When you start making your WordPress website it can be very overwhelming. So I’ve put together a list of must have free WordPress plugins!
Sucuri
This plugin is great if you want all-round security for free that is extremely easy to set up. All you need to do is download the plugin and they do the rest. Sucuri looks through your WordPress files and checks that there is no malicious activity, suspicious redirections, SEO spam and more. It gives you peace of mind that your site is safe and clean. At the same time, it checks that your site isn’t blacklisted on search engines. The plugin also gives your recommendations for your site to make it even more secure.
This is a great plugin and normally the very first one I download when I start a new site. One of the must have free WordPress plugins for any site.
Yoast
SEO should be a huge part of any online business and Yoast is the number one plugin for this. It does everything you could need to make sure your site is search engine friendly. Yoast sets you up with Google Search Console and makes sure you are visible to Google and other search engines. It brings together all of the verifications codes needed into one place making it manageable and easy.
The free version helps you make sure your content is SEO optimised. It lets you choose a keyword to focus on then it analyses the text on your page and tells you if it is good for search engines. It does this by looking at things like how many times your keyword is used, where it’s used and many other things. You can go through their checklist until the plugin says it is optimized enough. This is definitely another must have plugin. If you want to learn more about keywords and SEO read my blog about this!
W3 Total Cache
This plugin is again, SEO related but it does this by improving your website performance like site speed and loading times. W3 Total Cache uses a number of different techniques such as reducing the amount of caching in your memory to speed up your site and minifying your pages and posts.
Having a fast site is hugely important as search engines look at this and rank faster websites higher. But it is also important for your users as when you access a website and it takes too long to load you might exit it before it loads so you need a fast site to keep your users. W3 Total Cache helps hugely with the performance of your website so I highly recommend downloading this. If you want to learn a bit about SEO you can read my blog about setting up google analytics on your site, it’s very useful to have!
Elementor
This plugin may not be for everyone but it is by far the easiest way of making a great looking website quickly (in my opinion). Elementor is essentially a page builder, instead of using your themes content maker you can make your own page using elementor. You can drag and drop page elements to build your web page. You can choose to make your site from templates as there are loads of free pages you can choose them and then just change the pictures and wording to suit your needs. There are also blocks so that you can make your page piece by piece.
You do however need to be very careful with this app as it can look very weird if you don’t check how it looks on mobile or tablet. Sometimes it is best to use your theme’s features as these are normally more mobile friendly. Areas like menus are probably best to not use Elementor but it is great to make an amazing looking homepage using it. For a free plugin, it allows a huge amount of customisation for making websites and the only limit is your imagination. On top of this, there are a lot of free page templates that can be found such as http://www.tyler.com/
Give it a go!
Hustle
If you want to start an email list this plugin is great. It allows you to create a number of different emails collecting forms like pop-ups, slide-in and embedded. You can customize each one of these forms to show the users what you are offering and why you should sign up to your email list. It shows you how many signups you get per day and what ones work best. A good feature of Hustle is that it integrates with MailChimp so that anyone that signs up can automatically be added to your account. If you have a blog this is one of the must have free WordPress plugins as you can start collecting email subscribers straight away with this one.
WP Forms
Having good looking and working forms is key to a successful site. This plugin allows you to create a custom contact form that you can add anywhere on your site. For example in your contact us page you will probably want a contact form so that your users can get in touch if they need anything. You can set up with a form with WP Forms by dragging and dropping different elements and then setting up where the form will get sent to.
It is very easy to set up and easy to learn. This form plugin sends the content straight to your email without delay. WP Forms sends it instantly and allows you to customize how you see the email, very useful.
WP Smush
Some sites have a lot of large high definition images which look great but slow down your website. Large images make a site slow and the webpage looks bad while it’s loading. WP Smush is a simple plugin that reduces the size of your images. This makes loading times faster meaning improving your SEO. It automatically reduces the size of your images as you upload them so you don’t need to worry about manually doing this.
This plugin makes sure your site is fast while keeping the quality of your images. You can manually set up how much you want your images reduced. If you don’t mind sacrificing some speed with an HD picture that is ok.
Conclusion
I use all of the plugins mentions above for all of the sites that I make. I trust them and they are all very useful! Obviously, there are a lot of alternatives out there for each one. However, all of these have the most and best reviews so the numbers really say it all! Give them a go if you haven’t already and let me know what you think.
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