If you’re using WordPress, installing a few plugins is a must. Plugins can extend your site’s functionality in many ways, from making designing your website easier to adding security tools, complex code, setting up contact forms and more. With thousands of free plugins available, it can be a bit confusing knowing which ones are worth installing. In this post, we’ll walk through 12 of the best free WordPress plugins that can help improve your website and make managing it a lot easier.
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1) Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular free WordPress plugins, and for good reason, as it helps you optimise your website for search engines. The free version of the plugin analyses your blog posts and pages and gives you simple suggestions for improving your titles, meta descriptions, keyword usage, internal linking, readability and more. All these contribute to better search engine performance of your website.
2) Ninja Forms
Every website needs a contact form, and Ninja Forms makes creating one very easy. This plugin allows you to create, manage, and publish multiple forms on your website. You can build simple forms using a drag-and-drop builder, which means you don’t need any technical knowledge. It includes features like email notifications, form submissions, autoresponders, and more.
3) Rank Math
This is another fantastic SEO plugin and a popular alternative to Yoast. It offers a lot of powerful features even in the free version, including keyword tracking, schema markup, and detailed SEO analysis for your pages. What many people love about Rank Math is its clean interface and how easy it makes technical SEO tasks. If you want strong SEO tools without a complicated setup, this plugin is definitely worth trying.
4) WPCode Lite
Sometimes you need to add small snippets of code to your website, like tracking scripts, custom CSS, or verification codes, etc. WPCode Lite makes this easy by letting you safely add and manage code snippets without editing your theme’s functions.php file. This is especially helpful because it reduces the risk of accidentally breaking your site when adding code. From adding code snippets to specific spots on your websites, to adding in header & footer code, pixels, ads and more, this is one plugin that’s worth adding to your WordPress dashboard.
5) Accessibility by UserWay
This is an accessibility plugin designed to help make your website more inclusive. It adds an accessibility widget to your website that allows visitors to adjust things like text size, contrast, text spacing, pause animation, and other visual settings to make your content easier to read. Improving accessibility not only helps more people use your website, but it can also improve overall user experience.
📍Related Post: How to Add Custom Fonts to Your Showit Website + Website Typography Best Practices
6) Redirection Plugin
Broken links can be frustrating for visitors and bad for your SEO. This free WordPress plugin helps you set up and manage redirects so visitors are automatically sent to the correct page. If you change your domain, or the URL of a page/blog post, you can easily set up a redirect from the old link to the new one so visitors are directed to the correct page instead of landing on a 404 error page. This plugin also logs all 404 errors (page not found) so that you can fix any broken links.
7) Elementor
Designing a website on WordPress can be a bit of a drag with limited customisation functionality unless you know code. Page Builder plugins like Elementor help make this much easier. You can design pages visually by dragging and dropping elements exactly where you want them. With the free version, you can create beautiful layouts for landing pages, blog posts, and other sections of your website without touching code. You can also purchase pre-built Elementor themes, which you can easily customise to create a great website for your business or blog.
8) WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is another great free WordPress plugin. It helps speed up your website by creating static versions of your website’s pages, which makes it faster to pull up the page the next time someone visits your site. Website speed plays a huge role in user experience. If your site takes too long to load, visitors are likely to leave before they even see your content, so this plugin is a good one to add to your website.
9) Wordfence Security
Wordfence helps protect your website from hackers, malware, and suspicious activity. It includes a firewall and malware scanner that constantly monitor your site for potential threats. If anything unusual happens, the plugin will alert you so you can address the issue quickly. It’s pretty much one of the best security plugins out there.
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10) Smush
Smush is a plugin that helps optimise your website images for faster loading times, and it compresses files while still maintaining their quality. Once installed, this free WordPress plugin optimises images as you upload them, allowing you to automatically resize or crop large photos, and it can also compress the images already on your site. It’s one of those plugins that quietly works in the background but makes a big difference in performance.
11) UpdraftPlus
Imagine spending months building your website only to lose everything because of a crash or security issue. That’s exactly why backups are so important. UpdraftPlus makes it easy to create automatic backups of your website and store them safely on your device or platforms like Google Drive or Dropbox. Once the backups are created, you can easily restore your website using this plugin if anything goes wrong. UpdraftPlus is one of the best backup plugins out there with 3+ million installs and 7k+ 5-star reviews.
12) upPrev
upPrev is a great plugin for keeping visitors on your site longer. It automatically shows a small pop-up or slide-in box with a related blog post when someone finishes reading an article. Instead of readers leaving your site after one post, upPrev gently encourages them to check out another piece of content. It can be a simple way to increase page views and help visitors discover more of what you’ve written, and it’s pretty simple & straightforward to set up.
WordPress plugins can add a lot of powerful functionality to your website, but it’s important not to install too many at once. Stick to the plugins that truly improve your site’s performance, security, and usability. Start with the essentials, and add others as your website grows.
There are a good number of great WordPress plugins out there, both free and paid, but I could only cover a few in this blog post. Did I miss your favourite WordPress plugin? Let me know in the comments!
I hope you found this blog post useful. If you need help creating a professionally designed website that’s optimised and ready to grow with your business, I can help. I offer website design services, and if you’re more into DIY, check out my Showit website templates.
