13 Must Have Free WordPress Plugins For Bloggers
Are you a new blogger? You might be wondering what are the must have free wordpress plugins for bloggers..
When I first switched my first website to a WordPress.org website back in 2020, I was a little bit overwhelmed to be honest. Perhaps you understand what I mean? A self-hosted website can seem quite daunting!
Fortunately, there are a lot of really useful wordpress plugins that you can use to do the coding tasks for you and make your life sooo much easier.
What Are Blogging Plugins?
First of all, I will give you a bit of infomation on plugins. If you have a brand new website, you might not fully understand the purpose of a plugin.
If you haven’t yet chosen a website host, I recommend looking at Lyrical Host. This is the host that I use for both of my websites and they’re great!
When you set up a self-hosted website, you will normally be given a default theme for your website. Which you can then change to a different theme ( eg within WordPress.org) or adapt the one you’ve been assigned as default.
The beauty with a self-hosted website is that you can customise so much more than if you were using a hosted website like GoDaddy with their own web builder. The downside is that you will need to do a lot of the technical bits for your website yourself.
That’s where plugins are useful..
WordPress plugins can do multiple things for your website. Plugins are essentially an extension for your website to improve it’s functionality. It’s similar to adding an extension to your browser, which works with the browser but it’s still under Google Chrome, for example.
Some of the main benefits are as follows:
- Optimise for SEO
- Optimise for speed
- Customise it visually
- Improve user experience
- Improve security on your website
- Add contact forms and tables
- Backup your website
- Track the Analytics for your website
The Best WordPress Plugins For Bloggers
I have listed the must have free wordpress plugins for bloggers in order of importance. There will probably be some that are not going to be as important for your blog so definitely use your discretion.
I learnt quite early on that you can pretty much install a plugin for anything that you want to do for your website. One thing I will mention is that you shouldn’t have anymore than 11 activated on your website if you can, because too many plugins will slow down your website considerably.
Some plugins can also change your website and make it crash so definitely be cautious when you’re choosing plugins for your website. Check if it’s been tested with your version of WordPress and backup your website before you download a new plugin.
UpdraftPlus
I would say that having a method to back up your website is very important! Updraft is a great free plugin that you can connect with remote storage to backup your website.
Most hosts will have their own systems to backup your website but you also NEED a way of backing up your website remotely in case anything goes wrong with your host.
Updraft is soo easy to use as well and you can send the backup to some of the main cloud storage providers like Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft Onedrive and Google Cloud.
You can also use schedule backups to happen automatically, every few hours, daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly.
CookieYes
Having a Cookie consent form is another must have wordpress plugin for bloggers. All websites have to comply with GDPR.
A lot of themes on WordPress do come with a Cookie consent form built into it, however if yours doesn’t then getting a free Plugin like the CookieYes Plugin is a must!
You can change the theme colours of the consent form and even link to your Privacy Policy or Cookie Policy page from the form as well.
This plugin is very easy to use and you can get it all setup within minutes and make sure your website is GDPR compliant.
Site Kit by Google
Site Kit by Google is another free wordpress plugin which is so useful for bloggers. You can connect the plugin to Search Console, Google Analytics and even Adsense if you plan on using Adsense to place ads on your website.
The reason this is really useful is because when you login to your wordpress admin you can see how your website is performing at a glance. On the dashboard it tells you how many visits you’ve had in the last 30 days, your top performing pages and even Page Speed Insights which is how fast your website loads and how you can improve the speed of your site.
From the dashboard you can even click the link to go onto Google Analytics to look into your blogs performance further. It’s just handy to be able to see everything at a glance from WordPress admin.
Rank Math SEO
When it comes to SEO for your blog, there’s a lot you need to know. Have a look at my post what you need to know before starting a blog if you’ve not quite set up your website yet and you need some pointers.
However, I’m going to assume that you’ve got your blog set up and you know the basics about SEO. Getting a SEO plugin is a great way of helping you write your blog posts with SEO in mind.
The two main SEO plugins that I’m aware of is Rank Math SEO and Yoast SEO. I used Yoast plugin to start with but I actually found that I prefer Rank Math. I prefer Rank Math because even with the free version you can put multiple keyword phrases into the Focus keyword box. From what I remember from using Yoast free version you could only put one keyword.
When you write a blog post you input the keyword or phrase that you’re trying to rank for and it gives you recommendations for how to help your post rank higher in Google for that particular keyword.
Just start using one of them to write your blog post and see what you think. You can set the plugins to automatically create a Sitemap which helps search engines crawl your site and understand what your content is about.
If you don’t fully understand SEO I recommend learning everything you can about SEO, otherwise your blog posts just won’t appear in search. I wish I hadn’t put off learning about SEO at the start!
