Hey guys my name is Krishna welcome back to Easytechsmart.com where I like to talk about all things branding marketing and entrepreneurship when building your WordPress website it seems like it’s really never finished sure you can finish the pages and menu items needed on the site Today we will talk about Best Free WordPress plugin
But you’re always looking to improve your site by making it faster rank better on Google and be more secure today I thought it’d be fun to share my top 5 free wordpress plugins I highly recommend you try
Best Free WordPress Plugins to Make Better
I’ve talked about some of these before and dedicated Post but this is a brief overview you can refer back to when you need to let’s get right into it with Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO
Yoast is a free search engine optimization plugin Best free WordPress Plugin that lets you change how page titles and descriptions appear on Google and other search engines without a plugin like Yoast you can’t control this information on your Google result and Google just guesses out what it thinks you want there and adds a nice dots at the end it’s not very pretty
Yoast allows you to change this and put exactly what you want to be there your website title description all the keywords to increase your chance of ranking higher Yoast also make sure Google has the correct metadata for your site
So you can get that nice page structure under your listing to help people get directly to the page they need whether it’s about contact FAQ you get the idea they can just click straight through under your website listing and go right to the page
If you’re a blogger Yoast totally changes how you write content it helps you include keywords to reinforce your target search phrase make posts long enough for the Google algorithm to take it seriously and make it easier for readers to digest
Which increases time spent on your page when people can read easier which in turn helps SEO it’s really brilliant how it all works together Yoast does offer a premium version but I’ve never paid for it I find that the free version serves my needs just fine and I’d recommend trying it for your website
Yoast Duplicate Post
Next Best free WordPress PluginSimple one but one I can’t live without duplicate Post does exactly what it says it duplicates a post or page so you can make a copy to work off I find it so crazy that WordPress still doesn’t offer this feature natively
But duplicate post is free and does the job perfectly there’s a few reasons you might want to do this I’ll sometimes use it to do a save as for a page and be able to make changes to a copy of that page without permanently changing the only version that exists or sometimes
I’m working on a landing page and simply want to duplicate an existing one to use it as a template for my second one that’s all there is to it it’s a simple plug-in that does exactly what it says it lets you duplicate a post or page easily and work off of that copy to do whatever you need to do
WP Mail
Next Best free WordPress Plugin let’s take a look at WP mail this one’s a bit obscure on the surface and it seems very technical but let me explain what it does and why you need it by default when any email is sent from your WordPress website it’s sent through the IP address of your web server
If you’re on shared hosting the shared servers IP address commonly gets blacklisted as spam due to other web hosting accounts getting compromised and hackers utilizing it to send spam mail fun fact for you
I bet you didn’t know that the overwhelming majority of creepy spam mail you receive comes from GoDaddy shared hosting servers or Bluehost ur DreamHost or any of the shared hosting companies most of the spam email you get in your inbox comes from compromised web hosting accounts
So what does this mean in English well using the default mail settings in WordPress there’s a good chance of email being sent from your website getting sent to your spam folder this is a problem if you have a contact form on your site or receive emails
When people leave a comment on your blog post for approval because if you don’t regularly check your spam folder you could miss an important inquiry if you’re a freelancer you might miss someone who wants to hire you
Because you don’t have your wordpress configured correctly to send mail the right way WP mail allows you to change how WordPress sends mail and it allows you to link directly to a transactional mail service like SendGrid Amazon SES or send in blue again
What does that mean in English well you know how you use a service like MailChimp or Constant Contact to send your marketing emails to your email list you wouldn’t send a mass email from your Gmail account and CC everyone probably
Because it would get sent directly to spam and it’s just get you don’t do it you use a professional service like MailChimp if you’re doing an email list and you want to do email marketing services like MailChimp and Constant Contact have special ways of sending mail to ensure a low chance of it getting sent to spam and that’s exactly
what services like SendGrid Amazon SES or send in blue do for transactional emails transactional emails are emails to reset your password or emails such as getting a new contact form submission or new comment on your website I personally use spark post and I use the SMTP option within WP Mail SMTP to connect it accordingly spark posts
Lets you send up to 500 emails per month for free and I’ve never exceeded the free limit using a setup like this make sure you don’t miss important emails including security alerts
Know Also: Best and Fastest Web Hosting For WordPress [Case Study]
WordFence
Which is the next Best free WordPress Plugin I’m highlighting wordfence is a free security solution that features a live firewall brute-force protection against common attacks email alerts for new admin logins an optional two-factor authentication
I speak from experience in saying that WordPress is not secure on its own without a proper security system so I would advise installing wordfence on your site immediately seriously it’s totally free
If you don’t have it installed right now hit that link and go install it on your site it’s that important they do offer a premium version but I’ve always used the free version and been happy with it I won’t talk about it too much since I made a dedicated post on it
Really Simple SSL
Next Best free WordPress Plugin Let’s talk about really simple SSL I recently talked about how you can get an SSL certificate for free but when you install it on your web server or set up Cloudflare sometimes WordPress has trouble enforcing HTTPS on your website
Really simple SSL is a basic free plugin that ensures that all your content on your website is loaded over HTTPS and a redirect is forced so visitors will always see that lovely lock icon every time they visit your site and SSL will be configured correctly
It’s really simple to activate install it and click a few buttons and you’re set so if SSL is working fine on your WordPress site you don’t really need really simple SSL but if you’ve had trouble setting it up or you noticed that sometimes it’s not HTTPS
I would go ahead and install it I just install it on all of my WordPress sites as a general rule I figure why not it can’t hurt anything and because of that I’ve never had trouble with my SSL configuration
So those are my top five Best free WordPress plugins but I do have two honorable mentions sue mell in smush suma was a free eggs an intent popup I’ve talked about before
Know Also: 10Web Review: Best WordPress Hosting for Agencies and Developers
Smush
Smush is a free plug-in that automatically compresses and downsizes images when you upload them to WordPress it doesn’t affect the quality much but it makes the file size smaller this helps your site load faster which not only boosts your SEO
But it also saves you storage space on your web hosting account
Page Builder Plugin
Now I’ve gotten a few questions lately regarding drag and drop page builder plugins like Elementor or WP bakery and since this is a video talking about my essential WordPress plugins someone’s gonna ask it they’re gonna be like Christian why did you not talk about a page builder that’s pretty essential to WordPress
So I’ll make it simple I wouldn’t recommend buying or using the free version of Elementor or WP bakery on their own because they’re included in good quality WordPress themes and I think it’s best if you get a good WordPress theme that’s integrated and designed to work with the page builder plug-in directly which would mean that the page builder plugin is included and you don’t need to find one or install one
Know Also: Best and Cheap WordPress Managed Hosting (Deal-2020)
Because it’s bundled with the plugin now here’s the thing the wordpress theme you pick for your site can dramatically change your website building experience it can change based on the backend of the theme the developer chooses to use which page builder plug-in they include there’s a lot of variables that really can’t affect
How your website building experience goes just based on the theme you pick so if you’d like me to create a post about my top WordPress themes drop a comment below I think that would be an interesting post and if it sounds good to you do be sure to
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.