WordPress Plugins are an essential part to form a complete and powerful WordPress site. There are plenty of choices in Plugin niche which assures to provide the best performance for your online business. This is evidently an enormous advantage, but sometimes it really gives us a headache when not thoroughly understanding their features. In fact, many of our customers often ask us for plugin suggestions. So today, we are so happy to introduce you list of Top 10 Free Must Have WordPress Plugins as firstly. All of these plugins are well suited to all kinds of WordPress blog and surely will add awesome functionality to your site and make it ‘great’.
The list below contains a some of the best plugins of various types that can be listed as SEO plugins, security plugins, speed optimization plugins, marketing and social media plugins. As a result, we will provide you with comprehensive solution to build a functional site that can work properly in all niches. Let’s check it out!
#1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) is one of the most popular WordPress plugins. As its name suggests, Yoast SEO is a great tool to optimize your WordPress site for Search Engine. More precisely, this is an awesome plugin which guides you all the way to create better content and improve your ranking on search results. Yoast SEO focuses on creating the content which is useful to the users as well as technically SEO friendly. This is certainly the very first WP Plugin that you need to install if you want to go a long way.
#2. WP Smush
Investing in image quality is one of the fastest and most effective way to grab the attention of majority of internet users. This is the very first impression for people when visiting your site for the first time. As many people would like watching rather than reading, WP Smush is becoming a more and more essential plugin for all WordPress sites. With WP Smush you can compress and optimize the images without reducing the quality of the images using WP Smush plugin. It optimizes all of your image files in JPEG, GIF and PNG formats using advanced compression techniques and saves lots of storage space.
#3. W3 Total Cache
Speed is one of the most important SEO factors. Faster websites rank higher in Google, this means more visitors for your business website and more conversions. WordPress caching is one of the best ways to improve website performance. The general idea of caching is storing the website data temporarily in the cache so that it loads faster the next time the user opens the same page. And W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin is one of the most popular plugins and probably the best caching plugin for WordPress. Not only it features page cache, database caching, object caching, browser caching and a lot more but also let you integrate CDN services to reduce page load time.
#4. All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
Rich Snippet is basically a short summary of your page in the search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing and sometimes in the News feed of Facebook in nice format with star ratings, author photo, image. The snippets provide the main information about the product/ page briefly i.e. highlight the attractions of the product and therefore help you get more click through rates through search engines. To create rich snippets in WordPress website, you can use the handy plugin All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets as a good option. It provides the search engines with the precise information to be displayed in the search engine result pages. This helps your site rank better as well as get more click through rates.
#5. BJ Lazy Load
Your website includes a great number of images? And it takes hours to load despite having used compress plugin? It is a common trouble happening with many of our users. And the answer we give today is BJ Lazy Load. Actually, it is not exaggerating at all that Lazy loading is the mantra to make your site load faster with lots of images in the page. The plugin replaces all your post images, post thumbnails, gravatar images and content iframes with a placeholder and loads the content as it gets close to entering the browser screen. It displays the content (images) only if a user scrolls the page.
#6. Wordfence Security
Website secutiry is never a simple or ignorable issue when launching a site, especially you want to keep your site secure from hacker. In fact, there may be thousands of malicious bots on the web which can attack your website anytime and destroy your entire work in no time. To protect your site from being hacked, there are many available useful plugins. Among them, Wordfence Security is really a worth considering one. The plugin features Firewall protection, malware scan, blocking, login security, live traffic monitoring and a lot more. Also, it lets you monitor all your traffic in real-time including robots, humans, 404 errors, logins, logouts etc…All to assure that you can be aware of the security threats your site is facing and take an instant action against it.
#7. Broken Link Checker
Landing on broken page is one of the most annoying stuff when visiting a website as a customer. If you want to be more professional and more reliable in your visitor’s eyes, this will be the very first thing you must work on. Then, you can install a handy security plugin: Broken Link Checker for this task. This plugin can check all your posts, comments and other content for broken links and instantly notifies you if any are found. In addition, it reports on the missing images as well so that you fix them quickly.
#8. MailChimp for WordPress
For marketer, MailChimp is an extremely useful email marketing services to manage subscribers, send emails and track results in the bulk. It is no doubt a great marketing tool for the webmasters and business owners. MailChimp is a free plugin which allows you to add beautiful subscription forms in your WP blog. The plugin lets you create beautiful opt-in forms to add more subscribers to your email list. Besides, you can easily integrate the plugin with any other form on your site like contact form, comment or checkout form. It supports all the major form plugins like Contact Form 7, WooCommerce etc.
#9. Jetpack
As its name suggests, Jetpack offers users a package of many awesome features. By installing JetPack, your site will be taken care in a comprehensive manner, from site security, website performance, traffic growth, image optimization to website appearance and a lot more. This is an extremely powerful and totally free must have plugin for every WordPress website.
#10. Social Icons
Last but not least, Social Icons is a free WordPress plugin which provides you an easy way to display popular social icons on your website. As social network is more and more popular, this is becoming a vital part that you must pay attention to, if you want to expand your impact. This free and easy to use plugin supports over 100 popular social media platforms. Moreover, you can customize the icon as your wish: resizing the icons, square or rounded or grayscale background icon layouts etc…
All in all, the list above contains best free essential WordPress plugins according to our expert’s opinions. After understanding these plugin’s functionality, you can go back and check to see if your site hasn’t installed any of it yet. We hope via this article, your site will run more smoothly and become more professional.
Do you have a favorite plugin from this list? Have we missed one that you think is absolutely essential for every WordPress site? Let us know in the comments below.We will appreciate if you share any of your opinion.