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April 25, 2014

Top 10 Free WordPress Plugins

Top 10 Free & Useful WordPress Plugins for Your Website


There are a ton of WordPress plugins out there, which makes it hard to pick which ones to use to supercharge your website or blog. We browsed through tons of plugins to help you find the best free WordPress plugins. These plugins do everything from increase your site security to making your site look and function better.

Meet the Top 10 WordPress Plugins

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1. WordPress SEO by Yoast:

WordPress is already a great platform in terms of SEO performance, but you can always find ways to increase where your site ranks in search engines. That’s where this plugin comes in — it will help you optimize your pages with suggestions that will ideally help you climb up the search engine rankings.

Created in 2008, WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs. Not only does it help automate technical SEO tasks such as optimizing meta tags, implementing canonical tags, and generating XML sitemaps, but also the plugin generates actionable advice based on site performance data.

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2. Akismet:

This plugin is an absolute must-have because it makes it so that your blog doesn’t get swamped with spam comments. You can manage and review the spam in your WordPress admin dashboard so that your site experience is spam free.

Akismet ranks as one of our best WordPress plugins because it doesn’t stop with spam comments. The tool can also check contact form submissions against its global spam database to pinpoint potential problems. In practice, this reduces the risk that malicious content will ever reach your blog.

3. WPForms: Our list of free WordPress plugins wouldn’t be complete without this drag-and-drop form builder for WordPress sites. From contact to feedback, subscription, and payment form templates, WPForms has you covered. You can also create your own form from scratch using the WPForms Challenge tutorial that teaches you how to build a form in less than five minutes.

4. JetPack: Up, up, and away! JetPack is all about optimizing your site to improve security, speed, and growth. Equipped with 24/7 automatic site security, you can rest easy that your data is well defended. JetPack’s content delivery network (CDN), meanwhile, automatically optimizes page media to decrease page load times.

5. WooCommerce: WooCommerce is the world’s most popular eCommerce solution and a great addition to any site that sells products or services online. Easily create beautiful storefronts, build better shopping carts, and customize product pages with WooCommerce.

6. MonsterInsights — Google Analytics for WordPress::

This plugin gives you an easy way to easily connect your Google Analytics account to your WordPress site.

MonsterInsights makes our list of free WordPress plugins because it can integrate and leverage data sets from multiple sources. For example, you can connect data from Google Analytics, WPForms, WooCommerce, and Yoast.

7. Elementor:

Elementor ranks among the best WordPress plugins for design. Powering more than 10 million sites worldwide, Elementor lets you build pixel-perfect designs with real-time page building and inline drag-and-drop editing. Plus, this open-source solution comes with a host of included widgets and features to boost your site’s impact.

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8. Contact Form 7: Contact Form 7 makes it easy to design and deploy a contact form on your website to help visitors get in touch. But it doesn’t stop there. This tool ranks as one of the best WordPress plugins because it’s designed to pinpoint and eliminate spam using solutions such as CAPTCHA. 

9. Wordfence Security: Defend your site with Wordfence security. This WordPress firewall and security scanner includes a Web Application Firewall (WAF) along with real-time IP blocklists and an integrated malware scanner to keep your site safe.

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10. W3 Total Cache:

W3 Total Cache helps increase the performance of your website by making it run much more quickly. This means your users will have a better experience on your site and will be more likely to return. This plugin can also help boost search engine rankings for sites that use SSL or are mobile friendly and reduce bandwidth usage by up to 80% by minifying HTML, CSS, and JS files.

Take your blog to the next level with these free WordPress plugins. From design to development to security and speed, these plugins put the power in your hands.

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