WordPress is an amazing platform, but plugins can make the platform even better.
Though if you’re new to WordPress, you may feel overwhelmed by all the plugins on offer. How are you supposed to know which ones are worth installing?
If this is something you’re struggling with, you’ll be happy to know that choosing the right plugins isn’t as hard as it seems.
Keep reading and you’ll discover 10 awesome free WordPress plugins every site should take advantage of. Make it through this post and you’ll have the knowledge needed to supercharge your WordPress installation.
Let’s begin!
1. Yoast SEO
SEO is one of the best ways to generate traffic for a website. WordPress is SEO friendly, but that doesn’t mean it’s built to exceed at SEO.
Yoast SEO is a free plugin that’ll help you maximize the SEO potential of your website. This plugin will provide you with a ton of different recommendations on how you can improve the SEO standard of blog posts and web pages. This can be incredibly helpful if you struggle with SEO and find the concept confusing.
One of the good things about this plugin is that’ll help you discover when you’re going over the top with your SEO.
An example of this might relate to including too many of your target keywords in the content. This is helpful because if you create content like this, Google might consider it spam. This can result in your rankings falling.
2. Smush Image Compression and Optimization
How long do you wait for a website to load? If you’re like most people the answer is probably a few seconds.
Anything longer and you’ll click the back button and go somewhere else. Thus, if you’re website is slow to load, it can be a big problem and you may be missing out on a ton of visitors.
The images on a website/webpage are one of the main things to affect how fast loading times are. This plugin can help you compress images so that the file sizes are no longer large enough to cause significant loading delays. The plugin will also optimize them in other ways to ensure that loading times are yet further improved.
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3. Pretty Links
If you’re posting content on your site, you’ll occasionally have to provide people with links to content outside of your site. Sometimes, you’ll need to do this on your actual web pages. Other times this might be when you’re sending out a newsletter.
The problem is that a lot of links can look really messy. Links that are over 100 characters long can wreck the tidiness of a well-edited blog post. It’s because of this that a plugin like Pretty Links might be helpful.
Using this plugin, you can create custom links, that match the URL of your website. For instance, suppose your website is example.com and you want to link to a website about puppies. You can create a link such as example.com/puppies. When people click on this link they are then sent to the website about puppies.
This plugin is also helpful because it provides some data on how people are using the link. This can be helpful if you need some analytics data.
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4. Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
When you have analytics data on your website, you can make better decisions on its future. One of the best ways to gather such data is through the help of Google Analytics.
The problem, though, is that making Google Analytics work with your website can be tricky. That’s because you need to install some code.
This can be challenging for some people. But this plugin can make the entire process a lot easier. All you’ll need to do is provide the plugin with the code Google Analytics has given you and it’ll do everything else.
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5. Akismet AntiSpam
The internet being what it is, unfortunately, if you have a website, you’re going to become the victim of spam.
Yet this doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways to fight back. Using this plugin you can catch a lot of spam before it becomes a problem. This plugin is especially helpful for spam related to comments on your content.
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6. Jetpack
Jetpack is a plugin provided by WordPress itself.
It’s designed to do a lot of different things, but the main goal of the plugin is to make WordPress work more smoothly. For instance, it can help improve the loading speed of your site.
It can also make your site look nicer, by providing you with access to themes. This can be helpful if you do not know much about web development. There are two versions of this plugin, the paid and the free option.
The free option provides a lot of functionality. Plus, you can access the functionality provided by the paid option by using other free plugins.
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7. UpdraftPlus
If your site ever goes down, you’ll often need backups to restore it to its former glory.
This plugin can provide you with that functionality. It’s simple to use and many use it. You can even use this plugin to backup your site to a cloud storage location of your choosing.
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8. All In One WP Security & Firewall
You need to protect your site from attacks. This plugin can help. It’ll check for some of the common vulnerabilities that can lead to someone hacking a site.
It also has features that protect you from a Brute Force attack. There’s even the option of adding a ‘captcha’ feature during certain login phases of your site.
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9. MailChimp
If you want to keep visitors updated, you’ll need to send them emails, especially if you run an ecommerce site. Well, you can do this using the MailChimp plugin.
The good thing here is that MailChimp provides a free mailing option. This means that you can send professional emails with this plugin, without having to fork out a ton of cash.
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10. Social Icons
If you want more people to learn about your site, you need to make it easy for them to share your content.
This plugin helps you do that. This plugin displays visually appealing icons next to your content. People can then click on these icons to share their content.
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Ready to Install Some Free WordPress Plugins?
WordPress provides a lot of functionality out of the box. Yet with the help of plugins, you can make things even better.
In this post, we’ve reviewed some of the best free WordPress plugins on offer. As you use WordPress more and more, you’ll find that there are plugins best suited to your own particular needs.
Because of this, it’s always a good idea to review your existing set of plugins now and then. You should always consider if you might need to install something that isn’t popular but will be useful for you.
Want to learn how you can get more traffic to your site using guest posts? Check out this post to learn more!
