Here’s my recommended best free blog plugins for WordPress. I’ve been a fan of WordPress for several years now and there’s a few plugins I wouldn’t do without! They help me write posts for SEO, (search engine optimisation), get shares and syndicate posts throughout my social media platforms. I also use a plugin which offers a free webinar on this site, you’ve probably already been annoyed by it! But this has made me many sales so I’m going to recommend that too!
Best Free Blog Plugins For WordPress – Yoast SEO
If you’re a blogger like me, you’ll appreciate the need to write with SEO in mind. Without it, your rankings will likely suffer. The SEO plugin I use is Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO has a free version and a “premium” version too. I use the free version although I’m sure the paid version is worth the money if you were to upgrade.
The free version gives me everything I need at the moment and helps me write with keywords in titles, images and body text. It also reminds you of your focused keyword and offers a number of SEO factors which it analyses in your posts.
The green lights are a great visual reminder to keep up your SEO and to write good, long articles.
Best Free Blog Plugins For WordPress – Revive Old Posts
Revive Old Posts is a plugin I found not too long ago and it’s awesome! It lets you queue up older posts you have in your blog archive and schedule them across your social media platforms automatically.
You can also automatically post new content as it gets published so you don’t have to manually post to social media. The free account gives you two social platforms which you can post to – I use Facebook and Twitter. More functionality comes with the paid version and you can access more social media accounts. However, I’m just using the free version at the moment.
Revive Old posts has definitely made a difference to my blog traffic and I often see clicks coming from automated posts going to Facebook and Twitter platforms. It’s particularly good if you have a bunch of old content which you’re not doing much about. Just set it and forget it and it’ll send out your old posts on a regular basis to your social media.
Best Free Blog Plugins For WordPress – Pop Up/List Building – Icegram
I love this plugin – it has superb functionality and is incredibly useful. It lets you place pop-ups and drop downs to help you build your email list, or promote something to your audience.
There’s a tonne of pre-built landing pages which you can choose from and then just edit to your requirements. Download Icegram for free here. Again there’s a pro version and a “Max” version but the free version works fine and the functionality is great for a beginner.
Social Media & Share Icons
There’s many social media share plugins available for WordPress. I’ve tried a few of these and this one seems to work well. It’s called Ultimate Social Media Icons By UltimatelySocial. You can access it here.
A social media share icon lets your visitors easily share your content throughout social media, so it’s a good idea for getting your content out there. It only takes a few minutes to plug this into your site, and you could be getting a tonne of extra traffic because of it!
Again there’s a premium version but I’ve found the free version to work well for my purposes.
Cookie Consent Banners
You’ll need a cookie consent banner if you haven’t already got one for GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). It only takes a few minutes to download and install and you’re good to go! Here’s one I use by WebToffee:
Statcounter – Count Visitors On Your Blog
I use Statcounter to keep track on website visitors. It shows you where visitors came from and which pages they left on, plus a whole bunch of info on your blog activity. There’s an upgrade version as with most of these plugins but the free version works fine!
Really Simple SSL – Website Security
Really Simple SSL is a plugin which makes your site more secure. SSL / HTTPS is recommended for all websites on the internet. However, it is absolutely required for all websites that collect user information like login details, payment information, credit cards etc.
Either way it’s a good idea, especially if you’re selling something from your site. It shows website visitors your site is secure. On certain browsers an insecure site (which shows http instead of https) will flag up a warning, which may deter some visitors to your site.
With Really Simple SSL you can turn an insecure site (http:) into a secure site (https:), within a few minutes.
Push Engage – Web Push Notification Plugin
Pushengage is web push notification plugin which lets you keep in touch with visitors who have opted in on your website.
Cloudflare – Web Speed Optimisation
Cloudflare’s plugin for WordPress automatically refreshes the Cloudflare cache upon making changes to your website appearance. This means that you can focus on your website, while the plugin takes care of ensuring that the freshest content is always available to your visitors.
Summary
There’s lots of plugins you can use on your WordPress site. Just be careful not to overload your site with too many plugins as it can have a detrimental effect on your site speed, which is an important factor to getting traffic from the search engines. See best site speed plugins.
Here’s a rundown of the plugins I’ve recommended in this article:
- Yoast SEO – helps you optimise content for the search engines
- Revive Old Posts – automatically syndicate new and old content via social media
- Icegram – popups and drop downs to help you build an email list
- Ultimate Social Media Icons – helps you share your content on social media
- Cookie Consent Banners – For GDPR – date protection laws
- Statcounter – count visitors activity on your site
- Really Simple SSL – make your site secure
- Push Engage – send push notification to website visitors
- Cloudflare – speed up your site
If you’re a blogger, checkout my other posts on blogging such as blogging away debt! See a list of posts on blogging here.