With a growing list of over 20,000 plugins, it is sometimes a little difficult to figure out which plugins to use. This is a quick overview of essential WordPress plugins that every WordPress blog should have. The good news is that (at the time of writing this) they are all completely free. Given below are the essential WordPress plugins related to enhancing WordPress functionality, security, SEO, and social marketing.
Secure-WP
Security should always be your first concern when anything is publicly available on the Internet – which is why I rank Secure-WP as one of the most essential WordPress plugins. Don’t get me wrong – WordPress does a basically great job of keeping your blog secure, provided that you keep the version up to date.
However, Secure-WP further strengthens that security, removing a lot of information that hackers could use and removing some sensitive material from user accounts while keeping this information from administrators’ accounts. is protected in. Good stuff.
Spam Free WordPress
Spam is a major problem with WordPress blogs, which makes an anti-spam plugin one of the most essential WordPress plugins. I use Spam Free WordPress, which is doing quite well. Over a 6-month period, it has blocked over 8,000 spam comments, a number that appears to be growing rapidly. Now imagine going through 40-50 spam comments a day! One of the main reasons to use plugins is to save time, and Spam Free WordPress certainly accomplishes this.
W3 Total Cache
After taking care of security and spam, site speed is the next thing that comes to mind. No one will wait around 30 seconds for your webpage to load, so site speed is important. Now I will mention some essential WordPress plugins that help you supercharge your website.
The first is W3 Total Cache. This plugin is widely popular, downloaded almost 1.2 million times! It helps speed up your site by improving server performance, caching every aspect of your website, reducing download times, and providing transparent Content Delivery Network (CDN) integration. In short, it makes your WordPress blog faster.
WP Optimize
WordPress is database-driven. The more efficient the database, the faster pages can be accessed from the database, the faster your site loads to your visitors. However, over time, a WordPress database can become polluted with unnecessary information (such as deleted content, spam comments, old page revisions, etc.). This increases the overall size of the database and increases the access time to that database. End result – your pages take longer to open.
WP-Optimize automatically cleans your database and keeps it tidy by removing unnecessary information on an ongoing basis.
WP Database Backup
In terms of essential WordPress plugins, backing up your data is right there. It’s something we all give up on until it’s too late, and then I wish we didn’t. WP Database Backup makes it easy to back up Core. The important thing here is that you are easily able to back up your site with WP DB – and hire a freelancer to restore your sites if need be, I would imagine $25-50 in the area of ​​who will charge – much less a headache than rebuilding your site from scratch! WordPress tables.
One downside of this plugin is that it is a bit difficult to reinstall if something happens to your site. There are alternative plugins out there that are much more user-friendly, such as Backup Buddy, but unfortunately, it is not a free plugin, which costs $75 for 2 WordPress sites.
Broken Link Checker
There is nothing more frustrating than clicking on a link and getting a “page not found” error. While this is frustrating for a visitor, it usually also has the effect of driving that visitor (and potential clients) away from your website. Broken Link Checker can monitor links in your posts, pages, comments, blogroll, and custom fields and report broken links to you via your WordPress dashboard or email.
Google XML Sitemaps
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of SEO-related plugins. These are only a handful of what I would consider essential WordPress plugins. The first is Google XML Sitemaps. A sitemap is basically a road map of your website, with an outline of all the different pages and how they are linked together – their structure. Google and other major search engines use such sitemaps to crawl and index your site more efficiently.
Google XML Sitemaps automatically creates such a sitemap and keeps it updated as you add new content. Moreover, it also notifies all the major search engines every time you create and post new content.
All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress blogs. It helps you optimize pages and posts by automatically generating meta tags and helps you optimize web page titles. The best part about All in One SEO Pack is that it is fully functional out of the box, requiring very limited configuration, which makes it great for people new to WordPress and SEO.
Ultimate Follow Me
Probably my “favorite” of the essential WordPress plugins listed here. Ultimate Follow Me is actually a WordPress sidebar widget that links to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. This now also includes Google +1, which is generally seen as a very prominent way to increase your search engine rankings.
I have demoed some of these social marketing plugins. While they all do the same thing, Ultimate Follow Me generally renders the social media icon a little “pretty.” There are various sizes to choose from and look great in the sidebar – your visitors definitely won’t miss them!
Shareaholic
One more essential WordPress plugins I can’t do without! The plugin automatically creates a gorgeous little social marketing bar at the bottom of your post where people can like your post on Facebook, tweet it to their Twitter account, or share it on many, many social bookmarking websites. can.
At the time of writing this, Shareaholic supports 85 sites! It also comes in 3 flavors, Classic Bookmark, Sexy Bookmark, and Sassy Bookmark. Once you decide which social sites to use, Shareaholic automatically posts links at the bottom of each page or post – although you have the option to override the plugin on a per-page basis, Therefore it is not visible.
Google Analytics Dashboard
The Google Analytics Dashboard tracks visitors to each of your pages from your WordPress dashboard, so there’s no need to sign in to your Google Analytics account! You are also able to embed parts of analytics directly into posts or as part of your theme. One caveat to this plugin is that it does not display all the information you can get from your Google Analytics account. It gives you the basic information you need to know who is watching what, which is what I look for most in my Analytics account anyway.
Page Links To
For me personally, it is one of the most essential WordPress plugins I have used. I mainly use it in relation to the content I use on the front page. The blog front page description typically takes the first 200 characters or more of the actual article page and displays them as advertising words.
The problem is, sometimes I don’t want to use the first 200 characters of my articles as the word that appears on my front page, related to that article, so what do I do? I create an additional page with the words I want to use and use the Page Link To plugin to redirect that page to the actual post.