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Six of the Very Best Free WordPress Plugins – for Every Site! (YouTube Video)

There are literally tens of thousands of WordPress plugins… A select few, however, are used on almost every site. These select few are free, fulfil a very specific (and essential) job, are by far the best in class, and are plugins that, in short, you too should almost certainly be using!

Let’s go through them…

Six of the best free WordPress plugins

– (note: video credits to Topher DeRosia – creator of HeroPress)

Video Transcript:

Hi, this is Topher with WinningWP. In this video we’re going to take a look at six of the very best free WordPress plugins and the first one we’re going to take a look at is Jetpack. Now Jetpack is what’s known as a metaplugin and actually has many different small plugins built into it and it can manage things like Traffic and SEO. It takes care of Security and Backup Services. It helps with Content Creation, Discussion, and Community. It’s also excellently supported because it is owned by Automattic and supported by the WordPress.com staff. Now there are some paid services built into Jetpack, but you can get wonderful use out of the free services that it comes with. The next one we’re going to look at is called Akismet. Now Akismet is an anti-spam plugin and it is amazing. I’ve used it for years now. There’s a free version and a pay version and the free version works great. You simply sign up on their website, they give you a little key, and you put it into a form in your admin area and it’s all set. It just takes care of the spam after that. Next, we’ll look at Yoast SEO (search engine optimization). Search engine optimization is what makes it so that Google knows about your website and can help other people find it when they’re searching. It can help you put keywords on individual posts and pages and descriptions that show up right in the Google search results. It can help you analyze your pages, what weak spots are in your SEO. It’s a great plugin that will help you get found by people searching for your content. Next, we’re going to look at Monster Insights. Now Monster Insights makes it easy for you to put Google Analytics code into your website. Normally, it would involve editing files and FTPing and all that jazz. With Google Analytics for WordPress by Monster Insights, you simply sign up at Google and they give you a little key and you bring it back to your website and you put it into Monster Insight and it takes care of everything. Then Google knows all about the traffic on your website. It knows where they’re coming from, what they’re looking at while they’re there, and where they go when they leave. It can also help with ecommerce and ad tracking and custom traffic patterns to watch. Knowing how people are using your website is just as important as having one. Now Sucuri is a service, but this is a plugin that goes along with that service and this plugin is free and it does several things. It can scan your site looking for malware, but you can also use it to establish some good security policies. It can be used to set good permissions, to blacklist other sites that are trying to break into yours, and things like that. The people who built this plugin are really, really smart when it comes to security and I highly recommend it. The last plugin on our list is called Ninja Forms. Ninja Forms is a form builder for WordPress. It allows you to build forms for people to fill out and they might be simple contact forms or they could be more complex event signups or contest signups or anything you can imagine and it has a wonderful drag-and-drop system that you can see here in this banner. It’s very easy to put together a great form that can do a wide variety of things and collect all the information and store it in the database and email it to you. So we’ve just gone over six really great free plugins. There are many, many more so don’t be afraid to browse WordPress.org looking for great plugins like these. I’ll include links to all of these plugins below. If you’d like to learn more about WordPress, check out WinningWP.com.

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By WinningWP Editorial

Run by Brin Wilson, WinningWP is an award-winning resource for people who use – you guessed it – WordPress. Follow along on Twitter and/or Facebook.
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