Best Free WordPress Plugins

Best Free WordPress Plugins

Whether you’re a blogger or an online business owner, it’s important for you to have a strong online presence. For this you need to have a search engine friendly website which can get you a high search engine ranking. Additionally, you’ll want a responsive website that renders your content well across the various screen sizes and devices that users use these days.

Furthermore, along with a search engine friendly website you also need to make sure that your website is highly- functional, engaging and user-friendly. Now this can cost you good money if you get a website designed from a web designer but if you already have a blog or a website on WordPress, then you can achieve all this and more without breaking the bank. Wondering how?

Well, through WordPress plugins, you can make a boring site look fancy, functional and search engine friendly. When your online visibility increases, it attracts heavy web traffic as more people click on your site link which further leads to high click through rates.

In addition to this, if you have incorporated best plugins for WordPress in your site, eventually your website will be more edgy and engaging. This can help keep the audience hooked to your site. They explore it, place orders and visit the site again. And above all it keeps your traffic from drifting to your competitor’s website.

Best Plugins for WordPress

Currently there are over 24000 WordPress plugins available offering different benefits to WordPress users. However, browsing through all the plugins to choose the ones that are best can be time consuming and overwhelming. To make things easier for you, here is a list of the best plugins for WordPress for the year 2013. The list comprises of a wide variety of WordPress plugins that can help increase the functionality of your website and make it search engine friendly.

WPForms

WPForms is the most popular WordPress Forms plugin as it is both user-friendly and powerful. It allows you to easily add contact forms, email subscription forms, payment forms and other types of forms to your site. Features include:

Drag & Drop Form Builder– Create a variety of forms without the need to know any coding.

Responsive / Mobile Friendly– Every form you create is automatically optimized for mobile users without any additional configuration on your part.

Smart Conditional Logic– This feature allows you to build more advanced, conditional forms without the hassle.

WordPress SEO by YOAST

Yoast SEO is one of the best plugins for WordPress. This plugin helps search engine optimization of sites created on WordPress platform. The plugin is developed by an SEO professional and is easy to use. It includes features like:

On-Page Analysis– This feature helps you identify any SEO element like metadata and focus keywords that you’ve missed in your post.

Control Visibility– By using this feature, you can mark the pages on your site that you want Google to see and rank.

XML Sitemaps– This feature automatically creates a complete and advanced XML sitemap for you. This includes images, pages and posts. However, you can customize it.

Other Features– It also includes features like social sharing options to optimize your site through social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. It also includes features like permalinks and import and export that allow you to exchange data from one blog to the other.

Akismet

Akismet is one of the most sought after WordPress plugins. This is ideal for bloggers who want to detect spam comments. The detection of spam comment is important because if left unaddressed, it can damage your blog’s reputation and search engine ranking. The plugin checks the comments of different people on your blog against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not. Once the spam is detected, you can view it under the ‘Comments’ section in your WordPress blog’s admin screen.

Though Akismet is the oldest plugin it is still ranked among the best WordPress plugins for the year 2013. The reason for it is that the software is high functional and easy to use. Once installed, it works continuously and keeps flagging and catching spam comments for you.

It includes features like:

Link Highlighting– It highlights links in spam comments and reveals misleading and hidden links.

Comment status History– Through this you can see which spam comments were caught by Akismet and which were unspammed by the moderator.

Shareaholic

This WordPress plugin is ideal to boost social media sharing. This plugin offers features like clean social bookmarks, built-in URL shorteners, share counters and social analytics.  It’s got sleek and attractive menu bar design options and sharing buttons that you can customize and insert into your posts and web pages. The tool has proven to be quite useful and has attracted several readers to discover and submit blog posts to popular social networking websites.

Limit Logins

Security of your blog is as important as everything else. By default, on WordPress one can make unlimited attempts to login. This makes it easier for hackers to access your login details, steal your password and change it. And once this happens, it becomes difficult to get back your password and you have to create a new blog. To avoid this, ‘Limit Logins’ plugin is ideal.

This WordPress Plugin is created to limit unauthorized users from accessing your WordPress admin and from using it. The plugin limits the number of attempts to login through both normal login and with cookies. It limits the number of retry login attempts for each IP. You can decide the number of retries.

Better WP Security

‘Better WP security’ is one of the best plugins for WordPress blog/site security. It is easy to use without any complications and is quite effective.  The plugin is ranked among the best WordPress has to offer because it cleverly combines top security techniques and features into a single plugin enabling you to upgrade your blog ‘s security in one-click activation. It hides sensitive information from hackers.

Some of its notable features include:

  • Helps you change wp-content path, remove Meta generator tags and rename admin account.
  • Scans your website so that you can address vulnerabilities and threats
  • Bans troublesome hosts and bots
  • Strengthens security of your server
  • Forces SSL for posts and admin pages

W3 Total Cache

Slow loading of pages is one of the factors that make potential customers close it and go to your competitor’s website. To prevent this from happening, W3 Total Cache plugin is ideal. This is the best and only WordPress plugin available for web performance optimization. This plugin improve page speed of your website and overall user experience. This plugin is highly recommended by top web hosts including HostGator, Dream Host and Go Daddy.  In addition to this, W3 Total Cache also provides transparent content delivery system.

WooCommerce
This plugin is exclusively designed for ecommerce WordPress websites. It includes features that can boost the look of your shop front with attractive ecommerce web themes.

So make the most of WordPress plugin and improve your website ranking, security and performance today!

We at Astound Media are here to help you build a strong online presence. Take a look through the services we offer and choose the one that best fits the needs of your company and let us help you redefine the status quo & CAPTIVATE your audience.

Jorge @ ASTOUND on Linkedin
Jorge @ ASTOUND
I have a diverse background and experience that qualifies me as an expert. This includes consulting for enterprises, small businesses, entrepreneurs, and nonprofit organizations.

My areas of focus include marketing strategy development, marketing operations design and optimization, marketing automation, sales operations, content development, content marketing, content monetization, web development, design, and information architecture.

I pride myself on being technical, strategic, and tactical. I work well as the liaison between the technical and non-technical project stakeholders, and I work diligently to achieve results.