Posted on

Migrate HDFS Data to Azure

During the middle of last year, my team decided to move our Hadoop workloads to Azure, including our data and applications. This article provides some of the best practices we used in migrating on-premises HDFS data to Azure HDInsight. Mentioned below are two approaches that we adopted to transfer the data over network with TLS encryption.

Method 1

The ExpressRoute Azure service uses a private connection between Azure and on-premise data centers (ExpressRoute offers higher security, reliability, and speeds with lower latencies than typical connections over the Internet). We took advantage of Data Factory's native data copy functionality using the integration runtime to migrate the data. Data Factory's self-hosted integration runtime (SHIR) should be installed on a pool of Windows VMs on an Azure virtual network. The VMs can be scaled out to multiple VMs to fully utilize network and storage IOPS or bandwidth.

Posted on

Spring Boot on Quarkus: Magic or Madness?

Quarkus is a Java stack tailored for OpenJDK HotSpot (or OpenJ9 on zSeries) and GraalVM, crafted from optimized Java libraries and standards. It is a good choice for building highly-scalable applications while using lower amounts of CPU and memory resources than other Java frameworks. These applications can be traditional web applications, serverless applications, or even functions as a service.

There are many documented instances of organizations migrating their applications to Quarkus. In this article, let's see one such migration path from Spring Boot to Quarkus that is part magic and part madness! The magic will be some hand waving and performing the migration without changing a single line of code. The madness will be trying to figure out how it was done.

Posted on

Analyze Monolith Java Applications in Multiple CodeReady Workspaces With MTA (Migration Toolkit for Applications)

Introduction

Transforming monolithic Java applications into distributed, cloud-native microservices is never easy, but Red Hat’s migration toolkit for applications helps you understand and evaluate the migration path. As a developer, you can apply the following features to a broad range of transformation use cases:

  • Planning and work estimation.
  • Identifying migration issues and providing solutions.
  • Detailed reporting.
  • Built-in rules and migration paths.
  • Rule extensibility and customization.
  • Source code or application archive analysis.

This article guides you through configuring Red Hat’s migration toolkit for applications to analyze an existing monolithic Java application. We will set up our development environment in Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces. After that, I’ll show you how to use the toolkit to analyze migration issues and generate potential solutions.

Posted on

Why Migrate to Kubernetes in 2021: Key DevOps and DataOps Benefits

Since its release in 2015 followed by multiple commits on GitHub, Kubernetes (or K8s) has been scoring points across industries and professional communities. But while the reasons behind the success of Kubernetes are crystal clear for software developers, DevOps, and datascience engineers, it is not that obvious for business owners.

Why has transferring a company’s application-related processes to Kubernetes has become a mainstay? To find this out, let’s go over and brush up on some key concepts driving the benefits K8s can bring about.

Posted on

Migration From Mulesoft to Kumologica — Part 2

This is the second part of our four-part series that will take a deep dive through a real-time use case of migrating a developed service on Mulesoft. The Mulesoft service described in this article will cover some of the patterns mentioned in our earlier article. We will learn how to migrate this service into Kumologica without negotiating the pattern.

For those who are new to Kumologica, I would recommend going through our articles and youtube videos to get an insight. Kumologica is one of the early players in this space, which brings the benefits of the low-code integration capability of traditional integration like Mulesoft to Serverless's new world. It provides a drag and drops visual designer and low code approach to ensure the greatest speed and flexibility to support a wide range of integrations compatible with most platforms and cloud providers.

Posted on

Database Migration tools: Flyway vs. Liquibase

I believe that there is no need for describing why the usage of database migration tools is vital for modern days apps that utilize relational database engines. I will only say that they can make our life much easier and help us to automatize a complex and repetitive process.

Through the course of this article, I will provide some more insights into similarities and differences between two of the most common open-source migration tools, namely Flyway and Liquibase.

Posted on

Migrating to Open Source Tools (Especially Now)

Key Considerations and Strategies for Going the Open Source Route

If you’re paying for expensive software testing tool licenses, perhaps something to consider is migrating to open source alternatives to optimize costs, especially if your team needs to find ways to go lean during the pandemic. 

Of course, like most things worthwhile, migrating implies some up-front investment, with the realization of cost savings happening in the mid to long-term. 

Posted on

The Migration Path To Microservices and Security Considerations

While the move to microservices-based architecture is relatively new, it is already mainstream. A majority of companies are choosing it as their default architecture for new development, and you are not cool if you are not using microservices.

With regards to migrating legacy apps and breaking them down to microservices, companies are showing more conservatism, and rightly so. While the move creates a lot of value, mainly around new features, time to market, and scalability, it also has its complexities and trade-offs. 

