6 Important and Free WordPress Plugins Your WP Website or Blog Needs

Congratulations to you! You’ve done the research. Your design looks good. Your content is great. You’ve put in the work. It’s time to jazz things up with some nice and important free WordPress plugins.

The only thing remaining is the critical-to-success tools every WordPress website or blog needs to make an impact. Do you know them?

Truly, you need no introduction to WordPress. In fact, you’re already aware that it’s the most popular and important content management system in the world. Therefore, we are not going to bore you.

We will go straight to point.

Now we’ll show you the 6 very important and free WordPress plugins your site or blog needs.

1. Yoast SEO

Search Engine Optimization is critical-to-success for any website or blog. Yoast SEO is critical to Search Engine Optimization.

You get the idea?

Yoast SEO is probably the most important free WordPress plugin for SEO out there. In the first place, with over five million active installations Yoast SEO is a force for SEO.

Hence, this plugin makes your on-page SEO effortless by allowing you set a keyword and then optimize around that keyword.

Another beauty of this free WordPress plugin is to preview what the search engine result will look like on Google.

2. Google XML Sitemaps

In order for your website or blog to rank on search results you need search engines to index your site.

Consequently, for search engines to index your site accurately they need a piece of information from you called sitemap.

A sitemap is a XML file that properly informs search engines of the structure of your site before indexing. Without a sitemap search engine crawlers will have to guess and do the indexing their own way.

Thus, you need a sitemap. It’s very important. And you don’t want to do it manually. Because it’s no fun doing it manually.

But there’s a free WordPress plugin that is time-tested and proven with over two million downloads. This plugin will do it for you better than you can ever do it by yourself!

The plugin in question is called Google XML Sitemaps. You can easily install it with 1-click through your WordPress admin.

Google XML Sitemaps is dynamic. Dynamic in the sense that it not only creates but also monitors and updates your site’s sitemap file automatically.

It creates a sitemap file that meets Google, Yahoo and Bing requirements. This is all you need.

Lastly, it pings and notifies search engines upon creation of the sitemap as well as subsequent updates to it.

3. JetPack by WordPress.com

JetPack is another action-packed plugin making this list of important free WordPress plugins. Think of it as a WordPress toolkit. A toolkit that is loaded with design, marketing and security tools – all in one place.

Notably, it provides you with a list of professional design themes as well as customization options. It gives you access to fast content delivery network for images and videos coupled with lazy images loading for faster mobile experience.

At the same time, it empowers with you site statistics and analytics.

No longer will you have to copy posts to different social media platforms. Its inbuilt automated social media posting and scheduling make things much easier.

When it comes to security you can be rest assured Jetpack got your back. Brute force attack? Spam? Downtime?

JetPack comes with tools that handle all these. How about back ups? Secure logins and 2FA (2-Factor Authentication)? Malware? JetPack got you covered.

4. WPForm

Looking for friendly free WordPress plugins for your contact form? Take a look at WPForms.

Your website visitors need a way to contact you. The easiest and most convenient way is through an online form.

A form that you can create effortlessly without programming experience. Accordingly, a form builder that lets you drag and drop elements to build any kind of form you see fit.

WPForms is such a plugin and it’s free. You don’t need to hire a developer or pay anything.

It is simple to use. It allows you to design nice looking forms by point and click, drag and drop.

Forms created with WPForms are mobile responsive, search engine friendly and optimized for performance. No wonder it had to be on this list of important free WordPress plugins.

Equally, it comes with pre-built form template engine which saves a lot of time. It utilizes captcha to prevent spammy form submissions. And its instant form notification feature keeps you responsive to your visitors queries.

Likewise, you can use it in building email newsletter subscription forms, user registration forms, payment forms survey forms and much more.

5. WP Super Cache

A slow website or blog is no fun. It’s no fun for the owner. And it’s definitely no fun for the site visitors.

Therefore, site speed is very important. And among the list of free WordPress plugins that are critical-to-success for any website or blog is WP Super Cache.

WP Super Cache is an easy-to-use plugin that improves the speed and performance for your site.

It simply does this by generating static html files from your dynamic WordPress website or blog database. Then the static html files are served to visitors in place of the dynamic pages.

Thus, this greatly improves your website or blog’s speed and allows it to handle more visitors.

With over two million active installations WP Super Cache is a tested and proven free WordPress plugin that any serious website/blog owner should have on their site.

6. Akismet Anti-Spam

Akismet is a very popular WordPress comment spam protection plugin.

Did we say “very”? No, strike that. It is the “most” – not “very”.

Not to mention that it’s among the very few plugins that comes pre-installed with every WordPress website.

How does it work? What does it do?

First of all, spammy comments on your website pages or blog posts can be frustrating. But you already know this.

Therefore, Akismet scans your comments and contact form’s submissions against WordPress’ global database of spam.

Spam-like comments gets filtered out. You can view those comments to decide whether to allow them or not.

Overall, this is a great plugin to prevent your site from publishing malicious content.