5 Best Free Wordpress Plugins You Must Have

Wordpress is by far the most popular content management system in the world. Of course, it being a free and open-source plays a huge part in that, however, what separates it from other CMS is how easy it is to use and customize.

Wordpress is a powerful tool in itself and to aid that, it also supports plugins and has tons of pre-made themes.

Plugins are technically a piece of software that provides additional features to an existing software. Presently, there are more than 55 thousand plugins available for the users.

Wordpress plugins can be paid or free. Some plugins use a freemium model in which they provide basic features for free and advance feature on paid subscription.

The main difference between the paid and free plugins is the customer support which is present only in the paid plugins. However, this does not make the free plugins any less efficient than the paid ones.

Free plugins eliminate the cost factor and the variety of options to choose from make them the go-to choice for many users.

So, if you are looking to make a new website or a blog using Wordpress, these are the best free plugins you must have.

1) Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is hands down, #1 SEO plugin. SEO plugins are used to improve the visibility of the site on search engine result pages. Thus, SEO determines the traffic your page will have. This makes SEO plugins mandatory. However, despite having such an important role, Yoast SEO is miles ahead than any of its alternatives.

Yoast SEO comes with several features like content analysis, meta keywords management, XML sitemaps, social features and much more.

2) Updraftplus
Updraft plus is the most popular and highest ranked backup plugin which pretty much sums up its inclusion in the list. Updraftplus provides multiple backup locations to the cloud, single-click restore and a very easy-to-use interface. It also supports scheduled backup and cloning and migration tools.

3) W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is an important site optimization plugin. W3 Total Cache is a caching plugin which is very useful to speed up your Wordpress website.

It has all tools like cache, minify and CDN integration. Since the speed of the websites plays a huge role in determining search rankings, it is necessary to use a good caching plugin and one has to look no further than W3 Total Cache.

4) Jetpack
Jetpack is like an ultimate toolset one should definitely have. Jetpack provides so many features that it is actually hard to use it to its fullest. However, the users are free to choose which features they want to use.

The most important features of Jetpack is that it lets you design your site, keep a track of your stats, connect your site to all your social accounts and also inform you via email if it detects a downtime

5) Wordfence
Wordfence is a security plugin which has more than 2 million active users. Wordfence provides many essential features such as real-time monitoring, login security, Wordfence firewall, and IP blocking.

Wordfence collects data from all the Wordpress sites to learn about the new threats and how to detect them.

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