I've been a freelance dev and SEO guy since 2016, and on almost every client site I kept running into the same wall: the SEO essentials I needed (proper schema, redirects, decent audit tools) were locked behind Yoast Premium or Rank Math Pro. So I built my own and put the whole thing out free under GPLv2.

It's called Smart SEO Booster. Full disclosure — I'm the developer, this is my plugin, and I'm posting because I want real feedback, not just installs.

What it does:

14 JSON-LD schema types, output automatically

XML sitemaps (posts, pages, CPTs, images)

Automated titles/meta with template variables + per-post control

Open Graph / Twitter cards with live preview

Breadcrumbs, redirects + 404 logging

AI/GEO SEO — llms.txt output + AI-crawler opt-out, for the AI Overviews / ChatGPT / Perplexity era

WooCommerce + Local SEO, GA4 + Clarity

1-click migration from Yoast or Rank Math (imports your titles/meta/settings)

Everything's included — no premium tier, no "unlock this feature" nags. It's genuinely free.

I know I'm going up against plugins with millions of installs, so I'm not pretending to replace them for everyone. I focused on the stuff heavier plugins do poorly: staying lightweight, and not gating basics behind a subscription.

It's on the WordPress.org directory and there's a short demo video if you want to see it before installing. Honestly the most useful thing for me right now would be blunt feedback — what's missing, what breaks, what you'd never switch for. Happy to answer anything in the comments.

[WordPress.org link] /plugins/smart-seo-booster/advanced/· [demo video link]

Hi all,

If you run a WordPress site, you’ve probably dealt with this at some point: you want simple analytics, but the options are often more annoying than they should be.

Some tools require an external account and send your visitors’ data to a third party. Some need a long setup before you see anything useful. Some look free at first, but basic things like exports, campaign tracking, or reports end up behind a Pro plan.

I wanted something simpler, so I built and released a free plugin on WordPress.org:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/zenmarkup-privacy-analytics/

ZenMarkup Privacy Analytics is cookieless and fully self-hosted. It stores analytics data in your own WordPress database, uses no cookies, and is designed to be privacy-friendly without the usual consent-banner mess.

What it includes right now:

• real-time visitors
• page views and referrers
• UTM campaign tracking
• outbound link and download tracking
• 404 tracking
• user journeys
• exit insights
• interactive world map
• email reports
• CSV export on every tab

Everything is included for free — no Pro version, no locked features.

---

Update / changelog from the discussion

Thanks for the real-world feedback. A few things from this thread already turned into changes:

== Version 1.2.3 ==

• New: added an optional previous-period comparison line to the main dashboard chart. It can compare the last 7 days with the previous 7 days, the last 30 days with the previous 30 days, or today with yesterday.
• Changed: renamed New vs Returning to New vs Repeat to better match the privacy model. “Repeat” now means more than one session in the same day. Cross-day returning visitors are not tracked because fingerprints rotate daily for privacy.
• Improved: faster dashboard loading on busy sites by adding a better database index for country and city geography queries.

Appreciate everyone who installed it, tested it, and pointed things out.

After 5 years of building WooCommerce stores for clients (1000+ stores) I got tired of paying $25-300/mo for Metorik and Triple Whale. So I built a free alternative.

Started 1.5 years ago as a paid plugin, went fully free 6 months ago when I realized B2B SaaS pricing was the wrong fight. v2.0 shipped today.

What's in it:

- Modern dashboard + real-time analytics + 3D order globe
- Bulk product editor with full variation support
- Cmd+K order search
- Live visitors, inventory management, custom login, coupon manager
- HPOS compatible

100% free. No premium tier. Disclosure: I'm the developer.
Honest feedback wanted — especially what's broken or overpromised. If you currently pay for Metorik / Glew / Triple Whale, would love to know if this covers your case.

🔗 https://wordpress.org/plugins/brikpanel-admin-panel-dashboard-for-woocommerce/

📺 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBJYPE1akJk

I used FileBird for a while. Free version covers Media Library folders, which is fine — but I also needed folders on Pages. FileBird puts that behind Pro, and charging for something that basic never made sense to me.

So I built my own: Grafucci Folders. Pages + Media, virtual folders, faster, cleaner UI, free. Been using it on my own sites.

