Best WordPress Plugins: 9 Free WordPress Plugins.

Friends I finally hacked it! WordPress. WordPress.org can be quite challenging to newbies.

Having a hard time with your WordPress site? you are in the right place.

Having a WordPress site running can be an exciting experience especially for beginners.

However, without the proper functionality of your WordPress site can be a pain in the neck.

Your site users need a site that is responsive, easy to navigate, safe and secure, loads faster, and have great and appealing content.

A miss on any or all this and your users will leave as fast as they came in and that can be a downfall to your business in the long run.

For effective and proper functioning of your site, WordPress has put in-place an official plugins section with over 55,055 plugins at the time of writing this to choose from.

These plugins add easy functionalities to your site.

This post delves into the important and must-have WordPress plugins in 2019. These plugins are easy to use if you are new to website stuff. All you need is to install them on your WordPress site.

Let's get right in!

Wordfence Security.

The slightest thought of your site being attacked can give you sleepless nights.

Without proper security for your site in place can make it vulnerable to attacks.

Having the Wordfence Security plugin on your site can be a life-saver to your site.

Wordfence is a two in one plugin that provides both firewall and security protection.

• This plugin monitors traffic to your site and blocks suspicious traffic.
• It also allows you to limit login attempts hence protecting your site from force attacks.
• The security scanner works round the clock to ensure the safety of your site. It scans your site for any security loopholes and lets you know about it in real time.
• Also, you will note that when setting up your WordPress site, the WordPress assigns you the default login like www.yourdomain.com/admin which makes it easy for hackers to get access to your site.             

• Wordfence security gives you an option to change “/admin” to something unique and only known to you.
• Wordfence also lets you know about attempted attacks, the IP address used and the country from which the attacks originate.

This plugin has a premium version with more superb features.

Wordfence Security had three million plus active installations at the time of writing this.

Google XML Sitemap.
This is another important WordPress plugin for any WordPress site.

Google XML Sitemap plugin helps your site be indexed by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Askme.com.

This will greatly improve your search engine optimizations efforts.

Also, Google XML Sitemap will allow the web crawlers access your site easily and see the set up of your website without a hassle.

This plugin updates the search engines in real time on any new content added to your site.

And the good news about this plugin is that it is available on WordPress for free to both personal and commercial users.

Google XML Sitemap had more than two million active installations at the time of writing this and supported the latest version of WordPress.

Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that has been there for more than a decade.

It is available both for free and in premium.

This awesome plugin is a must have if you are aiming at owning the first page in the search results.

Basically, this plugin helps you tailor your content for the search engine.

This plugin by Team Yoast has a superior XML Sitemaps, a snippet preview to let you see how your content looks like in the search results, allows you to link to other content on your site with the internal linking suggestion and much more.

The premium Yoast SEO enables you to see how your content is shared on social media.

Highlights key phrases and synonyms in real time and have extensions tailored for wooCommerce.

To add, it also alerts you on plagiarized content thus saving you the Google penalties.

Yoast SEO had over five million active installations at the time of writing this with 25,350 five star ratings.

Akismet.

Not all traffic that comes to your site has good intentions.

Some are there to spam and that can be pretty bad for you.

To keep spammers and spam comments out of sight and site, you need Akismet.

Akismet is a default WordPress plugin that tells you whether a comment is a ham or spam.

It also screens the contact form submissions for suspicious and spam contents.

It also captures hidden and or misleading links in real time.

Its overall function is to keep your site free from spam and saving you some disk space by blocking spam comments.

This plugin is being used by millions of WordPress users.

However, something to note is that you will need an Akismet.com API key to use this plugin.

Don’t sweat it out through the key is available for free.

Jetpack.

Developed by engineers behind WordPress itself, JetPack is a one-stop plugin.

It is designed to provide top-notch website security, high performance and overall management of your site.

It protects your website from hackers, spammers, scans for malware and much more.

It will also provide a full back up of your website so you will never have to worry about losing your website contents.

Site Management provides you with real statics and analytics for a better understanding of your end-users. See the Jet analytics from my site below.

It also supports the SEO to ensure that you own the first page of the search engines.

Also, it has the PayPal payment option that allows you to sell your products/services online without worrying about payment options.

WP Smush.

Large images on your website increase the load time.

Internet users want websites that load faster and solve their problems in the fastest way possible.

As the name suggests, Smush is an image resizer and optimizer plugin for WordPress.

Optimizing your website media files will greatly improve the performance of your site hence the overall help in SEO.

With the lazy loader too, bulk image resizing tool, Auto optimization tool, and awesome servers, Smush will make your WordPress media library a breeze.

Don’t just take the word for it. This award-winning plugin has had more than one million installations with 3,837 five star ratings at the time of writing this.

Google Analytics.

This is another important plugin for every WordPress site.

Google Analytics by exact metrics is an awesome plugin that will capture and display stats to you in real time for a better understanding of your site users/audience.

This super free tool allows you to sample and evaluate your site’s overall performance.

It uses a tracking code thus allowing you to see real-time traffic to your site on the dashboard.

This plugin also enables you to see the source of your traffic, number of organic searches, referrers of your site, number of 404 errors, sessions, users, and much more.

MailChimp for WordPress.

Email marketing is one of the best ways of getting personal with your audience.

I mean if you are not helping your audience with their problems then your site is as good as not being there.

Reaching out to your audience can be really hard but with MailChimp for WordPress, you will have an awesome time with your email marketing efforts.

This seamless plugin allows you to create quality and user-friendly signup forms on your site.

To add, it has been integrated with other WordPress plugins like contact form 7, woo-commerce, comment forms, Ninja forms, and much more.

MailChimp for WordPress is available both for free and in premium.

The premium Mailchimp offers many more features like improved integration for wooCommerce.

There are other email marketing plugins but MailChimp for WordPress is definitely worth paying attention to.

Broken Link Checker.

With over 700,000 active installations, the Broken Link Checker is also another plugin worth checking.

As the name suggests, this plugin parses through your posts searching for any broken links.

Broken links can lead your site users to error pages.

This Plugin works by blocking the web crawlers from tracking broken links.

Also, it notifies you through the dashboard on any broken links.

It then saves you the hassle of manually updating the whole post by allowing you to edit the broken link directly on the plugin’s dashboard.
 

Social Icons.

Let’s get social.

Social media is a great way of generating traffic to your site which in turn can be your dream cash flow.

To achieve that you need a click away plugin that gives you a variety of options on what to do with your social media icons.

Thank goodness the Social Icons by UltimatelySocial is the deal.

This is one of the must-have plugins on every WordPress site.

With a mouse over action, it gives you the power of allowing your users to either share your content, visit or like you on social media or all of the two.

This allows for more interactions and engagements which can be ultimately good on your SEO efforts.

It also allows you to design the appearance of the icons on your website.

To add, it gives you the option of either displaying the number of social shares under each icon or not.

Final Thoughts on Best WordPress Plugins.

Plugins are essential tools on every WordPress site regardless of your niche.

I've been using the above plugins and to be honest, they are the best.

The above plugins cut across all the niches and are worth paying attention to.

They help in the overall functionality of any WordPress site.

One thing to note though is that it is important to do a thorough check and researching more on a given plugin.

Read their reviews to see and understand what other users have to say on a given plugin.

Do you have any other plugin that you think I missed out on? Let me know in the comments below.