If you have gone through the hassle, time and expense often involved with developing and maintaining a WordPress website, then it just makes sense to get plugins that will aid you in making the most of your investment. Read on to learn about several options, most of which are free, that can save you time and money and help your site overall.

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO is not just a search engine optimization plugin. It’s all in one—meaning that apart from adding titles and descriptions to all of your articles, open graph meta data, page analysis, publishing XML sitemaps and more are all on the table. The best part about this is it is very easy to install and set up.

2. W3 Total Cache

The speed of your site plays an important role in the search engine rankings, which are key to the success of your site. W3 Total Cache optimizes your site to speed and performance are top notch. It does this by compressing pages among other things.

3. Login Lockdown

It would be a terrible shame if your site was to get hacked. If that happened, the hacker could do whatever they wanted to your site, including delete all of the content. Make sure to change the default settings to limit the number of attempts someone can make before being locked out from trying to sign in to your site.

4. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is arguably the simplest plugin to configure. It is also useful because it shows things like the referral source, which may show you how the person contacting found your site to begin with. Once filled out, the form will go to your email and you can respond from there if you so choose. Otherwise, just leave the person hanging.

5. Backup Buddy

What a disaster it would be if you were to somehow lose your entire site! Backup Buddy is the most popular premium plugin available for backing up data. You can choose from daily, weekly or monthly backups. It is recommended to do more rather than less, especially if you update your site frequently. There is no monthly fee and it can also be used to duplicate, migrate or restore websites. Overall, a miracle tool.

6. UpdraftPlus

This free plugin is also for making backups of your data. Although very similar to BackupBuddy, this one charges a monthly fee. It is able to migrate or clone sites as well.

7. Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights

This is a wonderful, free tool to help you understand website traffic. When you understand your audience, you can better cater to their needs and desires, thus having a much more successful site.

8. Wordfence Security

This is key in keeping hackers away from your digital goods. You simply cannot let them in or everything you have worked for will have been for naught. This plugin monitors real-time traffic and keeps you aware of security threats. You can then choose to take action.

9. Broken Link Checker

Another literally priceless (because it is free) plugin in is Broken Link Checker. Its job is to check your own site for broken links because no one respects a page with broken links. It is one of the fastest ways to lose customers.

10. Social Icons

The majority of people in developed countries use various forms of social media such as Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram. Changes are your information is also on these other sites. The point of this plugin is to display the all too familiar logos of the various social media platforms so that visitors to your site can click on them and then be taken to your page’s social media accounts.

11. Ultimate Nofollow

Last but certainly not least is Ultimate Nofollow. This plugin gives full control of linking for all the purposes related to search engine optimization. It comes with all the features you need in order to increase your control of the nofollow tag over your content, which is great. It has more than 40,000 active installations, which is a clear sign that it works.

After you have spent so much time and money on your WordPress site, the real question is why wouldn’t you use some of these plugins, especially the free ones? Hackers can be utterly devastating in terms of ruining your website and worse, even your very identity.

It is paramount that you keep them at bay and. In addition to hackers, SEO is an ever important looming demon in and of itself. These plugins are here to help. Take them up on their offers of assistance, as soon as you can. There is almost no reason not to, especially for the sake of your website.