17 Must Have Best Free WordPress Plugins

Are you looking to install plugins on your websites? Then you are at the right place. This article will give you a list of the Best free WordPress plugins every website must have.

Earlier we have given the Must have WordPress plugins list (Free and Premium). This time we are going to give the list of free plugins. Here we help you to find some good plugins that are absolutely free of cost. You don’t need to pay a single penny to install these plugins. With these plugins, you can reduce your work on websites.

WordPress is the most popular CMS out there in the market. WordPress is a well-known platform among many users to create free websites very easily. If you install plugins in WordPress, it makes your websites flexible and also customizable.

To maintain WordPress, plugins are the most important part. Plugins are nothing but web app developed using a PHP language used to enhance the capability of WordPress or also to automate the variety of tasks that otherwise takes huge time to get done.

The plugins installed on your site will be registered on your database. At any time, you can activate or deactivate plugins on your WordPress.

List of Best Free WordPress Plugins

Video Tutorial: 17 Must Have Best Free WordPress Plugins (2021) – List Updated

For the reader’s convenience, we always create a video tutorial. Either you can watch and learn or simply skip the video and continue with the list of plugins mentioned afterward.

1. Jetpack:

Jetpack Homepage

Category: Performance/Optimization/Marketing

Jetpack is the oldest, most versatile free plugin that existed under the WordPress plugin repository. As the name states, it is a pack of multiple tools. Under this plugin, you will find various features under the category of WordPress security improvement, performance optimization, marketing, designing, and whatnot. It is one of the best free WordPress plugins.

It has more than 5 million active installations and even WordPress recommends it to install this plugin when you just beginning your website. I think there is no WordPress website without this plugin.

Jetpack comes in both free and paid versions. Its free version has all the core features you need. However, when you upgrade it to its premium version the additional features will unlock including real-time backups, video-hosting, spam filtering, search box, Ads monetization, Payment gateways integration, Google Analytics integration, and website scanning.

Note: By installing jetpack (a pack of various tools) you can eliminate the need for various plugins. Otherwise, you have to install numerous plugins for each thing. This way you can reduce the plugin load from your WordPress website drastically.

Jetpack (Free Version) Features at a Glance:

  • Brute force protection
  • Website downtime monitoring
  • SEO optimization tools
  • Social media automation tools
  • CDN for images
  • Lazy loading images
  • Automatic-related posts generation
  • Sidebar customization option
  • Secure authentication
  • Enable plugin auto-updates
  • Starter themes
  • Contact forms, Gallery, and slideshow tools
  • Enable subscriptions

2. RankMath

RankMath-Homepage

RankMath is a popular and must-needed SEO plugin for your WordPress Website to boost performance to the utmost level. This comes with a professional user interface and provides all the advanced tools. This is the most trusted WordPress Plugin across the globe. RankMath is the one-stop plugin to manage all the SEO of your website. You can integrate RankMath with popular platforms like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Bing, Google Search Console, etc.,

RankaMath has a professional dashboard and from there you can easily monitor the analytics and statistics of your website performance. This is available in Free and Pro versions that too at a very affordable price range. The installation setup of RankMath is also very easy and they provide guidance on each step of installation.

RankMath Features

  • Easy-to-setup to WordPress website
  • Professional Dashboard
  • SEO-Friendly
  • Content AI Assistant
  • Google Index Status
  • Rank Tracker
  • Dedicated Schema Generators for each category
  • Easy to generate XML Sitemap
  • Allows Social Media Integrations
  • You can Track the Post and Page speeds
  • RSS optimization

RankMath Pricing

RankMath provides its services in Free and Pro versions. The pro version is available in three plans, such as Pro, Business, and Agency. The prices of all three plans are listed below.

  • Pro – $59 per year (ex. VAT)
  • Business – $199 per year (ex. VAT)
  • Agency – $499 per year (ex. VAT)

3. CookieYes GDPR Cookie Consent & Compliance Notice Plugin

CookieYes Homepage

Category: Website Privacy

Run your website/business worry-free by adding this cookie consent plugin to your WordPress site. It helps you comply with GDPR and similar regulations by letting you manage your website’s first and third-party cookies as per the guidelines.

With the plugin, you can create a fully customizable cookie banner, and privacy policy, and auto-scan your website for cookies. You can also block third-party cookies from other WordPress plugins automatically.