Posted on

Java: It’s Time to Move Your Application to Java 11

In the past few years, several exciting things have happened in the Java world, among them is certainly the new version control. Previously, it could take anywhere between two or three years for a new version to be released. Now, there's a new cadence every six months in addition to the LTS for new versions of the JVM. Currently, there is already work to deliver Java 14, however, as the latest research reveals, the use of Java 8 remains very strong for the market. This post aims to encourage and discuss the reasons for upgrading to Java 11, the current Java LTS.

There are several Java surveys that show that Java 8 is still the most popular version among developers, such as the SNYK that shows Java 8 with 64% against 25% in Java 11 and Eclipse Foundation where the number is even more significant with 80% with Java 8 against 20% with Java 11.

Posted on

RxJava to Kotlin Coroutines: End-to-End Feature Migration

Kotlin coroutines are much more than just lightweight threads — they are a new paradigm that helps developers to deal with concurrency in a structured and idiomatic way.

When developing an Android app, one should consider many different things: taking long-running operations off the UI thread, handling lifecycle events, canceling subscriptions, switching back to the UI thread to update the user interface.

Posted on

Process Files on the Basis of TimeStamp Attached to File Name in Mule 4

Find out more about Mule 4!Sometimes when you work for a bigger client you will get a problem that is different than regular issues you get. I will talk about such a scenario in this article.

Earlier we were directly polling on one location and getting data in the form of the files. After some transformation, we were sending those data (in XML) to a queue. After that, they came to us saying that they need a solution so that they can control the processing through control-m.

You may also like: Mule 3 to Mule 4 Migrations Tool: Real-Time API

In this process, we designed a solution where we will give them one API where they will send us the request and will start picking the files from that location after receiving the request. In Mule 3 we had to use mule requester component but now in Mule 4, we have a file connector that is capable of doing this.

Posted on

How to Deploy to Several Orchestrators and Be Happy (or Not)

Deploy to Kubernetes or Mesos? Why not both?

In the article “The Power of Abstraction,” we discussed why we need to make our deployment manifest for applications. Now we are going deeper and I will explain how we delivered our services to Mesos and Kubernetes at the same time.

You may also enjoy:  Kubernetes vs. Mesos: Choosing a Container Orchestration Tool

I remember the moment when I started advising ANNA Money, and at that point, there was a process to deploy an application to Mesos. There was an Ansible playbook for templating manifests for Marathon and Chronos. It is a cool idea not to write manifests for each environment and use templates. However, something was broken in that process. Let's look at the standard manifest:

Posted on

Overview of AWS Security Tools and Processes

Here are some of the tools in AWS's security infrastructure.

Any time a company moves/transmits confidential or proprietary information or data, there is always that nagging concern about security. Internal IT specialists do their best to secure the premises. Employees are trained and often barred from using company devices for personal purposes. Third-party contractors are scrutinized for their security measures. Still, data breaches occur – big ones sometimes.

Posted on

Issues in Migrating to Microservices

We have issues (with migrating to microservices).


To understand the current state of migrating legacy apps to microservices, we spoke to IT executives from 18 different companies. We asked, "What are the most common issues you see migrating legacy apps to microservices?" Here’s what we learned: 

Posted on

Microservices Migration Use Cases

Places for microservices to migrate.

To understand the current state of migrating legacy apps to microservices, we spoke to IT executives from 18 different companies. We asked, "What are some real-world problems you, or your clients, are solving by migrating legacy apps to microservices?" Here’s what we learned: 

