WordPress is the most popular blogging platform out there. With its easy-to-use interface and thousands of free plugins, it’s no wonder so many people prefer WordPress over other platforms.
But with all that choice comes confusion when you’re trying to choose the best WordPress plugins for your blog! That’s why I’ve decided to put together this list of some of my favorite WordPress plugins.
What is a WordPress Plugin?
A WordPress Plugin is a software package that extends or adds new features to your website. They are designed to be easy to install, and compatible with the most popular WordPress platforms.
A plugin is a small program that extends the functionality of WordPress. There are thousands of plugins available, and they can be used to do anything from adding social media buttons to your site to interacting with your site using a mobile device.
Plugins can save you hours of work, and help you to get creative with designs for your blog. In this article, we’re going to look at 10 of the most useful WordPress plugins for business owners.
How can WordPress plugins help your blog?
Plugins are one of the most important aspects of a blog. They add functionality, can help with SEO, and even make your site look better. We’ll take a look at some of the most popular plugins and their functions.
Most bloggers just use the default themes that come with WordPress. Bloggers also tend to use free and paid plugins. Today, I’m going to show you how to use plugins to build any kind of website on WordPress.
Learn how to create a blog. You can create a blog for free using WordPress, which is the most popular blogging platform in the world.
What are the most important WordPress plugins for blogging?
WordPress plugins can help you increase traffic by optimizing your blog for search engines, creating beautiful and engaging content, or making it easier for people to contact you.
If you are looking to gain more visitors, start with a simple SEO plugin. It will help you optimize your blog so search engines will be able to find the best content and direct traffic to your site.
If you are looking to create an engaging, interactive experience for your readers, check out social sharing buttons or social media plugins. They make it easier for readers to share your content on their favorite social networks.
Many different plugins can be used to improve your website. The most important ones are the ones that will improve your SEO and make your website more effective.
Yoast SEO is a great tool that will let you know whether you have made any mistakes in your SEO. It will point out the errors, as well as give you advice on how you should correct them. It is an extremely useful plugin for bloggers and other types of writers.
WP Rocket is a caching plugin that will improve the speed of your website with no additional work on your part.
Top 10 WordPress Free Plugins for Bloggers
- Yoast
- Akismet
- WP Super Cache
- MonsterInsights
- Smush
- Contact Form 7
- Social Snap
- WordFence
- Pretty Links
- UpdraftPlus
1. Yoast
Yoast SEO is an excellent WordPress plugin that assists users in optimizing their posts for search engine optimization. It provides suggestions to use keywords effectively, links to canonicalize pages, and much more. It can be used on any WordPress site and can be integrated with Google Search Console.
Yoast SEO Plugin was created by Joost de Valk, who founded Yoast in the Netherlands, in 2006. He created his first web design company
For marketers and SEO specialists, the Yoast SEO plugin is a must-have tool for achieving higher rankings. The best part about this plugin is that it’s free!
2. Akismet
Akismet is free spam protection for WordPress blogs. It is a WordPress plugin, installed by default on all hosted WordPress.com blogs and available for download from the official WordPress Plugin Repository.
It checks each comment entered on a site against Akismet’s global database of spam, and flags comments as possible spam if they match known spam patterns.
3. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is a caching plugin for WordPress sites. It helps you to speed up your site and reduce bandwidth usage.
A lot of the time when people are browsing a website, the server is sending them unnecessary data that they will never use. For example, when you browse a page on WP Super Cache, there’s a very good chance that you won’t need all of the text in the CSS files or JavaScript files.
It can cache these files so that they don’t have to be sent to users and they don’t have to load them from their hard.
It helps to increase page speed and enables a cache system that significantly decreases page load time.
WP Super Cache is also very easy to install and you can set up the plugin in a few minutes. It doesn’t have a control panel, but it has an intuitive interface that will guide you through all the necessary steps.
4. MonsterInsights
The MonsterInsights plugin is a free WordPress plugin that you can use to track your visitors, analyze your content and find out more about your audience.
It is a powerful WordPress plugin for increasing organic website traffic. It shows you the value of each page and post on your website and helps you to convert visitors into leads.