The premium version of the GDPR cookie banner plugin supports advanced features including cookie consent log, advanced cookie blocking, and location-based cookie notice exclusion.

4. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache - Best free WordPress plugins

Category: Performance Optimization

The next best free WordPress plugin is the W3 Total Cache.

A website must have at least a 1-speed optimization plugin. When we talk about web performance plugins, no one could beat WP-Rocket. But since it is a paid plugin you might not interested in it initially. 

So as a WP-Rocket alternative, you only have one choice left and that is W3 Total Cache. Well, this plugin boosts your website performance up to 10x and helps to achieve a good score in the Google PageSpeed testing tool. 

W3 Total Cache has a lot of site optimization features. One of the main options that you need to enable is browser caching. If your site does not have enabled caching yet, you will see the caching suggestion at the top of the Google PageSpeed testing suggestion report.

Apart from Caching this plugin could do a lot for you. For example, deferring non-critical JS and CS, lazy loading, Minification, AMP, and whatnot.

I don’t want to bore you with web technical jargon. But if you want to achieve a high ranking in Google, then your website should be loaded at a lightning-fast speed. As per Google ranking factors, if your website’s core web vitals metrics scored less then your website suffers badly in the search engine rankings. 

To improve web core web vitals a high-speed hosting server (Rocket.net) and a web optimization plugin are all you need. There is no denying that the W3 total cache plugin improves your website performance and gives you a hike in Google PageSpeed score. But still, if you want to apply complete optimization on your website then you should have a premium optimization plugin. 

W3 Total Cache also has a premium version but not just we, millions of bloggers recommend WP-Rocket as a first-choice site optimization plugin. In fact, in the early days of our blogging career, we used to depend on W3 Total Cache free plugins. But sooner we realized the need and importance of the premium site optimization plugin. That’s why now we have WP-Rocket power running on our website.

Anyways we are talking about free plugins and for free of cost, W3 Total Cache is the only site optimization plugin you have to install on your website.

5. ShortPixel Image Optimizer

ShortPixel Homepage

Category: Image Compression

ShortPixel Image Optimizer is an image compression plugin. Have you seen any errors related to images in the Google PageSpeed tool? Well, it’s time to implement image compression on a website.

Apart from the performance optimization plugin, a WordPress website should have an image compression plugin. By installing the ShortPixel plugin all errors and warnings related to images will be gone from the Google PageSpeed tool.

Plugins like ShortPixel will compress your website images and serve them into WEBP format on a user screen. High-resolution images are usually bigger in size and hence increase the page size which results in a slow loading time. 

ShortPixel is a free plugin directly available from the WordPress plugin repository. In a free version, you get 100 monthly image credits which are enough to test out the efficiency of this plugin. 

The great thing here is the free version includes all features you’ll see in the paid one. The only limitation is image credits. If your website has lots of images then you can upgrade your plan accordingly.

When we talk about pricing, the plans are a bit expensive. However, if you use our discount coupon you will get a 50% straight discount on both monthly and one-time plans. After applying our discount the new plans will be reduced to this amount:

  • 7,500 images/month = $4.99
  • 18,000 images/month = $9.99
  • 82,000 images/month = $29.99

Note: Bookmark this page. First, try out the free version of ShortPixel and later come back to this page to grab the discount. Upgrade it when your requirements increase.

ShortPixel image compression plugin works effectively. We have been using this plugin for a long time and we have seen great results. It compresses the images up to 80%.

6. WooCommerce

woocommerce - best free wordpress plugin

Category: eCommerce

WooCommerce – How can we forget about this plugin? WooCommerce is the World’s most popular eCommerce plugin that helps millions of WordPress users in building eCommerce stores without any developer. This plugin is very powerful and has tons of features that are essential for running an online eCommerce store or business:

  • Helps to set up pricing rules
  • Payment integration in a store
  • Enable user registrations
  • Generate checkout page, payment page, thank you page, etc automatically
  • Templates available for storefronts
  • Shipping Configuration
  • Tax calculation 
  • Much more…

Similar to other plugins, WooCommerce is available in both free and paid versions.

7. Easy Table of Contents

Easy Table of Contents

Category: Content

Easy Table of Contents is the next free WordPress plugin on the list. Well, as the name states this plugin generates a table of content based on the content of the page.

The table of contents not just improved the SEO but also enhances the user browsing experience. Rather than going through a whole article, a Table of contents will give users quick content they want to consume. 

