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15+ Free Admin WordPress Plugins

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You and I have reviewed quite a number of useful WordPress plugins over the years. I mean, our ongoing WordPress plugin adventure has already revealed our picks for the social media, BuddyPress, memberships and more.

There’s tons of plugins! But for the most part we haven’t covered WordPress admin plugins. Does no one care about the backend? You see, most of the WordPress plugins we review have so much to do with the frontend. However, the plugins in our collection today will help you to take charge of your WordPress admin duties among other things.

Are you a WordPress developer? Stay tuned. Are you a WordPress blog administrator? Keep reading as well. Looking forward to customize your WordPress admin area? We have you covered too.

Checkout our list of some of the best free Admin WordPress plugins. Enjoy reading and share your much loved comments at the end!

WP Adminify

WP Adminify WordPress Admin Customizer

Optimize your admin panel with WP Adminify – the easiest way to organize and customize the WordPress dashboard. The free plugin is packed with features. The login customize allows you to redesign the standard WordPress login page and main dashboard menu. For freelancers, there are white labelling options which includes branding, custom welcome panel and even menu access rules by user role (for example, if you’re creating a custom admin for a client site you might not want them to have access to the WP Adminify plugin settings page). The plugin also adds a helpful floating menu that can be used for important dashboard notices, such as update notices or links to newly added site features.

But, that’s not all. WP Adminify ships with options to add light and dark modes to the admin panel, media file folders for improved media organization, simplified process to insert header/footer scripts (such as for Google Analytics tracking), drag and drop post type ordering, WordPress site activity logs, and more. And for even more features you can upgrade to WP Adminify Pro.

Admin Menu Editor

Admin Menu Editor

Looking to customize your admin menu items? Want to add custom menu items to your admin menus? Admin Menu Editor gives you all the power you need to build a one of a kind admin menu. You know, something you will love. There is just so much you can do with this plugin. For instance, you can edit menu titles, change menu icons and set access rights, drag and drop items easily, easily create sub menus, hide an entire menu (or individual menu items) and create custom menu items that point to external links.

You can even restore all of your default menus at the click of a button on the of chance that you mess something up. To sum it up, the plugin is coupled with ease of installation and use. What’s more? You can choose between the free and the pro version. Obviously, the latter comes with extra features.

Admin Columns

Admin Columns

If you have been meaning to transform your WordPress admin screens, Admin Columns is the plugin you’ve been waiting for. Admin Columns comes with over 200 custom columns as well as the ability to enhance your (or your clients’) admin panel easily, options for sortable and editable columns to make your work easier, ability to import and export functionality, easy integration with other plugins, custom fields for all your custom needs and full documentation. Add life and so much utility to your admin area with Admin Columns.

WP-Optimize

WP-Optimize

Is your WordPress site slower than usual? Guess what, your database could be the problem. One way or another, junk always finds its way to your WordPress database. This can lead to a sluggish website and cause a couple of WordPress errors. What to do? You must optimize your WordPress database from time to time. At the same time, optimizing your database can be an uphill task if you don’t know the first thing about PhpMyAdmin.

Enter WP-Optimize and the day (alongside your database) is saved. This special plugin has well over 1 million downloads and will help you to optimize your WordPress database automatically. WP-Optimize will rid your database of stale post revisions, spam and trashed comments, trackbacks and pingbacks just to mention a few. You can see more features on the plugin’s page at WordPress.org.

Redirection

Redirection

Are you looking to redirect users to other pages easily? The following features will reveal why Redirection is the redirection plugin you need (unless you already have an alternative redirect manager already installed like Yoast – you don’t want duplicate plugin functions). Features at a glance include global options to customize redirect links in bulk, current WordPress version compatibility, custom post types (and other plugins) integration, option to redirect users to a new or the same window, ability to add rel=”nofollow” attribute to links, redirect 404 error pages and more.

Debug Bar

Debug Bar

Hello WordPress developer! Looking to analyze errors and better understand how to develop with WordPress? If you said yes, Debug Bar is exactly what you need. This plugin provides a great deal of information such as memory usage, operating system, WordPress version, page load time, query info, cache info and much more from a helpful bar on your screen. Developed by the WordPress team, Debug Bar is a great plugin for every WordPress developer out there.

Google Site Kit

Official Google Site Kit Plugin for WordPress

Obsessed with stats and traffic metrics? Are you looking to understand your traffic fully without ever leaving your WordPress admin dashboard? Google Site Kit is just the WordPress admin plugin you need as it offers you a lot of insight about your traffic. After installing, the plugin will allow you to to view data for your Analytics, Adsense, Pagespeed, Tag Manager, Search Console and all of your other Google Tools from your dashboard. This saves you time and keeps your stats in front view.

WProofreader Live Spell Check

WProofreader

Spelling errors? We don’t want that now do we? WProofreader is a simple but powerful plugin that lets you catch spelling errors on the fly. It’s easy to install and once active it will proof whatever content you’re editing. It works with pretty much all post types (post, page, product, taxonomies, meta description) and the free version supports 6 languages.

Broken Link Checker

People and Google bots dislike it when you send them to 404 error pages. If you didn’t know, broken links can hurt your SEO severely on top of sending potential customers away. So, how do you get rid of broken links? First, you have to find the broken links. This is where the Broken Links Checker plugin comes in. The plugin monitors your blog for broken links and notifies you immediately one is found.

Broken Link Checker best features easy customizations, edit links automatically from the plugin’s page, monitor links all over your site, adds rel=”nofollow” attribute to broken links to discourage search engine bots, filterable links, etc.

(Aside: If you are looking to lighten page load, you can check broken links using an online service such as W3C Link Checker instead of installing a plugin).