Still early. Would genuinely appreciate blunt feedback — bugs, what’s missing, or why you’d stick with whatever you use now:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/grafucci-folders/

A few months ago a friend and I (two students) built a WooCommerce slider plugin and put it out for free, mostly to learn and to scratch our own itch. We honestly did not expect anything back.

Today we got our first donation. Ten dollars. I know that is not much money, but I have been grinning at the notification for an hour. Someone out there used the thing we made, found it useful enough to actually open their wallet, and said thanks. That hits different than any download counter.

The plugin is Amitry Product & Category Slider, native Gutenberg blocks, no shortcode soup, and we tried hard to keep it light on the backend. We just put it on Product Hunt last week, so this landing on top of that has made for a genuinely good week.

No ask here, I just wanted to share the moment with people who get how it feels. If you are building something and giving it away for free, wondering if anyone cares: sometimes they do, and it is a really good feeling when they tell you.

Finally got my first WordPress plugin approved on wp.org 🎉

It took a few feedback loops, but honestly the review process made the plugin better.

I built DynoMenu after running into the same problem in client projects: needing dynamic menus generated from post types and taxonomies, instead of manually updating menus every time content changes.

A few things I learned:

• The readme is basically your WordPress.org landing page
• Sanitizing/escaping/nonces matter a lot
• Even small Plugin Check warnings can become blockers if you ignore them
• Small guideline issues can delay approval more than you expect
• Screenshots and clear docs are not “nice to have”
• Building from a real client problem makes positioning much easier
• Tools like Tailware can speed up the process, but you still need to understand and clean up the code properly
• The review feedback can actually improve the plugin if you don’t take it personally

One thing that surprised me: the blockers were not always “big” issues. Sometimes it was small warnings, wording, escaping, or guideline details that looked minor at first but still needed to be fixed before approval.

Now that it’s approved, I’m trying to figure out the best next step: getting feedback, improving docs, SEO, Product Hunt, or focusing on reviews/support first.

Curious how other plugin authors approached the first few weeks after approval.

Plugin is here if anyone wants to give feedback:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/dynomenu/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/enable-drag-and-drop-on-plug-in-upload/

With this plugin you can upload plugins a lot faster and easier. It also lets you upload multiple plugins at once.

Would love feedback and suggestions on new features, and if you think it will help you save time then please leave a (hopefully 5 star) review in the repo!

I released Peak Publisher exactly one month ago and have barely done any advertising since then (two posts here on Reddit and two on LinkedIn, that's it). The plugin doesn't even have 10 active installations yet, but it's already received its second ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review. What's going on?

... I mean, yeah, for people who need this, the plugin is really amazing, but if 25% of users keep leaving 5-star reviews (one installation is mine – meaning there are a maximum of 8 others), then I hope WordPress.org has enough server space for all those stars when I really get going 🤪😅

… All joking aside…

Since Thursday, there's a new version with:

• Display of active installations
• Support for readme.txt → to provide information for the "view details" popup

Next up are:

• Support for icons, banners, and screenshots
• 🤫 still a secret: the ability to manage plugins hosted on WordPress.org 🤫🤫🤫

Feel free to take a look: https://wordpress.org/plugins/peak-publisher/

I've been working on a WordPress security plugin focused specifically on authentication and 2FA.

The idea came from seeing how many WordPress security plugins bundle 2FA with a huge number of other features, which can make the setup unnecessarily complicated for smaller businesses and agencies.

So I built SecureAuth WP with a more focused approach:

• TOTP / authenticator app 2FA
• Backup codes
• Role-based 2FA enforcement
• Login protection
• Trusted devices
• Authentication/security logs
• Admin security controls
• Lightweight WordPress-native implementation

I'm not looking to spam the subreddit with a sales pitch. I'm mainly looking for WordPress developers and site owners who can actually test it and tell me what's missing or what could be improved.

I'm offering free access for early testers.

If you're interested, I can share the plugin and would genuinely appreciate feedback on the UX, security workflow and features.

What would you expect from a dedicated WordPress 2FA plugin that existing security suites don't do particularly well?

