Top Free WordPress Plugins

Hello everyone and welcome to Dog Byte Marketing. We are a team of web designers, developers, and marketers. In total we have over 30 years of experience in the field. I’m your host Johnny, and today we will be talking about the top free WordPress Plugins. There are over 50,000 plugins on the WordPress Plugins directory as of today. So how do you decide what the top free WordPress plugins that you must install? Well today I’m going to provide you with the answer to that question. I’ve been developing for 15 years. I’ve built plugins for vBulletin and freelanced for WordPress design and development. After building hundreds of WordPress websites I’ve discovered the top free WordPress plugins that my clients and I use the most.

Yoast SEO

Sometimes it’s about the finer details, and Yoast does just that. Sure, you could rely on a plugin to automate everything, but when it comes to Search Engine Optimization, they pay attention to fine details. WordPress has some SEO built in, but it’s fairly basic compared to what Yoast can do. While WordPress can make your urls clean i.e. top-5-must-have-wordpress-plugins it can’t customize individual pages meta data, social media Open Graph/OG data, canonical URL, advanced XML sitemaps, or help you with Keyword Targeting. This makes number one on my Top  Free WordPress Plugins list.

If you share any page from Dog Byte Marketing to Facebook or Twitter you will see I have spent extra time on the finer details. Every page on Dog Byte Marketing I have set up to show a different image and description via Social Media. This really helps when you are sharing blog posts or products, because then whomever comes across the post will see a relevant image and description, making them that much more likely to click and/or purchase from your website. I do the same for all of my meta descriptions.

Yoast also allows you to link your Google Search Console to help you improve your SEO even further and bringing another tool all in one place.

Hustle

You can’t be a successful business or blog without some type of marketing. This is where Hustle comes in. Hustle is like many other email marketing popup plugins, but the best and free one I have seen yet. It’s so good, we use it on all of our clients businesses, including our own. As a matter of fact, you’ve probably already encountered the popup asking for your email. So you may be asking… Isn’t email marketing dead? No, in fact email marketing accounts for 20% of our clients revenue. Without it, you are missing out on an alternate method of revenue. You may think that a website is enough, but if you run an eCommerce store, services like MailChimp, Constant Contact, or Get Response are greatly beneficial to your business.

It can even help an offline store promote their sales and get more foot traffic in the door. This plugin lets you capture email addresses via a popup after a set time or even when the visitor is exiting the website. It can be customized in many different ways such as color scheme, animation, form fields, and even connected with many different email services, including the ones I listed. This is just one way to capture emails, we have our own secrets to help you get more emails and even run your campaigns via our Services Page. We do custom templates, automations, abandoned carts reminders to remind customers of their unfinished purchases, and more!

Jetpack

More specifically the Site Stats. I myself disable every feature inside of Jetpack besides this one. I may inquire from my clients to see what is the most important to them to further decide the features they need. This may include Two Factor Authentication, Lazy Load Images, or Social Sharing. Regardless, this is the first plugin I install and even can be installed from cPanel’s Installatron. I understand there are services available like Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, these services are great for advanced tracking, but for quick on the go tracking for when you want to just check in on how your business is doing… Site Stats has them beat. If I am already logging into my WordPress website to post to my blog, then a quick glance at my tool bar I can see a graph of how my business is doing. I can even click that graph to see a full size with a break down of referals, most viewed pages, and top clicked pages. This is why it is my go-to plugin.

Featherlight

As you may have noticed when you click an image by default in WordPress it takes you to another page. I don’t like my readers to have to leave the page they are on to see any content, unless absolutely necessary. Most images can be understood in a medium format, but I still want to help those with vision problems like myself by letting you click the image to see the original size. Featherlight makes this possible by displaying the full size image in a Lightbox popup. Plus when you are done viewing the image, just click the X button.

Duplicate Post

Last on my list of Top Free WordPress Plugins is Duplicate Post. Sometimes you just need to copy all of the settings from a post if you use a heavily modified WordPress website. This is where this plugin comes in handy. Easily duplicate posts along with other content with this plugin. There’s really not much else to say about it, it simply adds a clone button on the post listing page.

Bonus

Since the last plugin was short and sweet, I figured I would post another one that you most certainly need. Really Simple SSL honestly should be included in the Core of WordPress, but it does the job as a simple yet powerful plugin to make your WordPress website use SSL Certificates. It’s another must have plugin for use of features that Facebook offers such as the Facebook Customer Chat Plugin that you see on Dog Byte Marketing. You can even use Auto SSL to keep renewing your free SSL ticket, just another thing that we offer through our hosting in our Services.