Top Free Plugins Your WordPress Site Must Have

It is a known fact amongst WordPress users that plugins hold great importance on a website. These tools extend functionality to your WordPress site, and the kinds of plugins you need depend on the kind of website you own. The plugins are readily available in WordPress, but some people are not aware that they can use some of them for free. That is why in this article we are listing ten of the top free plugins your WordPress site must have.

Plugins are essential for your site to function better. There is a plugin for practically every function on WordPress that will essentially reduce the stress and work on your part. Presently there are over 40,000 plugins on WordPress available right now, free of charge. If you are looking for something that isn’t on the list of cost-free add-ons, you can certainly purchase that particular plugin at a minimal rate.

40,000 and more plugins mean that you will find several plugins that serve the same purpose. In cases like those, you can choose one that fits your needs. Aside from free and premium plugins, there are also “freemium” plugins, which are basically free plugins that have that have an upgradeable option. Below, we’ve listed the ten of the top free plugins your WordPress site must have.

Top Free Plugins Your WordPress Site Must Have

• Jetpack: It is a very powerful plugin that is created by the WordPress company itself. It has a series of features, making your work easier. This plugin will take care of the website’s security, its performance, image optimization, the growth of the traffic and several others.

Moreover, this plugin helps you to enhance distribution and efficiently share the website’s published content to services like third-party search engines which in turn will increase your website’s reach and traffic. It also creates sitemaps which enable search engines to index the website with ease. It has a strict security and notifies you if there are issues on your website.

• Hummingbird: Caching stores data and serves it back when requested. This technique is responsible for the speed of the website and hummingbird is the plugin that scans your site to give you an analysis of its speed performance.

This plugin allows you to see the overall score of your website as well as the ideal number that your website must get. Aside from caching the data, it also helps in minimizing, compressing, and merging them so you can have more storage space.

• Defender: This is a well-known plugin amongst several WordPress users. Defender keeps hackers at bay and keeps all your information safe. This plugin will search the entire website for any vulnerability, and if it does find any, it will notify you to fix them up with just one click. This is great for websites with sensitive information as it will help you clean up the website if you get hacked.
• Google Analytics+: It is essential to know every piece of information about your website, such as at the number of users accessed your website as well as the time with the most number of visitors to your site.

The Google Analytics + tracks the page visits, average visit duration, referrers and so on. It also has a feature wherein you can track your website demographics. This plugin helps business owners in analyzing their best strategies for marketing and advertising.

• Askimet: It is a default plugin on WordPress and comes with all the new core installation. It is basically an anti-spam plugin which will be able to check all the comments and keep the spam ones at bay.
• Yoast SEO: Every WordPress user is aware of the importance of SEO, and Yoast SEO is the best plugin for that. It ensures that you are always creating better content so that your ranking goes higher on search engine result page. Its main focus is to help website owners to create content that is useful to other users and increase web traffic efficiently.
• Google XML Sitemaps: XML sitemap is an important plugin because it helps search engine index your site. It is only with a sitemap where web crawlers are able to see the structure of a website and can retrieve the results more efficiently. Search engines get notified every time you post new content.
• Ultimate Branding: If you use WordPress for your business, it is essential to replace the WordPress logo with your own business logo for a more personal touch. This plugin will help customize your branding all over the site.
• WP Smush Pro: Images are a very crucial part of every website. How boring would a site be if all you have is written content? However, images are larger in size, so it can take up more space which could eventually affect your site’s speed performance. That’s where WP Smush Pro helps. It compresses all your images to ensure your site is always performing smoothly and efficiently.
• BJ Lazy Load: The main purpose of this plugin is to help the webpage load faster and save on bandwidth. It replaces all your post thumbnails and post images with a placeholder and loads the content as it is approaching to enter the browser screen at the point when the visitor scrolls the page. BJ Lazy Load works with text widgets and covers embedded videos from Vimeo and YouTube.

Conclusion

Plugins are a great tool both for private individuals and online businesses because they help in boosting the overall performance of a website. There are thousands of plugins to choose from and picking the most important ones might be overwhelming for first-time WordPress users.

However, choosing plugins for your website is not as difficult as you think as long as you know what you or business needs. If you’re still confused and need help in picking the right plugins, let our list of the top free plugins your WordPress site must have help you. Give these plugins a try if you want to be more successful in the online marketplace.

Wealthy Affiliate websites come pre-loaded with important plugins that save you time and effort. You have the flexibility of adding plugins for specific tasks that you may need. It is a great way to get started.