8 Free WP Plugins Your Blog Needs

It’s no secret that my blog is one of my absolute favorite things at the moment. I enjoy creating content, taking pictures, and tweaking here and there to get my website looking exactly how I want. I have received quite a number of questions about my blog and the tools I would recommend for bloggers or e-commerce website platforms. Today I’ll be sharing 8 free WordPress plugins that every blog should have.

My blogging platform of choice is WordPress. It makes creating your dream platform straightforward particularly for beginners. One way WordPress achieves this is through the use of plugins and widgets.

Plugins are the behind-the-scenes applications that enable different functions on your blog. For example, the security features and the comment section at the end of each of my posts are both brought to you by two different plugins.

Yoast SEO

After taking Google’s Digital Marketing certification course, I could not recommend this plugin enough! SEO stands for search engine optimization – in plain words, this plugin will help make sure the content you are putting out can be searched easily (on Google search, Bing search etc). Things like putting a certain number of keywords in your blog posts, using subheadings etc. are essential to make your website more searchable to audiences looking for content like yours. With Yoast SEO, you receive feedback on the searchability of your post and insights you could use to improve each post.

Smush

Smush is a very handy tool that compresses the size of your images without reducing image quality. This can be done for images stored in your media library (“Bulk smush”) and most image file types (.jpeg, .png, and .gif). This plugin also notes which images are slowing down your blog and will help your webpages load faster. No one likes a slow website!

Really Simple SSL

This plugin is small but truly mighty. If you’ve ever received junk emails and wondered where the heck the sender got your email address, part of the answer is from a website lacking SSL or any form of security.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, Really Simple SSL provides an encrypted connection whenever users interact with your website. For instance, when you sign up for my newsletter (side-eye if you haven’t), the information you enter i.e. name and email address, are delivered safely and cannot be intercepted by hackers or bots. The same goes for payment information and other essential information your audience provides on your website.

You can tell whether or not a website is secure with this feature by looking for the https:// in the address bar. Sites that are not secure will have http:// with no ‘s’.

Block Referrer Spam

There are different types of spam you will encounter as a blogger. Email spam from web developers trying to sell their services and comments under your posts generated by bots are just a few. Block referrer spam targets spam generated in your page views/hits. Yes, you read that right – your pageviews can become inflated by bots visiting your page. Often times you can tell referrer spam by looking at the websites that are sending or ‘referring’ viewers to your own website, hence the name. Block referrer spam allows you to make a list of these websites and block their access to your page.

This blocking feature is also available if you track analytics using Google Analytics.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the G.O.A.T. when it comes to web analytics. You can literally track any website by inserting a simple code and get insights into any area you can think of. To be honest, it can get overwhelming, but once you know how to find what you need, don’t worry too much about the rest. Thankfully, there are some online courses to help understand the program, from basic features like page hits and the percentage of new users to more complex analytics.

Site Origin CSS

So you have a brand new WordPress website and you want to equip it with a banging theme. After selecting your theme and looking at demos, you purchase the theme and immediately create a child theme (because you’re smart…the rest of us should please use Google to go about this). You probably don’t want your website looking exactly like everybody else who has this EXACT same theme or maybe you want to tweak something within your theme buuuuut you can’t code to save your life.

In comes Site Origin CSS. With this handy plug-in, you can change the main elements of your theme visually, meaning no coding involved. I love this plug-in for its usability and the fact that it tracks changes you’ve made to your child theme – a must-have!

Broken Link Checker

As you create more posts, add internal and external links, and build affiliate products, it is important to make sure that these links are still active, even for posts written years ago. Broken links spoil your audiences’ experience with your website and will cause search engines (e.g. Google, Bing) to rank your website poorly. So even if you wrote that super-bomb recipe for weight-loss muffins three years ago, if the link to the utensils you provided in your post is no longer working, someone searching for a recipe like yours on Google will not be shown your website.

To avoid this, Broken Link Checker scans all internal and external links on your website and checks for links that lead to nowhere (or generate a 404/error message). This will help your website appear to your target audience, and recovers lost income from affiliate links!

AMR Shortcode Any Widget

AMR Shortcode Any Widget is a great way to add widgets to your posts. In short, it converts any widget into a shortcode that can be placed anywhere on your website. This might be one you have to try out for yourself in order to understand.

One example on my homepage is the Pinterest widget. Typically, widgets appear on the home page or sidebar. As you can see, I have a ‘save my pins’ widget on my home page. However, in my post on How to Improve Your Room Aesthetics, I wanted to include both my Apartment Inspo and Bedroom Inspo Pinterest boards. With AMR Shortcode Any Widget, I could easily create the two widgets and paste the shortcodes into my post – just like that!

EXTRA – iubenda

I’ve added this extra feature (not a plug-in) as I also get questions about the legal aspect of my blog and how I protect data and user information. Thankfully, you can achieve this without a lawyer, using iubenda. This website provides all the legal coverage you need in terms of data collection and usage on your website. My entire privacy and cookie policy is developed by iubenda. Unlike many other privacy policy templates, this feature takes an account of every single ad, plug-in, and information-collecting form on your website and formulates a privacy policy.

This feature is free but does have a pro version that I recommend if you have a high-traffic website, or are looking to scale-up your brand.

Let me know in the comments if any of these plug-ins were useful, or if you have used them in the past!

See you in the next one!

ANTHONIAxo

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