Jetpack
I like the Jetpack plugin for added security for your site and for it’s social sharing buttons, however I do need to make you aware that social sharing buttons can actually slow down the load time for your website so be cautious with how you use those.
Jetpack is linked to WordPress as well so you can get people to login to WordPress before they leave comments as well. I normally setup Jetpack to notify me when my site is down, as I have two websites I might not notice if there’s a problem with my website so I just like this feature that they provide.
Easy Table of Contents
It took me such a long time to start using a Table of Contents for my blog posts. A Table of Contents is useful for readers to see more in depth what your blog post covers and it’s also good for search engines to understand fully what your blog post is about too.
What’s great about this Plugin is that it automatically adds a Table of Contents to each of your blog posts and it includes the H2, H3, H4 etc sub headings that you include as well. You don’t need to worry about it at all, you just start writing and when you publish the post, your Table of Contents will be included.
You can change the settings if you wanted the Table of Contents to be hidden initially, you can place it where you want it in the post and you can even change the colours if you would prefer it to match your brand colours.
WP Forms Lite
It’s useful to have a contact form on your blog in case anyone needs to get in touch with you. Generally bloggers will use a contact form to avoid showing their email address because of the risk of getting a lot of spam emails. However, it’s completely up to you..
My first website I included a contact form and I didn’t include my email address anywhere initially (although I do now). On this website I have a contact form and my email address is on every page, because I provide services to bloggers so I want it to be easier for them to get in contact with me.
The WP Forms Lite Plugin is particularly useful because you can add CAPTCHA to your forms that you create, which stops bots from leaving you spam and abusive messages through the contact forms. You can choose which type of CAPTCHA you want to use; Checkbox, Invisible or Advanced. This makes sure that it’s actually a genuine person leaving you a contact message.
There are other plugins that you can include CAPTCHA on your forms, however when I was looking, this was the only version that does it on the free plan.
Elementor
The elementor plugin is really good and millions of bloggers use this one. It’s a Web builder plugin which helps you build a professional and optimised website without the need for writing any code.
You can use templates to create your own pages on your website or you can start playing around yourself. It works well with Gutenberg and you can decide if you want to edit each page in Elementor or Gutenberg as soon as you go onto each page of your website.
Like your website theme, it works by adding widgets on your pages where you want different images, text, social links etc.
It might not be essential for everyone though so if you install the plugin and play around with it and if you don’t see any benefits, you can always remove it.
Akismet Spam Protection
This plugin might come in handy once your blog is a bit more established and you’re getting a lot of spam comments on your blog posts. That’s why I included it quite low down the list because it’s probably not going to be necessary when you’re first starting out. Plus you do have to sign up for a plan and pay so it’s not a totally free plugin.
On my first website I found it hard going through comments daily and deleting out the spam so I ended up getting this plugin to block the spam and make my life easier. This is definitely one to remember for the future, even if you don’t need it straight away.
Optional Plugins
WooCommerce
This wordpress plugin will be useful if you want to set up a store on your website and you plan on using a blog to bring more traffic. This plugin is easy to use; you can list your products from anywhere in the world, accept payments, shipping options and even link it to a email provider (if you plan to use email marketing).
Again, completely optional but this is going to be a really useful. You can sell anything through this Plugin; physical products, digital products, tickets, membership access and even your time (if you are a consultant or similar).
WP Table Builder
If your website includes services that you provide, for example as a Virtual Assistant or a Coach then you might find the need for this WP Table Builder plugin. It’s a free plugin which helps you to create a table for your website, whether that’s to include services that you provide or even a price list.
As with most free plugins, if you want more customisation then you will need to upgrade but it still allows you to create a basic table very easily.
Link Whisper Free
This is a really useful plugin for checking if your content has internal links on each blog post. It also features suggestions once you’ve written a blog post, for places where you can add internal links pointing towards your older content.
It’s a great plugin to use once you have a lot of content on your website because it’s not so easy to see if you’ve included internal links at that point.
If you think that you can do this manually as you write then you might not necessarily need this plugin but it’s definitely one to bear in mind.
ConvertKit
If you plan on getting email subscribers to send newsletters or even to get people to sign up to your course or paid product, then using an email provider like ConvertKit or Mailchimp is a must.
There are other businesses that provide this service but ConvertKit and Mailchimp are two of the most popular for this. You can add forms to your website with Opt-ins and once you have subscribers on your list you can even automatically send them an email sequence that you’ve pre-written. You can schedule broadcasts, create tags if certain people click on links from your emails and even create a landing page if you prefer that over forms.
I hope you’ve found this post helpful. These really are must have free wordpress plugins for bloggers and they’re going to make your life so much easier when you’re blogging.
If you’re looking for more tips, I’ve written a post on how to create a WordPress blog that you might want to read next.
Damaris
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