Updated: Jan 02, 2024 By: Dessign Team
If you looking for the best free WordPress plugins for blogs and bloggers, we put together a list of the best free plugins for any beginner blogger to help them maximize their website. Once you decide on a specific free blog themes for WordPress, next you need to install a few very important plugins to help you secure your site, help you back up, and optimize, you will need a spam protection plugin to help you deal with all spam comments you will get. It is important to have your images optimized for faster loading time, and you will need SEO plugins to help you rank higher on Google searches.
All those free WordPress plugins that we listed are the best and most downloaded and install on any WordPress site, you can be sure that you have all the tools and plugins you need to stay safe, secure, and always with the best backup.
Best Free Simple & Easy WordPress Plugins for Blogs and Bloggers: SEO, Security, Backup, Cache, Optimization, AntiSpam, Newsletter
1. Ultimate Blocks
Ultimate Blocks is the perfect Gutenberg blocks plugin for anyone who wants to create engaging content on their blog.
This plugin comes with a huge collection of Gutenberg blocks that will help you create better content for your readers.
As Gutenberg is being adopted heavily by WordPress users, it’s the best time to take advantage of it. With Ultimate Blocks, you get all the essential blocks required to make truly engaging and captivating content.
All the blocks in this plugin are customizable to a great extent. You can customize the colors, background, border, and more for all the different blocks.
Moreover, the blocks are fully responsive so that your readers can get a smooth experience across all devices.
Lastly, Ultimate Blocks is a very lightweight plugin as it doesn’t add a lot of code to your page. This means you can enjoy a beautifully designed page without sacrificing the performance of your website.
2. Sucuri Security – Auditing, Malware Scanner and Security Hardening
Sucuri Inc. is a globally recognized authority in all matters related to website security, with a specialization in WordPress Security.
The Sucuri Security WordPress plugin is free to all WordPress users. It is a security suite meant to complement your existing security posture. It offers its users a set of security features for their website, each designed to have a positive effect on their security posture:
3. Yoast SEO
Since 2008 Yoast SEO has helped millions of websites worldwide to rank higher in search engines. This WordPress SEO plugin helps you with your search engine optimization. Are you not entirely convinced? Yoast SEO is the favorite WordPress SEO plugin of millions of users worldwide!
As Yoast’s mission is SEO for Everyone, the plugin’s users range from the bakery around the corner to some of the most popular sites on the planet.
Do you know who your competitors are in your niche? There’s a reason why they are your competitors: they do what you do. And they might even do it better right now. That does not mean you can’t win from them, but it does mean you need all the help to get on top and stay on top! Yoast SEO is here to help you out as we’ve helped millions of people worldwide with their WordPress SEO efforts.
4. 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.
5. Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed, & Growth
THE MOST POPULAR WORDPRESS PLUGIN FOR JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING.
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.
24/7 AUTO SITE SECURITY
We guard your site so you can run your site or business. Jetpack Security provides easy-to-use, comprehensive WordPress site security including auto real-time backups and easy restores, malware scanning, and spam protection. Essential features like brute force protection and downtime/uptime monitoring are free.
- Back up your site automatically in real time and restore to any point with one click. Unlimited storage for your backup. Great for eCommerce stores especially Woo.
- Easily duplicate, clone, or migrate your site whether you want to create a staging site or move to a new host.
- See every site change and who made it with the activity log, great for coordination, debug, maintenance, or troubleshooting.
- Automatic scan for malware and other code threats. One-click fix to restore your site for malware.
- Block spam comments and form responses with anti spam features powered by Akismet.
- Brute force attack protection to protect your WordPress login page from attacks.
- Monitor your site uptime/downtime and get an instant alert of any change by email.
- Secure WordPress.com powered login used by millions of sites with optional 2FA (two factor authentication) for extra protection.
- Auto update individual plugins for easy site maintenance and management.
6. Really Simple SSL
Really Simple SSL automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https.
To keep it lightweight, the options are kept to a minimum. The entire site will move to SSL.
7. UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin
UpdraftPlus simplifies backups and restoration. It is the world’s highest-ranking and most popular scheduled backup plugin, with over two million currently-active installs. Backup your files and database backups into the cloud and restore with a single click!
Backup into the cloud directly to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email. The paid version also backs up to Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, and WebDAV.
8. 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.
The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users:
- Users who are not logged in.
- Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
- Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.
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.
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. Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons
Social media plugin which let’s you add share icons for RSS, Email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, ‘Share’ (covering 200+ other social media platforms) and upload custom share icons of your choice.
This free plugin has a lot to offer. Even more can be found in the Premium Plugin, please watch this short video:
11. Google 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.
Supported since over 9 years and rated as the best WordPress plugin, it will do exactly what it’s supposed to do – providing a complete XML sitemap for search engines. It will not break your site, slow it down or annoy you. Guaranteed!
12. Mailchimp for WordPress
MAILCHIMP FOR WORDPRESS
Allowing your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter should be easy. With this plugin, it finally is.
This plugin helps you grow your Mailchimp lists and write better newsletters through various methods. You can create good looking opt-in forms or integrate with any existing form on your site, like your comment, contact or checkout form.
13. Newsletter
Newsletter is a real newsletter and email marketing system for your WordPress blog: perfect for list building, you can easily create, send and track e-mails, headache-free. It just works out of box!
DISCOVER A COMPLETELY REWRITTEN COMPOSER
We redesigned our drag and drop composer to make your campaign creation even easier. Try it!
14. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
15. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP by ExactMetrics
The ExactMetrics Google Analytics for WordPress plugin helps you properly setup all the powerful Google Analytics tracking features without writing any code or hiring a developer.
More importantly, over 1 million users love ExactMetrics because of our signature Google Analytics Dashboard that helps you view key Google Analytics stats right inside your WordPress dashboard.
Our goal at ExactMetrics is to help you grow your business faster with data-driven decisions.
This is why we built the most comprehensive Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, so you can setup all the powerful tracking features that website owners otherwise miss out on when simply pasting the analytics code in WordPress.
We go beyond the simple analytics script and add the advanced event tracking, so you can see all important user behavior in WordPress with just a few clicks (without hiring a developer).
16. 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!
And whether you spell it ‘optimise’ or ‘optimize’, Smush will compress images without a visible drop in quality.
Image optimization is the easiest way to make your site load super fast!
17. Simple Author Box
Simple Author Box adds a responsive author box at the end of your posts, showing the author name, author gravatar and author description – author bio. It also adds over 30 social profile fields on WordPress user profile screen, allowing to display the author social icons in the author box.
