In this article, I am going to share a list of top 10 must have free WordPress plugins for every website and blog. You can install and choose your favorite plugins from this list on your website.
JetPack is one of the most widely used WordPress plugins. This is a free plugin, which offers more than 30+ modules. You can enable or disable any module from the General, Engagement, Security, Appearance and Writing categories.
Better Writing Experience You can add a contact form very easily. Enable MarkDown and Spelling and Grammar module for better writing experience. With Post by Email feature, You can publish new blog posts by sending an email.
Video Hosting: If you want to publish videos on your website, You can Upgrade your plan to activate Video Hosting on your website. This is one of the easiest way to upload ad-free and unbranded videos to your site. You get stats on video playback and shares and the player is lightweight and responsive.
Tiled Galleries and Carousal: If you publish a lot of images on your blog, With Carousel and Tiled Galleries feature, any standard WordPress galleries or single images you have embedded in posts or pages will launch a full-screen photo browsing experience with comments and EXIF metadata.
Security Scanning and BackUps: Never compromise on security of your blog. JetPack can automatically backup and monitor your website. The Basic plan is starting from $3.50 per month only and we are also using this plan to backup JustLearnWP.
Earn Money With JetPack JetPack Ads is a good paid feature to earn extra money from your blog. This is a premium feature, You will have to upgrade your plan.
There are so many other features available such as SEO Tools, Google Analytics, Site Verification, Mobile theme, social sharing and more.
It is a free WordPress plugin to add two-factor authentication to your WordPress site for better login security. The Google Authenticator plugin for WordPress lets you use two-factor authentication using the Google Authenticator app for Android/iPhone/Blackberry.
With this enable, You will have to type an extra code that you see on your Google Authenticator app. Otherwise, You won’t be able to login to your site. This is great to secure login page from hackers.
Lazy loading images and videos is a very popular modern method to improve page load times. This free plugin is using jQuery.sonar to only load an image when it’s visible in the viewport.
This plugin is an amalgamation of code written by the WordPress.com VIP team at Automattic, the TechCrunch 2011 Redesign team, and Jake Goldman (10up LLC). WrdPress.Org
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Sumo Formerly SumoMe
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Most blogs are designed for hit-and-run readers. People find your blog, read your article, and leave. Wouldn’t it be nice if some of those people subscribed or shared your amazing post? SumoMe
Sumo is one the best free WordPress plugin that provides free tools you need to grow your subscribers and social sharing.
With different email signup forms (PopUps, Welcome Mat) Sumo plugin makes it very simple and easy for your readers to join your email list, share your blog posts on Twitter, FaceBook, Pinterest and other social networking websites, and optimize with analytics.
With caching enables, Your website will load much faster. This free and one of the most widely used caching 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.
More than 1+ million websites are already using this caching plugin. Speed of websites really matters for blog readers and search engines as well.
You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars, just install and activate this free plugin to make your website fast.
If you are going to publish content on your personal, business or company blog, never publish a blog post without optimizing it for Search Engines.
What is the easiest method to optimize a blog post for WordPress users. An SEO plugin. There are many free WordPress SEO plugins available and you can install any plugin f your choice.
We personally use, Yoast SEO to optimize every blog we publish. Free plugin has a lot of good features to optimize every blog post for better search engine rankings.
JetPack has a contact form module but if you don’t want to use that one, You can install Contact Form 7 the most popular and widely used free contact form plugin for WordPress.
With this free contact form plugin, You can create and manage multiple contact forms for different pages. Additional add-ons are also available, which lets you enhance the functionality of Contact Form 7.
Why should your users prove that they’re humans by filling out captchas? Let bots prove they’re not bots with the LH Zero Spam plugin. LH Zero Spam
Akismet is the most popular AntiSpam plugin for WordPress but I really hate Akismet. It can detect spam comments but you have to delete all the spam comments manually from the queue and sometimes it makes WordPress dashboard really very slow. Sometimes, I was unable to delete spam comments.
If you have enabled comments on your blog, You should install LH Zero Spam plugin and believe me, I have found this the best plugin to reduce the spam comments from dozens to zero.
If you are already using Akismet or any other plugin to block spam, just give this plugin a try and believe me, You will never use any other anti-spam plugin.
At JustLearnWP, We are using JetPack’s personal plan with VaultPress for daily backups and we are really satisfied with the service. But if you want to use a free plugin, UpDraftPlus is a good choice.
This free plugin offers complete manual or scheduled backups to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, FTP, SFTP, email and other services.
Google Analytics is a very popular free service to find out that how many people are visiting your blog daily and what are they doing. You can easily find out your popular content and other stats.
Google Analytics WD is a free plugin to easily connect Google Analytics and WorPress site. You will be able to see all the necessary stats within WordPress dashboard, It means no need to login to your Google Analytics account.
Become a Better Writer with Grammarly – Bonus Appliation
Install Free Grammarly Extension for Chrome
That’s all
This is our list of Top 10 Must Have Free WordPress Plugins for 2023. You can install these free plugin to make your website safe, secure, better and easy to manage.
Thanks for sharing.
I want to add one more plugin to your list for security enhancement which is User Activity Log. It helps you monitor and keep track of all the activities occurs on the admin side also informs you about WordPress core updates, post updates, user activities etc. It notified when a particular user is logged in, so you can track all users activity on your website easily. Check out here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/user-activity-log/
Hi Folks,
i work as security specialist for an Italian hosting company and my job is to play with penetration testing and hacked sites.
I recommend a new WordPress plugin named “WP Security Optimizer” (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-security-optimizer/).
It prevent hackers to sabotage your rankings in search engines. Elude attackers that exploits your website and fight Negative SEO attacks made using Acunetix and WPScan and other penetration testing toolkit.
Implement features preventing users to be enumerated, and in particular enumeration of installed themes (wpscan –enumerate t) and plugins (wpscan –enumerate vp), generating false positives and forwarding an alert to the site administrator when it detects a scan. And finally, can verify corrupted and infected PHP files stored into “wp-admin” and “wp-includes” folders. Hope it’s useful