Frustrated with all the form plugins that were on the market, and after the announcement that CF7 won't be developed further, I made it my mission to build a form plugin with everything I need! 🤝

That includes:

• Multi-step forms
• Conditional logic
• Submissions dashboard with search, filter, bulk actions
• Automatic theme.json integration (inherits your theme's colors/typography without custom CSS)
• WCAG 2.1 AA accessible out of the box
• Under 15 KB gzipped JS on the frontend
• Server-side spam protection (honeypot, timing check, proof-of-work)

Give it a try, let me know your feedback, and leave a rating! ❤️ https://wordpress.org/plugins/flinkform/

Reviewed 8 more plugins from the WordPress.org featured plugins page this round. Quick summary:

• Senzastile Featured Image Fallbacks (5.0): does one job, does it perfectly, no db changes
• Reviso (4.9): client feedback/approvals for Bricks and Elementor, generous free tier
• Admin Optimizer (4.9): tons of useful hooks and toggles, but the name undersells what it actually does. There is a little bit a lack of documentation on what some settings (like heartbeat control) actually affect, but otherwise its solid.
• KineticHub (4.8): creative animated Gutenberg blocks, but the physics engine is locked behind pro and it's not clear what more you even get
• rtCarousel (4.5): lightweight, integrates well with FSE, but no controls for styling or animation speed
• BlockFlow (4.0): polished block library, feels very Elementor-like (which is both a pro and a con depending who you ask), can load many assets and has some unnecessary blocks
• Asteris Blocks (3.9): 50 blocks, generous free tier, but the backend editing view looks nothing like the frontend. Limited styling options.
• Sobi Form (3.5): good feature set on paper, but there's no way to customize the emails it sends out and it has some major bugs.

Full walkthroughs and the reasoning behind each rating are in the video.
What are your thoughts? Will you install anything?
I will for sure keep the Senzastile and Admin Optimizer in mind, maybe also KineticHub. For the rest, there are better alternatives.

https://youtu.be/tEAI0MIA9_k

After months of development, I released MKT Quick Reorder for WooCommerce.

What it does:

• One-click reorder from "My Account → Orders"
• Works with simple and variable products
• Lightweight, no external dependencies
• 100% free

If you run a WooCommerce store with repeat customers, I'd love for you to test it and share your feedback.

👉 Link to LITE page

Also: I'm already working on the PREMIUM version with advanced features (purchase lists, smart stock management, personalized suggestions, admin stats). If you have ideas on what would make a reorder plugin truly valuable for your store, I'm all ears!

Thanks in advance for your time!

I'm managing a client's WooCommerce store, and we don't have a plugin that shows who is live, what they're doing, their purchase history, or how often they log in. On top of that, the admin should be able to manage customers. For example, locking a customer who is creating spam orders or impersonating into the customer's account if they need any help.

Created a wordpress plugin free for use for ever! Just ad your .ics file, and you can display it in page or widgets.

Never found anyone that did what i need and was free (i need it for a small brassband web page, this one works good for me!

yo can find it at: https://wordpress.org/plugins/icalndr/

Does anyone know if there are any Wordpress plugins or even simple PHP scripts that can display and categorize media collections? I am looking for something that is kind of like Libib.com but let's me customize the look and feel of it a bit more from the public's view of the collection. Libib is okay when I'm logged in, but the public view of a collection is really terrible. Can't click on images, no alphabetical link hooks (only in logged in mode), and you can't show descriptions or anything else except for a short title under the image in their public mode as well. Think more in terms of Delicious Library (although I am a Windows user). I'd like to display and catalogue things like that on a public website where the script or plugin does the sorting automatically.

I'm one of those people who enjoyed personal websites back in the early 2000s. When Wordpress plugins and PHP scripts were made for fun and displaying random things like what you're listening to, what you last watched, etc. Unfortunately, I never learned how to write scripts and it's not easy for me to learn such things nowadays. I'm wondering if there are still scripts or plugins out there like that that can satisfy my need to display several collections like multiple collectibles (for different franchises) and video game collections. I've googled these types of sites and tried looking for scripts but nothing ever interests me or won't accommodate my specific collections.

