WordPress itself comes with many features to help you achieve your development goals. But there are many free plugins available there on market to enhance its power in terms of SEO, security and many more. So here in this article I will discuss 5 free plugins for WordPress which you should use on your site to make it more powerful.
Let’s get started.
Yoast SEO
WordPress is a very SEO friendly platform to develop any website. But it won’t hurt you if you have an extra support in it, right?
This plugin gives you few helpful features of its own which makes it #1 at the list of must have plugins. It gives page analysis report for every post or page while you write it right into the edit page. This report helps you to see the preview of the page on Google, with a focus keyword analysis report for the page content.
It also helps you to customize the look for the link on social platforms (Faccebook, Twitter, Google+). You can insert attractive image with title and description for the post for particular platform to attract visitors.
It also generate XML sitemap and update it automatically by its own whenever you publish a new post or page on your site.
These features are some of main features of it and other than these there are plenty of other features as well to boost your ranking. As this is so much handy for people that’s why it is activated on over 1 million site with overall rating 4 out of 5 of approximately 2000 ratings.
Contact Form 7
This plugin help you with HTML form. You can create any kind of forms and it provide shortcode for each forms. After that you can paste that shortcode in any page, post or widget area as per your requirement. It handles all the validation part for the form fields and if a visitor pass those validations and press the submit button then it sends a mail to WordPress admin.
By using this plugin you don’t need to worry about your forms, you can create forms as many as you want very easily. If you wish you can also customize it as you want. You can also configure Google reCaptcha with it very easily to stop bot programs to spam your forms.
This plugin is activated over 1 million sites and it has overall rating 4.5 out of 5 of more than 1,000 ratings.
Jetpack
This plugin is developed by WordPress.com to power your site in many ways. It has many features but my favourites are traffic insight and subscriber management. Traffic insight gives you a statistics about your views and visitors on your WP admin dashboard. It provide a widget to get subscribers and store them in one area and whenever you publish a new article on your site then it automatically sends a mail to subscriber mail to notify them about your new article.
Other features of it also very impressive and helpful too. They are
- Security – It protects your admin login page from malicious login attemts.
- Downtime Monitoring – It notifies you automatically through email when your website is down due to server isssues.
- Image Performance – By using this plugin you will get free CDN support from WordPress.com for all images on your site. This speeds up the image loading time and optimize them also.
To use this plugin you must create a free account with WordPress.com, but it is worth to create it as this plugin comes with so many features at one place.
W3 Total Cache
This plugin improves the user experience of your site by increasing server performance, reducing download times. Web page loading time is one of the main factor in SEO ranking and speeding up it definitely help you to improve your website ranking on search engines.
It caches pages, posts and minify all your JS and CSS files. It also provides easy CDN integration process with it.
Akismet
It helps you to manage and protect your site from spam comments. If you are not using any comment spam management plugin for your blog, then you need to worry about it. Because if you are not using any, then must be there are many spams in your comment section of your blog. By this spams your site can get hacked or not work properly as it should. And it can lead your site to get a penalty or drop in raking in Google.
It is really a must have plugin, that is why it comes with WordPress installation. You just have to activate it to take the benefit of it. To perform its task you need to provide an API key to it, which you can get easily and free by creating an account on akismet.com. By this account they track how many spam comments they have blocked on your site.
Here I have listed 5 plugins for WordPress which are in my opinion is must have plugins to run a WordPress site. Is there any other plugins in your mind which can be categorized as must have plugins? Then let me know in the comment section below.