You may also like: Successful Migration to Microservices: Why, When, and How

Scale

  • Deploy things at a different cadence even if they share a common codebase. Able to scale services differently independent of other services. Able to communicate to users if things go down and execute canary deployments. Resilience, reliability, scalability, and fault isolation.
  • The most common real-world problem we hear from customers is how they can stay relevant to their end-users and customers. In this day and age, technology is driving many businesses and acting as the front door to their company. You cannot get by with long outages or poor user experience regardless of the vertical you’re in.
  • By migrating to microservices IT will enable your teams to become more innovative as they are freed up from daily mundane tasks supporting and developing on a legacy system that simply cannot compete in the competitive world we are in today. The other primary benefit customers see is scale — an elastic environment that allows your business to auto-scale takes the worry out of slow performance during critical events or peak traffic seasons. This could be a retail outlet during Black Friday/Cyber Monday, or an insurance company during a natural disaster or macro-economic changes that cause a flurry of activity on Wall Street. 
  • We create value on mobile apps with external development providing an entry point to enter the data center and consume our APIs. We empower from hundreds to thousands of microservices to happen with a self-service platform for developers to publish new services and new versions as needed. All of this is automated allowing the platform team to set boundaries on what teams can do. 
  • Better resource utilization on cloud platforms. Microservices architecture makes it easier to scale the computationally (or I/O wise) heavy parts of the application. 
  • Our suite is the solution to security policy management. That means we often introduce support for new firewall models. Although we’ve done it many times in the past, it’s never an easy thing to accomplish. Tight model coupling makes introducing changes to the model difficult to perform safely. To overcome that we've defined a generic extensible model that’s propagated as events to the services consuming it.
  • Each microservice can then transform that model to a model that more specifically represents its domain. The limited scope of use for the model means it’s easier to introduce changes gradually without the risk of breaking multiple areas at once. In addition, our customers use our product to automate changes to their security posture, and the specific use-case of the customer determines to what extent they use one module more extensively than another. The microservices architecture provides the flexibility of scaling out in a way that fits the specific use-case of each customer.

Speed

  • Independence in implementation and scale grants an organization the flexibility to innovate and try new things. This makes it easier to respond to market shifts, be more responsive to customers, and occasionally shoot for the moon. When new ideas don’t work, they can get tossed without impacting other development; when they do work and adoption drives demand, it’s easy to devote additional resources. Fail fast or scale fast. 
  • Innovation speed. By splitting the legacy application into microservices, you have more freedom to innovate, for example, on the user-interface or reporting, while keeping the backend and processing platform unmodified.

Flexibility

  • Organizations want a unified way of managing their workloads. If they have to support legacy and microservices they may need expertise in dealing with two sets of APIs. Business just wants to consolidate into a unified way of handling workloads to reduce costs. One set of tools and command-line interfaces. Some customers decide to migrate existing virtualized legacy apps to containers to standardize on microservices API. Someone looking to reduce their VMware presence sees microservices as a way to modernize applications and move to a more open-source model that’s more cost-effective over time. 
  • 1) K8s are typically being designed as your own private DBaaS. People are concerned about cloud lock-in. From a microservices standpoint, you can take the same Docker images and run in different environments. Putting the right stack and the right environment provides flexibility and portability.
    2) The core of cross-platform. Public cloud is as susceptible to outages as on-prem. If you’re set up to run cross-cloud you can move to another cloud if there’s an outage. Flexibility and agility. 
  • Beyond the apparent cost savings of deploying a microservices architecture, microservices also enables decentralized data management, that is to say, it supports distributed deployment. Microservices deployed in containers allow you to re-provision any container individually, or replace, deprecate, or easily add new microservices as needed for a new feature release, a vulnerability patch, a bug fix, or to roll out any other change.
  • They’re also simple to scale independently and responsively, so you can scale out based on demand for a particular service without scaling the entire application. This makes your development process more productive, agile, and cost-effective. You can respond more quickly to customer demands and deploy continuously available applications in the cloud. 
  • Managing different, potentially conflicting, component versions. Some legacy applications might use a specific version of a component, such as a library, database, Web framework, programming language (Python 2 vs. 3), etc. When implementing the microservices architecture, you might not want to (time/money/ROI) update all components and microservices allow you to update some components and let some use the older version.

Financial Services

  • Under the new version of their application, a client is acquiring substantial read-write like an IoT device communicating. Embarking on the cloud, K8s, DevOps they try to embark on operational excellence and improvement initiatives to achieve greater feature velocity. A financial services company is now deploying code twice a month versus twice a year. 
  • In financial services, Xignite makes cool apps for users. They've moved from sharded SQL setup to us to collapse two tiers for the scale, performance, and consistency they need. 
  • Some use cases naturally fit into a microservices architecture due to the series of steps that need to be taken on data. One example is in payment processing, where several distinct actions are taken, either in a serial or parallel manner. Transaction data ingestion, rules-based validations, multiple fraud detection algorithms, approval, gateway selection rules, etc., are all distinct actions that can be modeled well in a microservices architecture.
  • The benefit of microservices is that any of these actions can be enhanced and expanded individually without impacting the overall operations of the system. Another example is in the industrial internet of things (IIOT) where time-series data from various devices need to be processed in several stages and then delivered to a final data store. Actions such as filtering, summarization, alerting, all can be separated out as microservices. As more functionality is added, new microservices are added to the pipeline without requiring a complete upgrade of the entire system. 
  • Microservices provide easier connections to clients' customer systems, such as an insurance company that needed to collaborate with a bank to offer insurance to its customers. The insurance company needed to integrate their systems with the bank. Before having microservice-based APIs, it would take months. After implementing microservices, they completed it even before the commercial agreement was signed.
  • This was a game-changer for the way the IT department perceived. For one bank, the critical factor was creating a global API so users (consumers and third-party systems) could get the same service anywhere in the world independent of the backend system is connected to. The expected rollout was 9 months on traditional technologies but using a microservices approach it was deployed within weeks.

