14 essential free WordPress plugins for a new website…
We have already made a list about The Best 11 Plugins, now here is an upgraded version. We have refined the list and here are the new essentials for 2019 for any new website.
All of our recommendations are plugins that are either free or are a free version of a commercial plugin that still offer so many useful features which make it usable even without purchasing the pro version.
Under Construction Plugin
Till your site is very underdeveloped you can make great use of this plugin.
Just go to Settings / UnderConstruction on the left navigation bar of WordPress and turn Under Construction Mode on. From this moment all your visitors will see an Under Construction Page, but you will see your page from within WordPress when editing your content. You can just as easily make the website visible again.
In the Design and Content tab of this plugin you can highly Customize how you Construction Page should look like, it has a lot of themes to choose from.
Yoast SEO Plugin
This plugin will help a lot in writing good posts and pages, it will check all your content for SEO optimization, you can edit snippets, it will even check your language and make suggestions. Nice little tool that is worth installing.
Google XML Sitemap Plugin
It needs no extra effort besides installing, it will instantly create a sitemap.xml file on your site that you can submit to Google Webmaster tools.
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
Also a great plugin that you will need to attach your site to Google Analytics.
Social Media Share Buttons
There are lots of social media share plugins (we will also recommend one more), but this one is an easy and elegant one that you can use with minimal effort.
With half a dozen clicks you can make all your posts and pages likeable and shareable via social media and I guess I don’t have to emphasize how important it is these days. Specially that you won’t get too much attention from Google and other search engines in the first 6 months, so using social media the right way is absolutely vital.
Once installed and activated go to “Ultimate Social Media Icons” on the left pane and make the settings. You just have to choose the sharing services and where they should be displayed, easy as that.
Is your blog already connected to social media? If not, then do it now!
Social Pug
Social Pug is a great alternative to the previous one. It’s huge advantage is that it has floating share buttons. What does it mean? Just look at the left site of this page. Those buttons are always there no matter where you scroll, so anyone can easily share your post any time. You can also add share buttons under the title of your post.
UpdraftPlus Plugin
If you have already played around with the desing and posted a few posts you will not want to lose that all.
This plugin can create a backup of your site with the press of a button. You can also very easily link it to Google Drive, so when you press that button it will immediately create a backup and upload it to your Drive.
Advanced noCaptcha & invisible Captcha
As soon as you have a couple of posts out you will see that there will be tons of spam coming in every day. These spam comments under your posts are generated by robots that never get tired, so the only real and effective solution against them is adding a Captcha to solve when someone is posting a comment.
Of course you may loose a few comments of people who don’t want to spend that extra 3 seconds solving a captcha, but overall you gain a lot by getting (almost) completely rid of spam.
WP Fastest Cache
If you are just starting a new website or blog, most probably you are on some kind of shared hosting services, probably you have purchased an affordable plan to begin with. It means that your blog is hosted on the same server as many other websites and so the hardware resources are limited.
Every time someone visits your website many files have to be loaded, many scripts are running in the background before your homepage appears in their browser. And this loading time get get pretty long which severely affects your visitor numbers and search engine ranking. The slower your site loads the less visitors you will have.
Google has its own tool, Page Speed Insights, where you can check your site’s load speed. Is your site in the green region? Or rather it’s full red? The solution is a good caching plugin:
What it does is the following: this plugin will run all the scripts in advance and pack all the different files together, so when someone visits your site it will load much faster than it would do without it. The effect is huge, this plugin can make your site load 2-3 times faster than it did before.
Newsletter Plugin
Are you already collecting subscribers and sending out newsletters? You should! And there is a great plugin for that, the Newsletter plugin. Of course it has a pro version, but the free version is also adequate enough for any new blogs or websites. It provides you with great features that are very easy to integrate. You will have a subscription widget that you can just drag and drop anywhere and a separate screen for managing your subscribers and sending out newsletters, tracking open- and click-through rates and much more. It’s really a must have.
ThirstyAffiliates Affiliate Link Manager
Once you join an affiliate program you may want to start using the ThirstyAffiliates link manager. It’s a simple but very useful tool. You just enter your affiliate links into it and it will provide you with simplified links that also look more trustworthy. Instead of long and scary character chains you can have neat little links like yourdomain.com/link/product, like this one: WebHostingHub
People will be more happy to click a link like that rather than a long, shady bunch of character mess.
Popup Builder Plugin
Do you want to create a popup? This plugin is by far the easiest to use and even the free version can be highly customized.
Ad Inserter Plugin
Maybe it’s a bit early, but once you have a couple of posts and your site looks good, you will need this tool for installing Google Adsense to your site.
Elementor Page Builder
There are many page builders out there, most of them are really bad and clumsy. Elementor is one of the best page builders out there.
And though most of the time you will stick to the basic tools when writing a post or creating a page, but if you ever need to create a custom page with a lot of images, columns, rows, extra elements, you will be glad to have Elementor at your hand.
These plugins are great to start width and you will need these (or some similar ones) to create a great, modern site. I have personally tested and used a lot of WordPress plugins, these are by far the best and easiest to use.
Do you know any other great and useful WordPress plugins? Share in the comment section below!
14 COMMENTS
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