Some highlighted features of the “Easy Table of Contents” plugin are:

  • Compatible with WordPress Gutenberg editor and modern themes
  • Can be disabled on any individual post/pages
  • Option to exclude specific headings or all headings of a particular type. For example H3
  • Supported bullet formats: None, decimal, Roman, and numeric
  • Hierrarichal display can be enabled or disabled.
  • Design Customization

8. Content Forms by WPForms

WPForms

Category: Website Forms

WPForms is the most downloaded drag-and-drop form builder plugin that existed in a WordPress space. Do you want to add a content form to your website? Then this plugin is all you need. Not just contact forms, you can build plenty of types of forms including feedback forms, subscription forms, payment forms, and whatnot.

WPForms is a mobile-friendly, SEO-friendly, performance-friendly fully-fledged WordPress form plugin.

Initially, the free version is enough. A Few templates are included too. But for advanced features like multi-page forms, file uploads, conditional logic, surveys, polls, and more you can always check the WPForms full version.

9. Antispam Bee:

anti

Category: Comment Spam Protection

Antispam Bee is the plugin that eliminates or prevents spammy comments on your website. It is a free alternative to the popular paid comment protection plugin: Akismet. This plugin is available on the WordPress plugin repository. This is a trusted plugin with over 700,000 active users and moreover, it is ad-free.

If you are a new blogger and haven’t installed any comment protection plugin yet you will notice lots of people will try to spam your website comments just to increase the backlinks. 

This practice will hurt your SEO for sure. So before something like this happens, you should have installed a comment protection plugin like Antispam Bee on your website. 

Let me walk you through the features of this plugin:

Antispam Bee Features at a Glance:

  • Antispam Bee could able to block both spammy comments and trackbacks automatically.
  • Ads-free
  • 100% GDPR compliant
  • Option to block comments from specific countries
  • Commenter’s IP address validation
  • Those commenters previously marked as spammers will be directly blocked.
  • Admin would always be notified about incoming spam comments.
  • Spam indicators can be set for identifying spammy comments.
  • A separate dashboard to check spam comment statistics including spam detection rate, number of blocked spam comments.

10. Social Warfare:

social warfare

Category: Social Media Optimization

Social Warfare is the best plugin to add a sharing button to your website. Social sharing plugins are the perfect way to improve your social following as well as to gain social traffic for your website. This plugin comes in both free and premium versions. The free version allows you to add these social network buttons on your site: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, and StumbleUpon.

However, the pro version will unlock more social buttons and advanced features. In the Pro version, you will find extra buttons for these platforms: Reddit, Email, Tumblr, Yummly, WhatsApp, Pocket, Buffer, HackerNews, and Flipboard.

Although there are more plugins available with similar features, this is the unique one with its super-fast feature. Whatever the screen size or resolution of your content will look good as there are the most attractive share buttons. Moreover, you can choose the share button wherever needed i.e., above, below, both above and below the post, etc. It even has a premium version with more features.

Social Warfare (Free Version) Features at a Glance:

  • Multi-screen resolutions friendly
  • Gives you 4 options to configure the placements of Social buttons on a website: Above the post content, Below the post content, Both above and below the content, and manual placement.
  • Shortcodes are friendly. With shortcodes, you can place social share buttons anywhere on your website.
  • The normal buttons can be converted into floating share buttons.
  • Social Proof: Share counts and tweet counts can be shown to users. This is important to influence users to give you more shares. 
  • A “popular post widget” is included to show visitors your best-performing website post around social channels.
  • Gives you the option to create tweetable quotes within posts and pages.

11. AMP for WP:

AMP FOR WP

Category: Performance Optimization

AMP for WP free plugin is for those users who want to take their website speed and performance to the next level. I don’t know if you know about AMP technology or not, But AMP is the technology introduced by Google itself.

By enabling AMP mode on your site, your website pages on mobile devices will load much faster. In AMP mode only limited things (HTML, CSS & JS) will load up on a webpage. Hence the size of the page would be reduced drastically and the user’s experience a faster loading speed.

Well, setting up AMP on a website with coding is a terrible and time-consuming task. However, for WordPress users, there is a free plugin AMP for WP available to help users to enable AMP functionality on their sites. 

AMP for WP comes in both free and paid versions. The free version could be directly installed from the WordPress plugin repository.

The premium version is beyond possibilities. It gives you extra advanced features including AMP Cache, AMP WooCommerce integration, Advanced custom fields, Multilingual functionality, AMP layout & themes, tracking, etc.