Retail

  • The majority are modernizing the microservices infrastructure of the big box retailers. Data-as-a-service exposing data APIs and running on microservices. Hardware stores creating more modular components to scale on demand especially around the holidays. Organ donation is able to reduce the time to match doctors with organs available in inventory. Another is the idea of smart agriculture soil samples for nutrients. 
  • In the retail industry, Narvar is a post-purchase company trying to migrate from AWS to GCP without disrupting operations. They have data in multiple AWS databases and consolidated them with us to move. They want to be able to scale when needed (i.e., Black Friday).

Other Applications

  • A customer is moving from on-prem Oracle to the AWS and hybrid-cloud. We helped them move all of their data and databases from on-prem and in data centers to new data stores and structures. There’s a ton of change management that needs to happen. The scariest is at the persistence layer. TBs upon TBs of data. Finding sane ways to ETL it over.
  • We bring safety, transparency, and governance into schema and structure changes. We leverage the cloud-native or platform-as-a-service offerings the cloud vendors have. We help with the transition of the data store many months ahead of schedule. We accelerate and de-risk transitions. The easy part is how to build and deploy application bits into cloud-native, managing all of the data is the challenging part.
  • It tends to be more about gaining visibility into how you are operating and comparing against legacy. Internal dev teams are tired of working with business teams or the business gets a huge OpEx bill and learns they are doing cloud wrong. Microservices with managed services is the way to reduce those costs.

Other Industries

  • Plume works with ISP devices embedded in Comcast to monitor the quality of Wi-Fi. Today, every home is a mini data center.  There are multiple ISPs and geographies. Plume enabled scalability and a cloud-native platform.
  • Two enterprise-level problems we are currently solving through such migrations are:
    1) A monolithic application that encompasses an entire company’s business revenue, from automotive dealership management, inventory, motor insurance, regulatory management, financial modeling etc is being slowly architected into a microservices application.
    2) Rearchitecting from a 2-tier legacy application to a microservice-based architecture on the cloud for one of the world’s best-known companies in Loyalty Management platforms and services.

Here’s who shared their insights:

Posted on

The Definitive Free WordPress Plugins List (2019)

Ever wondered if you can make your car fly? Perhaps, all you need is a set of wings, a new engine, a control stick, and air safety features. While I can’t guarantee that your car will fly after those upgrades, the right set of plugins can definitely skyrocket your WordPress site to new heights.

There are 54,000+ plugins available on WordPress.org repo alone. And they’re all either free or follow a freemium model. Either way, they’re free for you to use.

If you’re new to WordPress, this makes it extremely tough for you to find the perfect plugins for your website. Heck, I’m an experienced WordPress developer and even I struggle to find the right one sometimes!

To help with this, I’ve scoured the depths of WP.org’s repository to find these golden set of free WordPress plugins. And I’ve tested them all to make sure that they work as advertised and are updated constantly.

These plugins are arranged by category (rather than listed randomly) so that it’s easier for you to go through them. Some plugins may have overlapping features, but that’s fine. I trust you to use better judgement.

Your goal should be to install as few plugins on your website as possible. This ensures that your site’s performance isn’t affected by too many plugins. With that being said, let’s begin.

Form Plugins

Forminator

Forminator is the only free form maker plugin that allows you to create forms AND polls, submissions, quizzes, and order forms. Its drag-and-drop interface is a breeze to build the form exactly as you envision it. You can also submit blog posts from a form if you want.

Its powerful API can also be accessed for free to build your own custom extensions.

Forminator supports integrations with third-party apps such as Zapier, Google Sheets, Mailchimp, and many other email marketing apps. You can even collect payments with Stripe or PayPal through it.

There’s no free form plugin for WordPress that has these many features available for free. You really need to try it to believe it.

Get Forminator Here

SEO Plugins

SmartCrawl SEO

SmartCrawl boosts your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) with its one-click setup, automatic sitemaps, improved social sharing, a real-time keyword and content analyzer, scans, reports, and much more.

It is designed to increase your site’s traffic without making it hard for you. This gives you more time for concentrating on other areas of your website. As your website grows, SmartCrawl’s autopilot features help it grow along with you, making sure that it always has your back.