Google Authenticator

Google Authenticator for WordPress

As we saw in a recent post, WordPress security is a serious issue. Unless you have Vaultpress or a similar service, never leave the security matters of your WordPress to chance. The Google Authenticator plugin offers you two-factor authentication for you WordPress site. The entire operation runs on the Google Authenticator app. Google Authenticator is the 2FA plugin you need to bolster your WordPress security.

AdRotate

AdRotate

Do you work with many adverts? Perhaps you own (or run) more than a few sites that come with more than a few adverts? How do you manage the adverts? How do you keep sane? You chose AdRotate. The plugin allows you to add and manage adverts easily. Basic level stuff; you self manage advertisements from a central dashboard that offers you plenty of options. You are really in control of your ads with this plugin.

Search Regex

Search Regex

Search Regex plays one role and plays it well. The plugin gives you the ability to search and replace any type of data on your website. Looking for pages or posts? Categories, tags or comments? You can find and replace anything you want with the click of a button. This plugin is meant to add ease to website migration. Remember how difficult it can get finding files after moving your site?

Redux Options Framework

Redux Options Framework

It’s a plugin. No, it’s a framework. Well, according to the authors: Redux is a simple, fully extensible and responsive options framework for WordPress themes and plugins. Redux will simplify WordPress theme and plugin development by far. It offers you an extensible and streamlined WordPress framework to work with (they even have tons of premium Redux extensions). This plugin will help you to hit the ground running where WordPress theme and plugin development is concerned.

Download Monitor

Download Monitor

Do you serve digital products on your website? Would you like to monitor your download activity? If that is a yes, the Download Monitor plugin will help you to add and manage downloads using a friendly user interface (UI), add files while editing posts, include mirror links for downloads, track download counts, restrict and control access to downloads and more.

Adminimize

Adminimize

Clean up your WordPress dashboard with Adminimize. This clever little plugin makes it easy to hide parts of the backend so specific user roles cannot see or access them. For example, you can hide the “Pages” section from your Editors. You can also use Adminimize with third party plugin meta boxes, so you can hide Yoast SEO from your blog Contributors or ensure that your shop staff can only access WooCommerce products. There’s tons you can do!

White Label CMS

White Label CMS

If you’re working on clients sites, then having a way to tailor the WordPress backend is a must. There are many plugins you can choose from, but White Label CMS is completely free with all the options you need. Hide WordPress features you don’t want customers messing with (for example, a theme panel or the live Customizer), edit which menus are displayed, add custom branding and more.

InfiniteWP Client

InfiniteWP Client

Building off the last plugin, if you are managing clients sites it’s extremely helpful to be able to manage them all from one central site. This is where InfiniteWP comes in. The free version offers quick access clients’ admin areas, updates and backups all from a single main admin site. Just install the main version of InfiniteWP on your own site and activate the and the above linked Client version on each site you’re managing. Once linked, keeping up with client site maintenance will be a breeze!


Hopefully you found a few new plugins that will help you with your WordPress site(s). Are you aware of any WordPress admin plugins you would like to see included here? Please share with us in the comments. Happy developing!

Article by Freddy WPExplorer.com guest author
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15 Comments

  1. Jice from elokenz

    That’s a great list Freddy. I am always installing broken link checker on all my websites 🙂
    You gave me the occasion to discover so many new plugins. Thanks !!

    • AJ Clarke

      Just make sure to install the broken link checker and run it, then de-activate it. If you leave it active it could cause your site to be really slow.

    • Freddy

      You’re welcome Jice! Thanks for sharing 🙂

  2. Kevin Weber (@kevinweber)

    Hi Freddy,
    great thanks for this nice list and the mention of Inline Comments!!
    Best regards,
    Kevin

    • Freddy

      My pleasure Kevin. Inline Comments looks great. Thank you for passing by 😉

  3. Ashish Ajani

    Great list Freddy, I would like to suggest another wordpress plugin which can be very useful to administrators, that is WP Show Stats. Very useful plugin to see stats related to Pages, Posts, Comments, Categories, Users, Custom post types at one place with charts.

  4. kafediem

    Hi Freddy,

    Can you tell me please what plugin are you using to display the “Author” red button badge on your comments ?! Or is a custom made function ?!
    Thanks!

    • AJ Clarke

      Actually it was a custom function, but a few users have asked us in the past so I decided to make it a plugin which you can now download for free on our site – Comment User Badge Plugin.

  5. Greg

    Did anyone proof read this article? “we even use it in out best selling Total WordPress theme’ Otherwise a well written article

    • Kyla

      We do actually 🙂 Pardon my “t” haha. And another fix you brought my eye to, we used to use Redux way back in early 2014 (for our admin panel) when this article was written – we no longer use the Redux framework, but we still do use a bit of Redux for custom widgets.

      Thanks though, I’ll be sure to update the post!

  6. rohit

    Thanks Freddy I have used your Plugins very nice it makes my business website really a business website, thanks for this Article

  7. Russ Tanner

    Is there a plugin that lets an admin see the most recently updated/accessed pages? For example, I find myself always having to go back to the Pages link in the admin menu and then searching for the page I want to update. I would love a plugin that lets me scroll over it and a pop up appears that shows me the last 5 pages that I accessed.

    • AJ Clarke

      Hi. This isn’t something included in WordPress but it wouldn’t be very hard to add to the dashboard screen. I actually found this free WordPress plugin called Recently Edited WordPress Widget which does exactly what I mentioned previously (adds a Dashboard widget to see recently edited pages).

  8. Sunday Ukafia

    The download monitor plugin is really useful. Thanks for sharing.

  9. Ivan

    Great list Freddy, I would like to suggest another wordpress plugin which AUTOMATICALLY hides admin menu items based on your using them – Useful Admin Menu.

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