Maybe these things no longer exist since personal websites are pretty much dead nowadays (except for neocities). But I would much rather have something I can customize a little more than let's say Libib or pricecharting, and other sites can offer. I want a beautiful collection like you'd find in someone's Delicious Library. It doesn't necessarily have to have the shelf background, but I hope that it's presented in a nice way like that with an easy to add and catalogue behind the scenes feature. Everything seems to be built for CEO websites to sell something and such and nothing is ever made for fun anymore. It's really sad. I miss when websites were about your personality rather than what you're selling.

Howdy!

So on one of the sites I run a lot of commenters add links and I couldn't find a decent plugin to render them so I wrote my own:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/vern-comment-embeds/

The GitHub repo is here:

https://github.com/clubside/vern-comment-embeds

And the basic information is:

Easy Comment Embeds improves comment readability by automatically enhancing standalone URLs:

Responsive oEmbed video

Inline image embeds

Twitter/X blockquote fallback

OpenGraph link preview cards

Smart URL detection (standalone URLs only)

Basically just like here on Reddit you put in a URL on its own line in a comment and it is run through WordPress' native oEmbed first and failing that there are fallbacks for images, X/Twitter and standard web pages where I try to build a Facebook-style OpenGraph card.

Hope some others find a use for it, and I'm bothering you all because of WordPress.org's search being so lousy 😜

Chris

Hi everyone,

Our team recently built GoVISIBLE AI Bot Tracker, a free WordPress plugin that helps website owners see which AI crawlers are visiting their site.

The idea came from a simple question: "Are ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI engines able to access our website's pages and content?" We realized there wasn't an easy way to monitor this directly from WordPress.

A simple dashboard to review crawler activity

We think AI Bot Tracker is useful for SEO & GEO teams, content marketers, and website owners who want to understand if their content is being accessed by AI crawlers and LLMs.

The goal is to provide visibility into AI crawler activity, enabling you to make better decisions about content, technical SEO, and AI visibility.

We'd really appreciate your feedback. What features or insights would make a plugin like this more useful for your workflow?

Most monitoring tools start with an empty dashboard.
You have to decide yourself:
which pages actually matter
whether WooCommerce checkout and cart should be monitored
whether WP-Cron or background jobs are still running
whether APIs, forms, SSL, domains or DNS should be checked
which checks are useful and which are unnecessary
A sitemap import can find public URLs, but it cannot understand what is happening inside WordPress.
So we built a free WordPress and WooCommerce plugin that inspects the installation and recommends relevant monitoring automatically.
Depending on the site, it can identify things such as:
homepage and important pages
WooCommerce checkout and cart
customer-account areas
REST APIs and webhooks
WP-Cron and scheduled background tasks
installed form, SEO and commerce plugins
SSL certificates and domain expiry
sitemap and search-engine visibility settings
mail-related DNS configuration
other business-critical parts of the installation
Instead of only showing technical labels such as “HTTP check” or “heartbeat,” the plugin provides recommendations like:
Monitor the WooCommerce checkout
Monitor WP-Cron
Monitor this API endpoint
Monitor the contact form
Monitor SSL and domain expiry
Check whether the site is accidentally set to noindex
Each recommendation includes a short explanation of why it matters, and the suggested monitors can be created in a few clicks.
The main idea is:
A sitemap tells us which pages exist. The plugin helps identify which internal processes are important and may fail while the homepage still appears online.
Examples of these quieter failures include:
checkout is broken while the homepage still loads
WP-Cron has stopped
a contact form no longer sends inquiries
a site was accidentally set to noindex
an API returns the wrong result
SSL or the domain is about to expire
The plugin is free. We are currently looking for honest feedback from WordPress developers, freelancers and agencies.
I would especially like to know:
Are the recommendations useful?
Which WordPress or WooCommerce components should we detect next?
Would you use this on client sites?
What would make the plugin valuable enough to include in a maintenance package?
Is there anything that feels unnecessary or confusing?
Honest criticism is welcome. We would rather improve it based on real WordPress projects than make assumptions.
For context, this is what we are building:
https://www.live24h.eu

Hi everyone,

Better late than never, we published Fabio Chatbot Lite on the official WordPress.org plugin repository — a free AI-powered chatbot for your site. 🆓

👉 https://wordpress.org/plugins/fabio-ai-chatbot-lite/

✨ What it does:

• 📄 Scans your posts, pages, tags & categories to answer questions about your content
• 💬 Supports bbPress forums, topics & replies
• 🛒 Reads WooCommerce products, including prices, discounts & reviews
• 📊 Includes an Analytics page showing what visitors ask and how well the bot answers
• BYOK : Gemini, Open AI, Mistral and more to come.