Get SmartCrawl SEO Here

Yoast SEO

The OG WordPress SEO plugin since 2008. It’s still going strong after a decade, having 5+ million active installations as of this writing. Though many worthy competitors have emerged recently, it’s still the go-to choice of many WordPress developers and designers.

Yoast SEO tries hard to do everything, and it succeeds in many ways to please both search engine spiders (bots) and visitors. As of now, it’s the #1 rated SEO plugin on WordPress.org’s repository.

It’s huge popularity has a downside though. With so many users out there, it’s hard for their team to give dedicated 24/7 support to all of them.

Get Yoast SEO Here

Speed & Optimization Plugins

Hummingbird

Google recommends that your site should load within about two seconds. Hummingbird makes sure that it does. Hummingbird scans your site and provides one-click fixes to speed it up. It does this through various performance-boosting techniques such as caching, minification, compression and merging.

With Hummingbird, you can see the overall score for your site’s speed, and if it’s lacking in some areas, it suggests you the most appropriate fixes for them. In no time your site will be running as fast as a Hummingbird flaps its wings. Faster load times mean higher search rankings and happier visitors, which further means even higher search rankings, and so on.

Get Hummingbird Here 

WP-Optimize

WP-Optimize is an all-in-one site optimization plugin that cleans your database, compresses your images, and caches your site. It’s simple, popular and highly effective to keep your website fast and thoroughly optimized.

Its minimal setup is easy for beginners to get used to, but if you’re looking for more features down the line, it’ll be a hassle to install a new plugin and set it up. Overall, WP-Optimize brings most optimization features together in a single lean and efficient plugin.

Get WP-Optimize Here

W3 Total Cache

Trusted by over 1+ million websites, W3 Total Cache improves the performance and user experience of your site by reducing load times. It uses features like caching, minification, CDN integration, and the latest best practices to get it done. And it does it all without you having to change your core files, theme, plugins, or how you produce your content.

W3 Total Cache is a web host agnostic Web Performance Optimization (WPO) framework for WordPress, which means that it works on all types of WordPress hosting setups. It’s no wonder that it’s trusted by millions of website owners and developers worldwide.

Get W3 Total Cache Here

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress site. After an HTML file is created, your web host will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier WordPress PHP scripts.

As most of your visitors will be served static HTML files, this will decrease the load on your server. Thus, your users get to experience faster load times and performance. Its simple mode is easy to set up and makes your website load pretty fast. However, if you’re looking for more, there’s also an expert mode which gives you more options at the cost of complexity.

Get WP Super Cache Here

Media, Gallery & Slider Plugins

Smush

Smush is an award-winning image compression plugin. It has been benchmarked and tested to be the leader for speed and quality. Smush is the most popular image optimization plugin for WordPress, and also the most popular WPMU DEV plugin. I’m not exaggerating when I say that you need to add this to your must-have WordPress plugins list!

It not only compresses your images, but also meticulously scans every image you upload – and the ones you’ve already added to your library. Thus, all the unnecessary data is eliminated even before you even see it on your site. Your user’s data plan will also thank you for its exemplary service.

Get Smush Here

Photo Gallery by 10Web

Photo Gallery is a popular plugin for building beautiful, mobile-friendly galleries. Its simple interface makes it possible to create them in just a few minutes. Photo Gallery comes packed with amazing layout options, gallery and album views, multiple widgets, and a bunch of other extensions that.

It’s a great choice for photography and media-heavy blogs. If you have a site that needs robust image galleries with easy navigation, give Photo Gallery a try.

Get Photo Gallery by 10Web Here

Smart Slider 3

“Smart Slider 3 is a gift from the gods.” I heard one of our developers remark that in the chat recently, and they couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s the most powerful and intuitive slider plugin for WordPress. Its intuitive live slide editor makes creating slides fast, easy and efficient.

The sliders you create with it are fully responsive, SEO optimized, and work with almost any WordPress theme. Creating beautiful slides to tell your stories has never been this easier.

Get Smart Slider 3 Here

SVG Support

SVGs are the bomb! Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are becoming a rage in modern web design, but WordPress doesn’t support this file format out of the box yet. That’s where this plugin comes in.

SVGs allow you to embed vector images with small file sizes that are scalable to any size. And without losing quality. Apart from enabling SVG support, this plugin also adds features that allow you to add styling and animation to your SVG elements.

