Updated: Jan 02, 2023 By: Dessign Team
Are you looking for the best free WordPress plugins for your website? There are thousands of free plugins to choose from, but which ones are the most important to have for security, SEO optimization, content writing, page building, eCommerce and Google analytics. We put together a nice list of the top free plugins for WordPress, those plugins are perfect for any beginner who need help picking the right ones to improve their WordPress blog or website. If you looking for the best free premium plugins to help you customize your website.
All the plugins on this list are 100% free to use, some have a premium features when you need more support or specific feature you can always upgrade, but all the functions are there in the free ones so you can decide if the specific plugin is right for you and your website to be better optimized.
1. Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed, & Growth
Security, performance, marketing, and design tools — Jetpack is made by the WordPress experts to make WP sites safer and faster, and help you grow your traffic.
Get blazing fast site speed with Jetpack, the premier WP plugin built to leverage the power of AMP, a tool that helps optimize your site on mobile devices. Jetpack’s free CDN (content delivery network) auto optimizes your images. Watch your page load times decrease — we’ll optimize your images and serve them from our own powerful global network, and speed up your site on mobile devices to reduce bandwidth usage and save money!
2. Yoast SEO
To rank highly in search engines, you need to beat the competition. You need a better, faster, stronger website than the people who sell or do the same kinds of things as you.
Yoast SEO is the most-used WordPress SEO plugin, and has helped millions of people like you to get ahead, and to stay ahead.
Yoast is powered by a team of expert developers, testers, software architects, and SEO consultants. They work constantly to stay at the cutting edge of WordPress SEO, and to improve the plugin with every release.
3. Akismet Spam Protection
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.
4. Wordfence Security – Firewall & Malware Scan
Wordfence includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that were built from the ground up to protect WordPress. Our Threat Defense Feed arms Wordfence with the newest firewall rules, malware signatures and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your website safe. Rounded out by 2FA and a suite of additional features, Wordfence is the most comprehensive WordPress security solution available.
5. XML Sitemaps
Use this plugin to greatly improve SEO to create special XML sitemaps which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your site.
With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
6. Elementor Website Builder
Introducing a WordPress website builder, with no limits of design. A website builder that delivers high-end page designs and advanced capabilities, never before seen on WordPress.
Whether you’re a web designer looking for a way to achieve pixel-perfect websites, a marketer looking to get online fast or a developer who wants to expand their capabilities, Elementor’s website builder has what you need – intuitive drag-and-drop Editor, advanced design features and a full open-source approach.
7. WP Super Cache
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
99% of your visitors will be served static html files. One cached file can be served thousands of times. Other visitors will be served custom cached files tailored to their visit. If they are logged in, or have left comments those details will be displayed and cached for them.
8. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the world’s most popular open-source eCommerce solution.
Our core platform is free, flexible, and amplified by a global community. The freedom of open-source means you retain full ownership of your store’s content and data forever.
Whether you’re launching a business, taking brick-and-mortar retail online, or developing sites for clients, use WooCommerce for a store that powerfully blends content and commerce.
9. Autoptimize
Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default but can also inline critical CSS and defer the aggregated full CSS, moves and defers scripts to the footer and minifies HTML.
You can optimize and lazy-load images (with support for WebP and AVIF formats), optimize Google Fonts, async non-aggregated JavaScript, remove WordPress core emoji cruft and more. As such it can improve your site’s performance even when already on HTTP/2! There is extensive API available to enable you to tailor Autoptimize to each and every site’s specific needs.
10. Smush – Lazy Load Images, Optimize & Compress Images
Optimize images, turn on lazy load, resize, compress & improve your Google Page Speed with the incredibly powerful and 100% free WordPress image smusher, brought to you by the superteam at WPMU DEV!
Some image compression tools destroy images with as much as a 30% loss in quality. Our servers strip hidden bulky information from your images and reduce file size without affecting the appearance.
Smush meticulously 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. And it can serve images in the WebP format.
11. Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress by MonsterInsights
We believe that it’s easy to double your traffic and sales when you know exactly how people find and use your website. MonsterInsights shows you the stats that matter, so you can grow your business with confidence.
The best part is that MonsterInsights comes with a Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress that shows you actionable analytics reports right inside your WordPress dashboard. We have created customized reports that eliminates the fluff and only show you the stats that matter, so you can see exactly what’s working and what’s not!
12. Black Studio TinyMCE Widget
This plugin adds a new Visual Editor widget type that allows you to insert rich text and media objects in your sidebars with no hassle. With Black Studio TinyMCE Widget you will be able to edit your widgets in a WYSIWYG manner using the native WordPress TinyMCE editor, just like you do in posts and pages. And if you are a developer you may still switch back and forth from Visual to HTML mode.
For years the default WordPress text widget has been very basic and it required HTML knowledge to add formatting and images/media to the text. This plugin was born in 2011 to overcome these limitations. After a long time, in June 2017, version 4.8 of WordPress finally introduced a new text widget that included the ability to manage text widgets with the visual editor. The new widget available in WordPress core could now be used as a basic replacement of Black Studio TinyMCE Widget, but the plugin still offers some additional features, so it remains a must-have for advanced users.
Conclusion
We hope you find most of the free WordPress plugins very useful and try to install and activate them on your WordPress site or blog. All the plugins will help your website perform better in Google search and overall user experience which will make your site more accessible to others.
Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default but can also inline critical CSS and defer the aggregated full CSS, moves and defers scripts to the footer and minifies HTML.
Our Threat Defense Feed arms Wordfence with the newest firewall rules, malware signatures and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your website safe.