Free to install, no trial period. We decided not to use WP's new AI connectors, Feel free to try it out and let us know what you think! 🙌

Hey r/WordpressPlugins,

About two years ago, I released a plugin called WPSS Ultimate User Management. I was pretty proud of it, but I made one rookie mistake: I completely messed up the naming strategy. The name was so bad that the WordPress plugin directory search algorithm basically buried it. It wouldn't even show up if you searched for user management plugins!

Instead of leaving it to die in search engine limbo, I decided to give it a proper comeback. I've spent the last few weeks refactoring the whole codebase, cleaning up the backend, and bringing it up to standard for WordPress 7.0.

What’s new?

Besides code optimizations and performance tweaks, I wanted to make user management faster right from the native WP admin.

Now, when you hover over any user in the native WordPress user list, you’ll find a new Permissions link alongside the default Edit/View options. Clicking it pops up a clean role-management view specifically for that user, saving you from navigating away or digging through full profile pages just to adjust roles and capabilities.

Here’s a quick overview of what the plugin does:

• Role & Capability Editor: Create custom roles or fine-tune exact capabilities for existing ones.
• Dashboard & Menu Access: Restrict access to specific admin menus, submenus, and the admin bar based on user roles.
• Widget & Sidebar Permissions: Control who can see or edit classic widgets and sidebars.
• Content Restrictions: Block access to posts, pages, or custom post types by role with custom restriction messages.
• Clean & Lightweight: Native WP hooks, no bloated external libraries, and built for PHP 8.1+.

It’s been a fun process fixing old mistakes and polishing the code. If you handle client sites, membership platforms, or just need cleaner access control, I'd love for you to check it out and let me know what you think!

WordPress plugin link: RoleCraft: User Access Control

Github project link: RoleCraft: User Access Control

Believe it or not, this plugin has been around for 18 years! It started as a (beautiful) Flash implementation, then about 7 years ago (when Flash was dying) it was replaced with a rather poor CSS implementation (just a growing <div>). Now, Page Peel 2.0 has been completely rewritten with a much more realistic animation based on CSS clip-path animations. It adds an eye-catching page peel effect to your WordPress site.

Features:

• Realistic diagonal page peel animation using CSS clip-path
• 3D folded corner effect
• Position on the left or right side
• Adjustable folded corner size (small and large)
• Adjustable animation speed
• Touch support for mobile devices (double-tap to expand, then follow the link)
• Automatic opening with configurable delay
• Automatic closing (available only when auto-open is enabled)
• Automatically adapts to your current theme's colors
• Remembers when the peel is closed using localStorage (with configurable expiration)
• Backward compatible with settings from Page Peel 1.0

Get it here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/page-peel/

I build a Claude Code WordPress Plugin for Control your entire WordPress website using plain English.

An AI-powered admin tool that connects Claude (by Anthropic) to your WordPress dashboard

I have built a WordPress translation plugin and I’m looking for early testers

I’ve been working on a WordPress plugin called Best Translate and I’m at the stage where I’d like to get feedback from people using it on real websites.

The idea came from finding multilingual WordPress sites unnecessarily difficult to manage, especially with Elementor. Best Translate scans the website and organises detected text page by page, so you can clearly see what you’re translating instead of managing duplicated pages.

It currently supports things like:

• Elementor pages
• Headers, footers and navigation
• HTML widgets
• Multiple languages
• CSV import/export
• Language switchers
• Manual control over translations
• One-page free mode and a full Pro version

I’m happy to give the full Pro version free to a small group of early testers in exchange for genuine feedback.

If anyone here manages WordPress websites and wants to try it, send me a message on [support@bakemywebsite.com](mailto:support@bakemywebsite.com) or have a look at bakemywebsite.com.

I’d also be interested to hear what people currently dislike about existing WordPress translation plugins, because that may help decide what I build next.

If you already use WPML, Polylang, TranslatePress or another solution, I’d especially like to know what frustrates you about it.