5 Free WordPress Plugins You Should Use

One of the major reasons to build a WordPress website is that it is open source, making it flexible to improve and extend the core functionality of the WordPress CMS. This can be done with prebuilt plugins that offer new functionality to WordPress. These are five well known and effective plugins that have been tested by millions of users. You can trust that these plugins will be updated frequently, reducing the risk of them leaving vulnerabilities in your WordPress website.

Yoast SEO:

The Yoast SEO plugin is essential for conducting basic on page SEO tactics. It allows you to easily customize your page title, Meta description and other SEO information about your website for each page. This is incredibly useful, and saves a lot of SEO effort that is better-spent creating valuable, quality content. The best part is, its free, and it’s a great product without even paying for the upgrades you can buy.

Akismet:

The spam protection plugin, Akismet is an amazing product for WordPress. Anyone that does not have it installed knows your site gets slammed with comment spam. There is a free personal version, and if you are a business, Akismet is worth the five bucks a month to stop comment spam from bombarding your site every day. As your traffic builds to your site, it will only get more necessary.

MailChimp:

I may be very bias, but Mailchimp is the best email marketing platform out there for SMB’s and continues to make improvements on a consistent basis. The best part is, its free if you have less than 2000 subscribers. That’s an incredible product to try out, and when you have more you can always upgrade for a reasonable price. The WordPress Mailchimp plugin allows you to easily integrate Mailchimp into your site so that your newsletter subscribers and other forms you want sending emails to Mailchimp go directly to the lists you want.

Google Analytics by Yoast:

Google analytics is an unbelievable free tool, allowing anybody to track their website with enterprise level web statistics. Yoast Analytics allows you to easily add in the Google Analytics tracking code into your website without directly editing the header.php file in WordPress. It also allows you to easily setup goals and conversion tracking without having to manual set them up in the code.

WooCommerce:

The free WordPress plugin, WooCommerce is a tool that allows any WordPress website to sell products online. This is a great feature for selling simple products through your WordPress website without paying for a hosted option or some sort of subdomain or link to a separate eCommerce website. It is great for a basic eCommerce store, and is a great Segway for new companies looking to quickly get some products up online.