Get SVG Support Here

Security Plugins

Defender

Defender is layered security for WordPress. And it’s amazingly easy to setup. Defender scans your server and files, and then it adds all the hardening and security tweaks your site needs in just a matter of minutes, if not less. It’s highly efficient at blocking brute-force attacks without any noticeable impact on your website

It’s also one of the few free security plugins that support 2-Factor Authentication. The 2FA is also very simple to set up. Defender’s 2FA keeps you and your sites better protected than any simple IP blacklisting security plugin.

Get Defender Here

WordFence

With over 3 million active installs, WordFence is the most popular firewall and security scanner plugin for WordPress. Its firewall and malware scanner is built from the ground up to protect WordPress.

Wordfence constantly updates itself with the newest firewall rules, malware signatures, and malicious IP addresses. This keeps your website safe at all times. It’s perhaps the most comprehensive free WordPress security solution available.

Get Defender Here

iThemes Security

iThemes Security gives you 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site. It works round the clock to lock down attacks on your WordPress site, fix common holes, stop automated attacks, and strengthen user credentials.

Experienced users also have access to advanced features which  they can use to harden their WordPress sites even better.

Get iThemes Security Here

Marketing Plugins

(Newsletter Signups, Popups, CRM, etc.)

HubSpot All-in-One Marketing

HubSpot’s All-in-One Marketing plugin is essentially a form and pop-up builder with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. It also includes live chat and an integrated free contact database (CRM). This helps you can capture your visitors’ information easily.

HubSpot will collect submissions off any form you have on your WordPress website (even if it’s built with our free Forminator or Hustle plugins). It then automatically adds those new leads into your CRM.

You can also segment your contact database into lists and personalize your emails using any CRM property. And all of this for free! It then generates a report on your email’s overall success and let’s you see how each contact interacted with your email campaigns, all thanks to its built-in analytics.

Get HubSpot All-in-One Marketing Here

Hustle

Hustle is the ultimate marketing plugin to grow your business. It lets you easily grow your mailing list or display targeted ads across your site with pop-ups, slide-ins, lead generation forms, social media share bars, widgets, and shortcodes.

Since it’s made by the same awesome developers here at WPMU DEV, it integrates perfectly with the equally amazing form builder plugin Forminator. Thus, you can embed your forms, polls, and quizzes into popups and slide-ins for interactive lead generation. Grow your following faster and capture more leads with Hustle.

Get Hustle Here

Mailchimp for WordPress

This plugin does one thing better, and that’s it. It helps you grow your Mailchimp lists and write better newsletters. MailChimp for WordPress also allows you to create good looking opt-in forms easily.

It integrates with any existing forms on your site, including those created by Forminator. The developer has also made it easy to modify and extend its default features with various filter & action hooks.

Get Mailchimp for WordPress Here

Analytics Plugins

Google Tag Manager for WordPress

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is Google’s free tool for everyone to manage and deploy analytics and marketing tags. Currently, GTM is Google’s recommended method to add Google Analytics tag to your websites. This plugin helps you place the GTM container code snippets onto your wordpress website easily.

You can also insert multiple GTM containers with this plugin. It complements your GTM setup by pushing page meta data and user information to your DOM’s data layer. It also lets you add your Google Optimize container with the recommended code.

Get Google Tag Manager for WordPress Here

Google Analytics Dashboard by MonsterInsights

With 2+ million active installs, MonsterInsights is without a doubt the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It’s the simplest way to properly connect your WordPress site with Google Analytics. MonsterInsights also allow you to enable all advanced Google analytics tracking features.

But the best part of MonsterInsights is its Google Analytics Dashboard widget for WordPress. It shows you actionable analytics reports right inside your dashboard. Thus, you can see exactly what’s working, what’s not, and take immediate action. No more juggling around!

Get Google Analytics Dashboard Here

Social Media Plugins

Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons

This plugin lets you add share buttons and icons for over 200+ social media platforms. Some of the popular ones include RSS, Email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, and ‘Share. You can even upload custom share icons of your choice.

You can pick from several design options and make your icons ‘float’ or ‘sticky’. The plugin also scours the respective social media platform’s APIs to display the proper like/share numbers beside your social media buttons.

Get Social Media Share Buttons and Social Sharing Icons Here

Comment & Spam Reduction Plugins

Akismet Anti-Spam

I have just two words for you: get this! Akismet comes standard with most WordPress installations, and it’s for a reason. It checks your comments and contact form submissions against a global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content.

If any spam is detected, it’s sent to the review section under Comments in your dashboard. The more you help clear spam or identify false positives, the better Akismet gets at what it does best. Say no to spam!

Get Akismet Anti-Spam here

Disqus Conditional Load

Disqus is a great commenting system platform, but there’s one major drawback with it: it’s super bloated, especially so on WordPress.