It integrates with your Google Analytics account and tracks user behavior, including pages visited and time spent on each page.
This plugin will enable you to:
- See your most valuable pages with a score based on metrics such as bounce rate, time spent on a page, and page value.
- Get more insights into visitor behavior, such as how many people arrive from different sources, and how long they stay on your site.
5. Smush
Smush is a free WordPress plugin that optimizes images for faster page loads. It was created by the team at Automattic, which runs WordPress.com (the free and open-source blogging platform).
It decreases your website loading time by compressing the image files. WordPress community loves this plugin and refers to it as the best WordPress plugin for images. It’s very easy to use and install.
By default, Smush will optimize all images under 1MB uploaded to your WordPress site and convert images to WebP format when possible. If you’re using a hosting service that doesn’t support WebP (like Media Temple), you can opt to have it convert to PNG instead.
6. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is a free WordPress plugin. It allows you to add contact forms to your website. This plugin is very easy to use and install, even for the less experienced user.
This installation process takes no more than 3 minutes. You can configure the plugin from the settings page in the admin area of your site.
It can use to create contact forms, use AJAX, and get the data via POST or GET. It’s very flexible and has lots of features available.
7. Social Snap
Social Snap is a WordPress plugin that automatically grabs the most recent posts from social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn and displays them in your blog.
This gives your blog fresh content and keeps it updated with your customers’ most current social posts.
Having Social Snap installed on your website, you will be able to easily view all the updates of your friends and contacts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram on your single site.
8. WordFence
WordFence is a WordPress security plugin that provides real-time monitoring and blocking of malicious attacks, brute force attempts, and unauthorized login attempts.
This is a very powerful plugin for all WordPress users who are forced to deal with bots, spam, and security issues on their websites.
9. Pretty Links
Pretty Links is a popular WordPress plugin that allows you to create short URLs for your content. Link shorteners allow you to make long URLs shorter, which is useful for when you’re emailing someone a link or posting it on Twitter.
It will automatically convert any URL into a pretty link. For example, if your post has http://www.example.com/my-blog-post/ as the URL, then they can change that to http://prettylink.com/2 which will take readers to the same post.
It is mainly used for Affiliate marketing where you can give a link for a specific word.
10. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is a premium WordPress backup plugin. It has been downloaded over 5 million times and acts as a lifesaver for many WordPress users.
The free version is so loved among customers that it has a 100% 5-star rating, which is pretty rare in the world of WordPress plugins which are mostly low quality and often buggy.
The premium version brings a lot more value to the table with helpful features such as email backups and file transfer capabilities.
How do I know if a plugin is safe to use?
WordPress plugins aren’t always what they seem to be. Unfortunately, there are a lot of fraudulent programs out there that are nothing but scams. Use security plugins like Wordfence Security, Jetpack by WordPress, SecuPress, Sucuri Security, iThemes Security, etc. These plugins are useful for detecting malware, securing your theme.
If you don’t know how to spot these plugins, or if you fall victim to one, things can get bad quickly. Not only is it costly, but if they’re malicious in nature, they could put your site at risk by exposing your website to hackers and other cybercriminals.
Sometimes a plugin can cause a problem and it’s not easy to tell. Generally, the plugin will throw an error so you don’t have to look too hard, but what if you don’t see anything.
Use security plugins like Wordfence Security, Jetpack by WordPress, SecuPress, Sucuri Security, iThemes Security, etc. These plugins are useful for detecting malware, and securing your theme.
Tips for finding the right plugin for you!
I use plugins on every site I build. I’m not a coder, so without plugins, I’d be lost. But WordPress is huge, and there are literally thousands of plugins out there to choose from.
How do you know which one is right for you? The answer is pretty simple: You don’t. Which means you have to try them all.
Conclusion
WordPress has a huge library of plugins. There are thousands of plugins that can help you improve your blog and make it more attractive to readers, but many of them aren’t worth the hassle or money.
With so many WordPress plugins available, it can be hard to know which ones are worth the effort. In this guide, we’ve provided you with three of the best free WordPress plugins for bloggers.
We hope these tips have been helpful for you! If there is anything else we can do for you please let us know by visiting.
