WordPress is a popular CMS that is widely used by companies and individuals. WordPress is an alternative in creating blogs and e-commerce that is easy to install, supported by a large selection of themes, free and paid plugins.
Talking about plugins, there are hundreds of free plugins available to meet the needs of a wordpress-based website. You need to know, WordPress plugins are actually divided into several categories, including SEO, E-commerce, Widgets, Security and Performance.
If your wordpress website is e-commerce, a plugin from the e-commerce category is a must have. And there is no need to use it excessively, this is so that your hosting does not take up so much memory, the use of plugins on WordPress depends on the availability of memory, it is ensured to use only what is needed, except for important plugins such as SEO, security or performance.
Here we will provide some free wordpress plugins that must be owned by a wordpress-based website, to produce fast performance, good SEO and security, what are they? let's see.
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the best free plugins owned by wordpress and is very popularly used by users of this CMS. Easy configuration and abundant features are one of the reasons why Yoast SEO is so popular.
Yoast SEO functions to improve SEO performance on WordPress, which is flexible in changing the component structure in several parts. WordPress by default does not provide this feature, therefore Yoast SEO is needed to improve several components such as meta tags, sitemaps or webmaster tools in just one tool.
The good news is that Yoast SEO is a free plugin (there are also paid ones) and can be installed at any time, even by beginners.
2. All In One SEO Pack
All In One SEO Pack is one of the best free SEO plugins besides Yoast SEO, If you want to find other alternatives besides Yoast SEO, All In One SEO Pack can be your next choice. All In One SEO Pack provides a variety of features to improve the SEO of your wordpress including setting a sitemap, meta tags, preventing duplicate content, schema markup and so on.
The All In One SEO Pack is known to be quite good in website optimization performance in the eyes of the Google search engine, so it's no wonder that the users of this plugin have reached more than 1 million users.
3. Rank Math SEO
Rank Math SEO is a free WordPress plugin that focuses on SEO and content optimization for search engines and social media. This wordpress plugin is an alternative to other SEO plugins that offers some beginner-friendly features. Rank Math will make it easier for users to set the title, description, sitemap, integration with Google Search Console and others.
Rank Math SEO has many advantages such as SEO analysis, comparison of keywords and Google Trends, keyword analysis, content bulk editing, automatic configuration, quite complete documentation and much more. If you want other additional features, you can continue with the pro or premium version.
4. WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache is one of the popular free WordPress plugins that performs well because it generates static HTML which will be cached. Cache is a temporary storage method in the browser to call up the HTML page of your website when a user visits your website. This will result in a good user experience and work quickly, the browser does not need to call data into the server because it is already available in the cache.
WP Fastest Cache is a must-have for wordpress users because of the ease of installation and abundant features such as HTML and CSS minification settings, activating the GZip compression feature, having the option to combine several javascript files in just one tool.
This plugin is available for free or paid by providing several premium features that are not in the free version such as image optimization, delete cache logs, database cleanup, rendering blocking, Google Font API Async and many more.
5. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is another free performance plugin to manage wordpress cache for fast website performance. W3 Total Cache has support for Cloudflare, which can adapt to the needs of the website. W3 Total Cache is quite popular which has reached 1 million active users.
Another interesting feature of W3 Total Cache can save some bandwidth by minimizing Javascript, CSS files and being able to integrate with several CDNs which will speed up your wordpress. This plugin will solve all lag problems and will make visitors feel at home on your website.
6. Jetpack
Jetpack is one of the most complete free plugins that can handle various needs such as security and performance. Jetpack has free and paid versions, even with the free version, you can already enjoy the features that Jetpack has such as security, optimize, writing and many more, here are the basic features of Jetpack in the security module:
Downtime Monitoring
Which will notify you if the website is offline.
Brute Force Protection
A feature to avoid brute force attacks from hackers.
Auto-update
Ensure that the installed plugins are updated regularly.
Login
Securing security on wordpress login.
In addition to security features, Jetpack has a website optimization module that will increase website speed, such as Site Accelerator and lazy-loading.
The good news is that W3 Total Cache is free which can be installed at any time.