Disqus Conditional Load is an advanced version of Disqus Commenting System, which boosts your page loading speed. This free plugin adds advanced features like lazy loading, shortcodes, comment widgets, script disabling, and more to your Disqus-powered website. And the best part, it uses pure JavaScript.

Get Disqus Conditional Load Here

Backup & Migration Plugins

UpDraftPlus

I can’t stress enough the importance of setting up automated backups of your website. Thankfully, we have free plugins like UpdraftPlus that make automatic site backups and restoration a child’s play. With 2+ million active installs, it’s the most popular scheduled backup plugin for WordPress.

With UpdraftPlus, you can backup your files and database into the cloud. You can also restore the backups with a single click. It supports backing up to popular cloud storage solutions like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Amazon S3.

Get UpdraftPlus Here

Duplicator

Duplicator enables you to move, migrate or clone your WordPress site between domains or hosts. And with zero downtime. It can also clone a live site to your localhost setup for development.

The most useful feature of Duplicator is to transfer a WordPress site from one host to another. You can perform a full WordPress migration without any messy import/export sql scripts.

If you’re planning to bundle up an entire WordPress site for easy reuse/distribution/backup, Duplicator also supports that.

Get Duplicator Here

All-in-One WP Migration

All-in-One WP Migration does what it suggests. It exports all the things in your WordPress website, including the plugins, database, media files, themes, and everything else.

Once exported, you can then upload it to a different WordPress installation. Do note that there’s a limit on the file size in the free version. If your site is more than 512MB, you need to look elsewhere. For smaller WP sites though, this plugin is perfect!

Get All-in-One WP Migration Here

Admin Management Plugins

User Role Editor

User Role Editor allows you to change user roles and their capabilities easily. Just select a user role and turn on/off the capabilities you wish to, and then update to save your changes. That’s it, no need to mess around with complex PHP scripts anymore!

You can also add new roles and customize its permissions according to your needs. Unnecessary roles with no users assigned can be deleted to keep things simple. The best part, Multi-site support is provided for free with this plugin.

Get User Role Editor Here

WP Reset

Ever messed around with your WordPress site so much that you wished you could reset it all and start over? That’s exactly what WP Reset does. It quickly resets your site’s database to the default installation values, without modifying any files.

If you’re testing out different plugins and themes, WP Reset is extremely helpful. It speeds up your testing and debugging greatly. WordPress developers will appreciate this plugin very much.

Get WP Reset Here

Duplicate Post

There are some plugins which you think you don’t need until you’ve used them. Duplicate Post is one of them.

It allows you to clone posts of any type quickly, or copy them to new drafts for further editing. That’s pretty much it. Give it a try, I’m sure you’ll love it!

Get Duplicate Post Here

Regenerate Thumbnails

This plugin helps you regenerate all thumbnail sizes for images in your Media Library. This is extremely useful if you’ve changed your theme or have added a new feature on your website which uses a different image size.

Regenerate Thumbnails also allows you to delete old, unused thumbnails to free up server space.

Get Regenerate Thumbnails Here

DIY Page Builder Plugins

Elementor

Elementor is the most popular free page builder for WordPress. As of now, it has 3+ million active installations and mostly 5-star reviews.

So, what makes it unique? It’s a live page builder that lets you create high-end page designs and advanced capabilities like never before, without touching a single line of code. You had to be a web developer or designer before to get these effects on your website: Box Shadows, Background Overlays, Hover Effects, Animations, Gradient Backgrounds, etc.

Not anymore. Elementor makes it easy for everyone to build websites. Yes, for everyone!

Get Elementor Here

Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is like a mature, elder brother (or sister?) of Elementor. Likewise, it’s a flexible drag-and-drop page builder that works on your WordPress site’s front end. Beaver Builder grants you complete design freedom with no coding involved, and it is all fully responsive as well.

The best part of Beaver Builder is that it doesn’t output any confusing shortcodes or bloated HTML. With Beaver Builder, building beautiful, professional WordPress pages is as easy as connecting LEGOs. However, you should note that its free version isn’t as feature-rich as Elementor’s.

Get Beaver Builder Here

Bonus: Here’s a detailed list of the top page builders for WordPress.

Theme Customization Plugins

Custom Sidebars – Dynamic Widget Area Manager

Custom Sidebars plugin is a flexible widget area manager for WordPress. It allows you to dynamically display custom widgets on any page, post, post type, category, or archive page.

It is light and integrates well with any WordPress theme. Thus, Custom Sidebars plugin grants you tons of possibilities to customize your website even futher.

