WordPress is one of the popular blogging platforms. It has a huge collection of free and premium plugins. However some of the plugins are not useful and they eat your site’s performances. Therefore it’s better select right one for your site. In this post, I’m going to introduce five useful WordPress plugin to optimize SEO, improve social media reach, page loading time and improve security. All of them are totally free plugins.
All the WordPress plugins available official WordPress (WP) plugin page. Therefore you can download though the WP dashboard and activate. Alternatively if you like manual installation can upload them to a Cpanel, plugin directory (wp-content/plugin/) and extract the uploaded zip file and activate them via WP dashboard.
WordPress SEO by Yoast.
WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the well know and popular WordPress SEO Plugin. This plugin offer user to add meta description, SEO title, keyword and even breadcrumbs for all the posts as well as categories and tag and pages. Apart from that user can choose whether index or no-index site’s pages, categories and tag pages.
WordPress SEO by Yoast has XML sitemap functionality. Therefore you don’t need to install extra sitemap generating plugin. However this sitemap doesn’t offer some of the useful features. For an instance exclude category pages, images etc stuff. In its permalink functionality, it allows user to remove stop words from the permalink, redirect ugly URL’s to clean permalinks.
With its file editor option, user can edit .htaccess and robots.txt file without accessing the cPanel. Moreover user can add Google webmaster tools, Alexa and Bing verification cod without editing theme file using this free WordPress plugin to your blog. Using Social functionality, authors can add their Facebook , Twitter and Google plus profile links. Overall I have to say this is one of the best SEO plugin.
Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps (BWP GXS).
This is one of the best and advanced sitemap for WordPress. If it mentioned Google, this XML sitemap supports other major search engine including Bing. It has many more customization options than other one. This plugin has mainly two functions they are sitemap generator and news sitemap. If your blog publishes news related content, then you don’t need to install additional sitemaps.
BWP GXS allows user to add or remove exclude pages, categories and tags from the site map. Apart from that it supports caching, therefore once it’s generated the sitemap, it will not use higher resources on your server. Like other similar plugins, this one support gzip compressed.
If you have a multi site installation, Better WordPress Google XML Sitemaps will create separate sitemaps for all your sub domains. When the site has a large number of posts, then this BWP GXS can split the posts to reduce the length.
NextScripts.
This plugin automatically publishes posts from your blog to your social network accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, YouTube, LinedIn and many more. At present it’s support more than 20 social networking sites. It supports URL shorten function (goo.gl, bit.ly etc). In addition to that, it can automatically import comments posted on your social networks posts and publish them on your site relevant posts.
Each account has different configurations. Before starting the configuration, you have to create your own account on each social network. Apart from that, the user has to configure them one by one.
WP CleanFix.
WP CleanFix is one of the useful WordPress plugin that can clean and optimize your WordPress site. It can optimize database tables, delete unwanted post revisions, auto-draft, orphan post meta, orphan attachment. Apart from that it can clear unapproved and spam comments, expired transients and many more just a few clicks.
If your site has lots of post revisions, unoptimized table, it will slow down your sites. By using this free tool, we can optimize it in several minutes.
WordFence.
This is one of the best WordPress security plugin as well as firewall. In another word, it’s all in one WordPress security plugin. It can scan your site’s files (uploaded files, core files, theme, etc) for malware as well as unauthorized DNS settings. Apart from that it can prevent unauthorized login attempts and brute force attacks. Using it’s firewall functionality user can block bad bots throttling your site.
Live View function, track active visitors on your site. It is a further shows visitors country, referring page, web browser and even IP number. In addition to that, using its cellphone sign-in option, users can apply 2nd step verification for your site. Once you register for that additional service, after the user successfully logged in to the site, it will send a verification code to your mobile to continue the login process. It gives best security for WordPress sites.
Read:- Best automatic WordPress backup to Dropbox, Amazon S3 Google Drive Free.