We highly recommend having a look at the “AMP for WP” premium version to explore its possibilities. 

Note: We have already created a video where you can learn to set up AMP on your site with AMP for the WP plugin.

12. Internal Links Manager

Internal links manager - best free WordPress plugins

Category: On-Page SEO Optimization

Internal Links Manager is a plugin utilized for managing internal links within the website. Well, as your website content grows it becomes very difficult to manage internal links. The manual way of interlinking post by post is good in the beginning but later you will find this task very hectic and time-consuming.

To save time you’ll require a plugin like this. This plugin basically maintains the flow of internal links in your whole website. You just need to specify a keyword and the URL of the post that you want to assign with that keyword. That’s it. As soon as you make the changes, this plugin searches that keyword in all posts and gives an internal link to the URL it has assigned.

Don’t worry! You can control the frequency of internal links. This way your website’s On-Page SEO will be improved in no time. Trust me this internal linking strategy works like magic and further, it saves a huge amount of time.

13. WPCode

WPCode

Category: Website Development

WPCode is the most essential plugin I have ever seen. It saves you from website breakage. Well, there are numerous situations in which we are required to add the external script to either the website header or footer. For example during the time of Google Analytics installation or for enabling Facebook pixel tracking.

For non-coders, the manual process of adding the script to the website theme code could be dangerous. One mistake leads to website failure.

To avoid such situations, you can use this plugin for inserting any script (JS/HTML) into the website header, footer, or body without making any changes to the existing code. Also, you get the option to remove the added scripts at any time. 

14. Tidio – Live Chat Plugin

Tidio - best free WordPress plugins

Category: Automation/Business

Tidio is the free live chat plugin available for websites where live chat functionality is required to communicate and operate the business. This plugin is ranked number #1 in the chatbot plugins category.

Its free version has everything you need in the beginning: Unlimited chats & unlimited bots. The free version is directly accessible from the WP plugin repository. 

However, to ensure bot service for a longer time you might need to upgrade your plan because, in a free version, bots could only be able to communicate with 100 unique visitors. But the great thing is there would be no limitation on live chat. The live chat will last forever in a free version.

So if a live chat communication system is required on your business site, then Tidio chat is the best tool for you. Install it today.

15. Theme Check:

Theme Check:

Theme Check plugin will help you to check whether your theme is in the latest WordPress standards. It is highly recommended by many users to update the latest themes on their websites. To customize your themes, you need to install this Theme Check plugin.

16. Disable Comments:

Disable Comments

Disable comments are one of the best & free WordPress plugins. Are you facing a problem with a lot of comments on your WordPress website? Go with this plugin to hide such useless comments from your comment box.

This plugin helps you to disable comments by post type, for pages, attachments pages, etc. You can download this plugin from the WordPress plugin repository. However, you should use this plugin only if you don’t want any comments on your site. If you are looking to selectively disable comments, then don’t prefer this. You can also follow some techniques to remove comments without this plugin.

17. Redirection

Redirection free wordpress plugin

The redirection plugin will help you to set up 301 redirects to get them back to the original content next time.  This also keeps track of 401 errors. Redirection Plugin will also help you to track when somebody lands on your site. You can use this on your site with a few to thousand redirects. It is a top-notch plugin active for the last 10 years with Websites having more than 2 million active users.

Conclusion: Best Free WordPress Plugins

So that’s all for today. We have shared with you the most crucial free WP plugins that you will require from the beginning of your blogging or WordPress journey. We will update this list regularly.

If you have questions related to any plugin, let us know. Also, don’t forget to share any free plugins you have in mind. We will add and update the list.

I hope you like our List of Best Free WordPress Plugins. If you use any other free WordPress plugin, do share it in the comment section. Want more WordPress tips, follow BlogVwant on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Best Free WordPress Plugins – FAQs

How to download and install free WordPress plugins on a website?

Most of the plugins mentioned in this article are available in the WordPress plugin repository. To install free WP plugins, navigate to “Plugins > Add new” from the WordPress dashboard and search for the plugin you want to install.

What is the best free WordPress plugin for SEO?

Rankmath and Yoast SEO.

Which is the best speed optimization plugin for WordPress?

WP-Rocket.

Which is the best form builder free WordPress plugin?

WP-Forms

Which is the best image optimization plugin?

ShortPixel Image Optimizer

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