WordPress is one of the most popular CMS that has powered more than 30% of the websites on the Internet. It is free to install and deploy without any hassle. Besides, it is an open source, has a vast community and highly customizable to meet the demands of its users. The best part of WordPress is that thousands of free WordPress plugin and templates are available for free for anyone who wants to set up their website. In this article, I will share ten best WordPress plugins that you can get for free to power your site.
A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that perform a specific task which can be easily added to your WordPress site. Plugins extend the functionality or add the new features to your existing WordPress website. Thousands of free and paid plugins are available, but in this article, I will be sharing only free WordPress plugins. Here’s the list of best WordPress plugins that you can get for free:
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10 Must Have Best WordPress Plugins for WordPress Site
1. Akismet Anti-Spam
We all hate spam comments that pollute our website. Akismet Anti-Spam plugin checks and filters for spam comments and contact form submission against their global database of spam to prevent your site from malicious content. It automatically identifies and then stores them so that you can manually take action on those comments. This free WordPress plugin e with default WordPress installation. Though it is free for personal use, paid subscriptions are also available for businesses and commercial websites.
2. WP Database Backup
It is always a good idea to take a backup of your website from time to time. Making a backup of your WordPress site ensures that if anything goes wrong, you can always revert to the previous state using your backup. WP Database Backup is another free WordPress plugin that you can use to create a backup of your website. You can either create manually or schedule a backup and even choose a destination to upload your backup files.
3. W3 Total Cache
It is recommended to cache your WordPress site to improve its performance and loading speed. W3 Total Cache is one the best and most popular plugins suited for caching your site. This plugin cache your posts and pages as static HTML which is served to the users thereby reducing page loading time drastically and helps to optimize your overall site performance.
This free plugin features page cache, database caching, object caching, browsing caching, source file minification and a lot more. Further, you can also integrate CDN services to load your source files libraries. It is essential to improve your site loading time and performance from SEO aspects for better ranking on search results.
4. Smush
Using images, you can grab your visitor’s attention and get them engaged in your blog posts. If you have a website on tutorials or any other similar genre, you probably need to use a lot of images. However, using large and high-resolution images without optimization will consume a lot of your database space and take a lot of time to load which might not be suitable for your website from performance aspects.
With Smush plugin, you can resize, optimize and compress all your images without losing much of its quality. It supports JPEG, GIF and PNG formats customization which is the standard image format. With the free version, you can optimize only 50 photos at a time and have to rerun the process to optimize other images. With its advanced photo compression algorithm, it saves lots of your storage. Another best thing about this free WordPress plugin is that you can enable auto-smush all your attachments on upload.
5. Regenerate Thumbnails
Whenever you switch to a new theme, you are likely to get issues with your images especially featured images. Some are distorted, not properly fitted and in some cases very large. Regenerate Thumbnails is a fantastic free WordPress plugin that allows you to regenerate all thumbnail sizes for one or more images that you have uploaded to your Media library according to your activated theme.
6. Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
Google Analytics is a great free tool available to track your website traffic and analyze your website contents. It enables you to understand your audience and the content they prefer to read on your site. There are several plugins available for this and Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights is one of the best and popular one used by millions.
With this plugin, you can easily authenticate your Google analytics account with just a few clicks. It highlights the critical stats, shows your popular posts, pages and sections, top traffic sources, and a lot more. Premium add-ons are also available for this plugin if you want additional features.
7. WPS Hide Login
WordPress is a most popular CMS because millions of people around the globe use it. Everyone knows that the default login page is accessible by going to wp-admin or wp-admin.php. A hacker can try brute force attack to gain access to your website and do the potential harm. So, to prevent such attack, it is advisable to change the default login page. WPS Hide Login is a lightweight security plugin that you can easily configure to change the URL of the login page. It doesn’t modify any files but makes your wp-admin directory and wp-login.php page inaccessible and intercepts the page requests. With this plugin, you can define your login URL (e.g. www.example.com/mycustomurl). You can always revert to the origin login URL just by disabling this plugin.
8. Wordfence Security – Firewall & Malware Scan
The most crucial thing for our website is to secure it from malicious attack. Hackers often attempt to deploy thousands of bots or launch brute force attack to steal your website credentials. Our website security is something that should be one of your top priority. There are many security plugins available for WordPress site. Among Wordfence Security is one of the most popular that provides Firewall protection, malware scanning, real-time IP blocking, protection against brute force attacks and much more. The paid version offers more features but the free version is sufficient enough to provide basic security to your site.
9. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is among one of the best WordPress plugins used by millions of WordPress users. The best things this free plugin is that it is very easy to use and customize. You can easily create and manage multiple forms, add your customization and integrate wherever you want with a shortcode. This plugin also supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, and filters spam.
10. Yoast SEO
We put an enormous effort to make our site stand out and compete for better ranking. Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is an essential factor for anyone with a WordPress site. Optimizing your website for SEO can be frustrating and time-consuming. However, there are many SEO plugins available to make your job a little easier. Yoast SEO is one of the best WordPress plugins with over 5 million active installations. With this plugin, you get the basic idea to optimize your blog posts to meet the SEO standards. The plugin is simple to use and doesn’t require any technical knowledge. However, if you have experience in SEO that will be beneficial to optimize your post to great extends. This plugins also has a paid version which offers slightly more advanced features, but the free is enough to get started.
Wrapping Up
I have used all these plugins for my site, and it has increased my productivity and provided better security. As stated earlier, these plugins are the best WordPress plugins that you get for free to improve your website performance, improve your site SEO, secure your website and much more.
If you are using any of these plugins, let me know in the comment section below. If I miss any essential WordPress plugins, please let me know. I would appreciate that.
