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 the 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 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 the 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 elements, 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 comments 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 highly 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 for boosting 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
The security of your blog is as important as everything else. By default, on WordPress, one can make unlimited attempts to log in. 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, the ‘Limit Logins’ plugin is ideal.
This WordPress Plugin is created to limit unauthorized users from accessing your WordPress admin and using it. The plugin limits the number of attempts to log in through both normal login and with cookies. It limits the number of login retry 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 with a single click. It hides sensitive information from hackers.
Some of its notable features include:
- Helps you change the wp-content path, remove the Meta generator tags, and rename the admin account.
- Scans your website so that you can address vulnerabilities and threats
- Bans troublesome hosts and bots
- Strengthens the security of your server
- Forces SSL for posts and admin pages
W3 Total Cache
Slow page loading is a key factor that drives potential customers to close your website and visit your competitor’s instead. To prevent this from happening, the W3 Total Cache plugin is ideal. This is the best and only WordPress plugin available for web performance optimization. This plugin improves the page speed of your website and overall user experience. Top web hosts, including HostGator, DreamHost, and GoDaddy, highly recommend this plugin. In addition to this, W3 Total Cache also provides a transparent content delivery system.
WooCommerce
This plugin is exclusively designed for e-commerce WordPress websites. It includes features that can boost the look of your shop front with attractive e-commerce web themes.
So make the most of WordPress plugins and improve your website ranking, security, and performance today!
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When he’s not leading projects or optimizing digital funnels, you’ll find him exploring ways to make technology more accessible and impactful for growing teams.