After blogging for more than a decade and being a huge fan of WordPress, I felt it was time to give back to the community and share my favourite six free WordPress plugins.
Each of these serve a different but important purpose, and all come with fully functioning free versions (I hate free lite versions that are barely usable without paying for an upgrade).
Before you write your next great blog post, consider installing one or more of these great plugins.
So, without further ado, here they are.
Classic editor
Hands up if you aren’t a fan of Gutenberg. I know I’m not, and maybe that’s because I have been using WordPress since 2002, and became married to the classic editor style.
If you are like me, this is the first plugin I install whenever I use a blog for the first time.
Insert post ads
This nifty free WordPress plugins allows you to insert some html wherever you like in every single page or post (or both!) on your blog. It needn’t be ads either; I use it to promote my latest post, or share my newsletter sign up form.
The fancy thing about this, is I can add it in a specific location, say after the 5th paragraph within the content area. Bingo!
Redirection
I regularly like to optimise my personal blog, by removing old posts and moving URL’s of ones I renamed. To do that, you end up with broken 404 pages everywhere, which annoys humans and Google, alike.
This plugin makes it super easy to add a redirect in, so the URL seamlessly transforms from the old address to the new.
Social Pug
Social media sharing is possibly the best traffic generation channel for most blogs I have written for. Having a bulletproof social sharing tool that adds the right platform buttons in the places you want is mandatory in 2019.
This WordPress plugin does just that. Although they do have a premium version, I have always been happy just with the free one.
WP-Cron Status Checker
Hosting sometimes fails. It’s life, no matter how infallible we all think we are. That’s where this comes in useful, especially if you like to schedule posts in advance. This free WordPress plugin keeps an eye on your cron jobs (server schedules) and warns you if something fails.
WPS Hide Login
For security sake, it is always wise to not leave your default WordPress login URL as it is. That’s why I always recommend people install this free WordPress plugin. It makes it easy to change /wp-admin/ to /my-secret-login-address/ or whatever other URL you wish to use.
Bonus points: use a random character string for the login url, something like /os76akj/ is perfect.
In Summary
WordPress is easily my favourite blogging system by a long shot, and with these six free WordPress plugins, it is made even better. The ability to create and add plugins gives WordPress their super powers.
If you like any of the above free WordPress plugins, can I suggest you support the plugin creators by dropping a thank you message or writing a blog post like this one, all of your own favourite plugins. I look forward to reading it!
About the Author
Emily Peters writes about Perth interior design and other fashionable things over at Perth Home, as well as writes about small business for a few other blogs. When not critiquing her own bad interior design sense, Emily can be found at the beach.