Get Custom Sidebars Here

Simple Custom CSS and JS

Adding custom CSS and JS code to your WordPress site is no more hassle with this plugin. These changes stay even if you update or change your theme.

Simple Custom CSS and JS features a text editor with syntax highlighting. Also, you can add your custom CSS or JS code to the frontend or the admin side, and you can add as many codes as you want.

Get Simple Custom CSS and JS Here

Ecommerce Plugins

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a flexible, open-source eCommerce plugin for WordPress. If you want an eCommerce store on your WordPress website, look no further. It’s made by the same good folks who make WordPress.

Whether you’re launching a business, taking an old retail store online, or designing a site for your client, WooCommerce can help you build exactly the store you want.

Get WooCommerce Here

Booster for WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an amazing eCommerce plugin for WordPress and there’s no denying that. You can get most of the features you want in your online store with it.  However, it still misses the mark when it comes to some essential features. That’s what Booster for WooCommerce rectifies.

It supercharges your WooCommerce store with awesome powerful features (100+ modules) like PDF Invoicing, Bulk Price Converter, Wholesale Price, Crowdfunding, Upsells, Custom Payment Gateways, and a lot more.

Get Booster for WooCommerce Here

Easy Digital Downloads

If you’re looking to sell only digital goods on your WordPress site, Easy Digital Downloads is a better eCommerce solution for you. It provides a complete system for effortlessly selling your digital products.

Selling software, photos, ebooks, songs, videos, graphics, or any other digital file for that matter, is a breeze with this plugin. The core plugin supports PayPal Standard and Amazon Payments gateways, but almost all major payment gateways are supported through 3rd-party developers or premium extensions.

Get Easy Digital Downloads Here

Live Chat Plugins

LiveChat

Want to add live chat support to your WordPress website quickly and easily? LiveChat is the solution you’re looking for. It allows for instant communication with your site’s visitors and enables swift resolution to their questions and/or concerns.

You can use its built-in ticketing system to provide 24/7 customer service to your customers. Increase your sales and build better relationships with your customers with this fully functional live chat plugin.

Get LiveChat Here

Tawk.To

Tawk.To is a free live chat app for WordPress used by 250,000+ companies worldwide. You can use it to provide real time support and service to your customers.

With tawk.to, you never have to lose another lead or sale again. It lets you monitor and chat with your site’s visitors from anywhere, even your mobile. The best part is that its developer promises that “it’s truly free and always will be.”

Get Tawk.To Here

Membership & Forums Plugins

Go here for an extensive in-depth analysis of all the popular (and free) membership plugins.

bbPress

bbPress is a lean, mean, and feature-rich forum or bulletin board plugin for WordPress. It is focused on easy integration, simplicity, strict adherence to web standards, and speed.

It’s one of the first plugins which showcased the versatility of WordPress, and it’s still going strong! That’s quite an achievement. With bbPress installed, you can use WordPress to run an efficient and professional forum.

Get bbPress Here

BuddyPres

BuddyPress helps you set up a modern, robust, and sophisticated social network on your WordPress site. What WooCommerce did to setting up an eCommerce store on WordPress, BuddyPress does the same with setting up a social network or community-based forum.

Members can register and create user profiles, have private conversations with each other, create and participate in groups, and much more. It also works perfectly along with Akismet and bbPress. If you’re looking to build an online home for your school, company, a sports team, or any other niche community, BuddyPress is perfect for you.

Get BuddyPress Here

Jetpack

Sometimes, I ask myself, What exactly is Jetpack? It’s a security, performance, and site management plugin, all rolled into one. And it’s maintained by the same folks who lead WordPress.org’s development. They also happen to be the owners of WordPress.com platform, from where it picks up most of its features.

It has a lot of impressive functionality built in, like site stats, a high-speed CDN for images, showing related posts, downtime monitoring, brute-force attack protection, automated sharing to social media, sidebar customization, and so much more.

Jetpack has so many things going on that many consider it to be bloated, and for a good reason. If you could give up almost every plugin listed here and only make do with Jetpack, perhaps that would justify its use. It does however let you turn on or off its modules as per your requirements.

Get Jetpack Here

Free as in Freedom

WordPress’ main goal is to give you the freedom to build anything you want, and these free plugins are an extension of that goal. From hobby blogs to some of the biggest brands in the world, WordPress and its free plugins are used by everyone.

At WPMU DEV, we’re driven by the same philosophy. We build beautifully coded free and premium WordPress plugins that’ll make your WordPress sites fly.

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s now time for your site to take off!