If you have just created a WordPress website, you can find many plugins in the Plugins section of the WordPress panel. But how do you select good ones and install them?
There are many plugins which always ask to pay or upgrade to pro. Basically, they are not useful until we pay or have very limited features in the free version.
So, here are the free plugins which can help you even with their free versions. These plugins are very helpful and will change your WordPress site forever.
Without wasting any more time, let’s look at these plugins.
What are Plugins
Plugins are addons which provide various features for customisation and functionality. Mostly, WordPress plugins are used to add various features and improve the functionality of your WordPress site.
Google Sitekit
Google Sitekit is an official plugin released by Google. It helps you submit your website to Google AdSense, simplify your Google Analytics dashboard, etc…
It is integrated with Google AdSense, Google Analytics, Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. You can also set up many other integrations manually.
Sitekit automatically submits your WordPress site to Google AdSense for approval and inserts your publisher code in all of your posts, pages and other spots on your website.
Google Sitekit is very helpful if you want to use Google Analytics, and Google AdSense. It has good integration features to help you integrate with other Google products.
Learn More about Google Sitekit
Table of Contents
You can see Table of Contents almost on all websites and blogs. Table of Contents helps your users to navigate through your content and skip to the important parts of your website. If your website doesn’t have Table of Contents, visitors will not read the article and visit another website.
This results in a high bounce rate, decreasing your Google ranking. So, it is very important to have Table of Contents on your website. Adding Table of Contents in WordPress is easy through Plugins.
We use a plugin called “Easy Table of Contents” to display the table of contents. This is the Plugin we also recommend for you. After adding the Table of Contents, our bounce rate has reduced by 29%.
Table of Contents shows contents of your page like this –>
Learn more about Easy Table of Contents
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin which helps you to rank your WordPress site on Google. It helps in writing articles with a good SEO score. Yoast SEO provides a special feature to write metadata for Google, Facebook, Quora and other social media platforms.
It gives you the Readability and SEO scores for posts, pages and category / tag archives. If your SEO score or Readability score is bad, you need to improve them. Yoast SEO also gives you why your scores are bad or good. If your scores are bad, you can improve them by using the guides.
AddToAny
AddToAny is a free WordPress plugin which adds clean looking share buttons for your WordPress site. It is very easy and simple to set up. AddToAny automatically adds sharing buttons to your pages and posts. You can also customise the buttons you want to show.
The best part about AddToAny is the “Copy Link” function. You can add Social Media, Messaging apps and also copy link buttons. When a user clicks the copy link button, the link will be automatically copied to the user’s clipboard. This is a unique feature. No other plugins offer this feature.
WPForms
WPForms is a plugin which is used to create form pages like Contact Us. It has templates which can be used to create various forms in seconds. WPForms is not completely free. But you can create forms and get notifications to your email for free. You have to upgrade to the pro version if you want to take backups. But I don’t recommend the pro version personally.
UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is a free plugin to backup your WordPress website to cloud storage. You can set it up to back up to your Google Drive or Dropbox or various other cloud storage services. UpdraftPlus also has a feature to backup automatically. You can set it up to backup once per week or any other timeframe.
If your site crashes, you can install Updraft Plus in the new WordPress. After installing you can restore the most recent backup of your WordPress site. If you changed a setting without knowing, you can restore the backup. In this way, UpdraftPlus helps you. It is very important to take backup of your site.
Classic Editor
Classic Editor is a handy plugin that helps you in writing posts. It is a minimalistic interface to write posts. It is not a must but most professional bloggers use Classic Editor. Due to its minimalistic design, you can focus on writing and you will never be distracted. Classic Editor is not a must but a good to have plugin.
Learn more about Classic Editor
These plugins can help you in your WordPress journey and change your WordPress site forever.
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