7. WP Optimize
In addition to other performance components such as CSS, Javascript, Cache, Database performance optimization you should never miss, this free WordPress plugin will optimize the database to clean unused tables. WP Optimize will specifically work with the server side, especially databases, when you want to remove some unnecessary tables, WP Optimize will do it automatically, you don't have to bother to manually login into phpmyadmin.
By optimizing the database, the speed of the website will be better felt by users or search engines that are crawling. In addition to the database, WP Optimize can also do many things to optimize your website assets such as images, caching and others.
WP Optimize includes a recommended plugin that you must try, both in the free and paid versions.
8. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a free plugin from paid wordpress that has full features and high performance that will increase website speed drastically. WP Rocket is very friendly for beginners and professionals because of its ease of installation or configuration, supported by reliable customer support who is ready to help you anytime.
Some of the mainstay features of WP Rocket that you will get when using this plugin include:
- Ultra-fast loading.
- File lighter.
- Loaded only when needed.
- Cloudflare integration.
- Optimize databases.
- And many more.
WP Rocket is a very powerful paid plugin, if you have more budget, WP Rocket can be an option.
9. Really Simple SSL
Really SImple SSL can update URLs from HTTP to HTTPS with just one click. SSL is an important component on a website to provide a sense of security to users when using your website. With Really Simple SSL, you don't need to manually set the URL to HTTPS and it will save time.
Some of the features of Really Simple SSL include:
- Can update HTTP to HTTPS automatically
- Redirect some URLs to 301 to change access from non secure version to secure.
- There is an option to set HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) including preload, etc.
- SSL expiration check.
- And many more.
Really Simple SSL has two versions, paid and free. However, we recommend choosing the premium version if you have more budget, because the features offered by this plugin are very complete which will protect your website extra.
10. All In One WP Security & Firewall
All In One WP Security & Firewall is a tool to secure websites and reduce the risk of attacks. All In One WP Security & Firewall will check every aspect that is vulnerable to attack and measure how likely the website will be attacked, the benchmark of the assessment will be given based on points (basic, intermediate, advanced).
Some of the features offered by All In One WP Security include:
- Login Security
- Users Security
- Security Register
- Data Security
- Spam
- File system protection
- Backup (htaccess and wp-config)
- Firewalls & Blacklists
- And many more
This plugin will not slow down your website and can be used for free.
11. Akismet Anti-Spam
Akismet is a free WordPress anti-spam plugin intended to deal with malicious comments on blogs. Akismet will check every comment that comes in and prevent input that is harmful to the website. In other words, the Akismet plugin will protect against any spamming attacks in real-time.
This plugin is a must-have for wordpress users who have a comment form on a blog. So it's no wonder Akismet is very popular because it has more than 5 million installations.
12. Google Authenticator
Google Authenticator is a free wordpress plugin that will prevent other people from accessing the login page using a username and password by activating two-factor authentication.
Two factor authentication will ask for a mobile number to process the login to the next stage. This method is the best step to secure login into the wordpress admin dashboard from irresponsible people.
13. Contact Form 7
This plugin is a million people plugin, very popular used by all wordpress users because it is very easy to use. Contact Form 7 serves to create a special contact form or contact page that can be customized as desired.
Contact Form 7 is very friendly to even beginners, who want a contact page to be created quickly.
Google Authenticator is free, you can use it whenever you need it.
14. Shareaholic
Shareaholic is a free social media share plugin for free to share the results of your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Whatsapp etc. easily. Shareaholic is a social share button that can be placed wherever you want.
Social share on blog posts is needed, because it can increase traffic and engagement on the website. Another interesting feature is that it can display several related posts, social analytics and website monetization. This plugin must be installed for content creator blogs with wordpress.
15. Quick Adsense
Quick Adsense is highly recommended for websites that have approved with Google Adsense who want to adjust the layout of ads on a wordpress blog. Quick Adsense is a plugin that is simple, easy to use and free.
All you need is an ad code from Google Adsense, this code is used to display ads on blogs that match the settings in Quick Adsense, set which ads will appear after what paragraph and so on.
Closing
There are many benefits to using plugins such as improving website performance, increasing website security and others. But please note not to use plugins excessively, just use plugins as needed so that they don't take up a lot of memory.
