WordPress plugins are great tools for adding and extending functionality to WordPress.These plugins will add awesome functionality to your site and make it ‘great’.The official plugin library has over 47,000 WordPress plugins and counting.That means there are plugins for almost every function or feature you need on your website.This post includes some free/ freemium plugins essential for a WP blog.Also read our 15 Must have Free WordPress plugins for startup bloggers.

Freemium plugins:

#1 Akismet

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Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content.You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

#2 Yoast SEO

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It is an awesome plugin which guides you all the way to create better content and improve your ranking on search results.Also the goal is to help the users, gain trust and sustain the rankings which they call sustainable SEO.It forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.

#3 Smush Image Compression and Optimization

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It Resize, optimize and compress all of your images with the incredibly powerful.Also WP Smush scans every image you upload – or have already added to your site – cuts all the unnecessary data and scales it for you before adding it to your media library.

#4 Wordfence Security

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Wordfence Security is a great security plugin for WordPress.It features Firewall protection, malware scan, blocking, login security, live traffic monitoring and lets you monitor all your traffic in real-time including robots, humans, 404 errors, logins, logouts etc.

#5 W3 Total Cache

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W3 Total Cache wp plugin is the best caching plugin for WordPress.It features page cache, database caching, object caching, browser caching and it lets you integrate CDN services to reduce page load time.It has options to minify and HTTP compression of the HTML, JS, and CSS files.

Free Plugins:

#1 Jetpack

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Jetpack takes care of your site security, website performance, traffic growth, image optimization, website appearance.It also provides advanced security and backup services, video hosting, site monetization, priority support, and more SEO tools in three simple and affordable plans.

#2 Contact Form 7

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Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, and you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering.

#3 WP-Optimize

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WP-Optimize is an effective tool for automatically cleaning your WordPress database so that it runs at maximum efficiency. It automatically removes the unnecessary data from the WordPress without manual queries. The plugin always keeps your database optimized for the best performance.

#4 All in One SEO Pack

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All in One SEO Pack optimize your WordPress site for SEO. Also it provides XML Sitemap support,Google AMP support,Google Analytics support,Generates META tags automatically,Redirect attachment pages to parent post,Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs and so on.

#5 Google XML Sitemaps

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This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog with a special XML sitemap. Furthermore it supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Probably it helps to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

#6 TinyMCE Advanced

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TinyMCE Advanced plugin will let you add, remove and arrange the buttons that are shown on the Visual Editor toolbar. Also you can configure up to four rows of buttons including Font Sizes, Font Family,text and background colors, tables, etc. In addition this plugin adds some commonly used options as keeping the paragraph tags in the Text editor and importing the CSS classes from the theme’s editor-style.css.

#7 Broken Link Checker

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Broken Link Checker plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. Consequently links can be edited directly from the plugin’s page, without manually updating each post.

I hope this article helped you find some of the best WordPress plugins for your website.Also if you are already using them, write your feedbacks in the comment box below. Since if there’s something I missed that you feel needs to be added, let me know in the comments!