25 Best FREE WordPress Plugins

One of the best things about WordPress are the plugins that you can add to your site for extra features and functionality.

In this post, I’ve rounded up the best free WordPress plugins that every WordPress website should have. Let’s dig in!

Brizy Page Builder

The Brizy Page Builder plugin starts off this list strong. It’s a free plugin that makes it easy to build your website without ever touching a line of code and it offers quite a lot of features on the free plan.

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Elementor Page Builder

Another great page builder plugin is Elementor. It’s the plugin I use on my sites and aside from being easy to use, Elementor offers a lot of features for free. It’s one of the best ways to build your site without hiring a developer.

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Yoast SEO

Once you have your website up and running, focusing on SEO will help you get found in the search engines which means more organic traffic. It will automatically generate a sitemap, make it easy to configure the rich snippets, and more.

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Squirrly SEO

Squirrly SEO is a Yoast SEO alternative with more robust options for and improving your SEO strategy. It’s an advanced plugin best suited if you’re familiar with SEO and want to up your game when it comes to improving your site’s rank.

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UpdraftPlus

Backing up your website on a regular basis is crucial if you want to protect it. UpdraftPlus allows you to set up a daily, weekly or monthly backup schedule and then backs up your site accordingly.

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Wordfence

Wordfence is a must-have plugin to keep your website safe from hackers. It will add a firewall to your site and includes other features such as 2Factor Authentication, the ability to block certain IP addresses from accessing your site, and more.

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Sucuri

Sucuri is a great alternative to Wordfence if you’re just getting started with your site. It offers one-click hardening and it will use its remote scanner to scan your site for potential malware.

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iThemes Security

Another alternative to keep your website safe and secure is the iThemes Security plugin. It offers a lot of the same functionality as Wordfence but is easier to use.

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ShortPixel

ShortPixel will help you optimize the images for your site. It will compress the images that are already uploaded to your site as well as process and compress future images as they are uploaded.

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WPRocket

WPRocket is a premium caching plugin that helps you speed up your website. The plugin is very easy to use so it’s recommended to use it even if you’re a complete novice to load times optimization.

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WP Fastest Cache

If you’re on a budget but still want your website to load fast, check out the WP Fastest Cache plugin. It will create static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files and serve them to your visitors to make your site load faster.

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Autoptimize

Autoptimize is another free plugin that you can use in conjunction with WP Fastest Cache to speed up your site. The plugin will minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default, move and defer scripts to the footer, and more.

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WP Smush

WPSmush is a free plugin that will reduce the file size of existing images on your site and compress new ones as you upload them. You can batch process 50 images at once for free and upgrade to a paid plan if you need more than that.

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Imagify

Another plugin that will help you optimize your images is Imagify. The standout feature of this plugin is the ability to immediately convert the images into the WebP format which is optimized to load fast.

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Ninja Forms

Ninja Forms is a free contact form plugin that makes it easy to create robust contact forms. You can add more features such as the ability to integrate with your email list or accept payments on your form with paid extensions.

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WP Forms

WP Forms is a popular contact form plugin that offers a lot of the same functionality as Ninja Forms. The basic plugin is free and you can add more features by upgrading to a premium version.

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Kadence Blocks

If you want to extend the capabilities of the new Gutenberg editor, this plugin will come in handy. It adds custom blocks and options so you can create custom layouts and more engaging content.

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Gutenberg Blocks

Gutenberg Blocks is another great plugin that adds more functionality and extra blocks to Gutenberg. You can even get a complete starter website built with the Astra theme, Gutenber, and the Gutenberg Blocks plugin.

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One Signal

One Signal is a free plugin that you can use to send notifications whenever you publish a new post on your site to people who opt for those notifications. This is useful when you want to make sure those visitors come back and check out your content.

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Really Simple SSL

If you’ve installed SSL on your site and you’re getting the error that it wasn’t installed properly, this plugin will help. It will force SSL throughout your entire site to ensure your visitors feel safe.

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WP Mail SMTP

Sometimes, messages from your WordPress website may wind up in spam or not get delivered at all. This can cause quite a few problems, especially if your clients and customers are trying to contact you. This plugin will help improve the deliverability of emails coming from your WordPress website.

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Akismet

Akismet is a free plugin developed by Automattic that will eliminate spam from your site. You can set it up so all spam comments are immediately deleted or to mark them as spam and leave them for review.

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Tidio Chat

Tidio Chat makes it easy to add a live chat option to your site. You can talk to your site visitors in real time and send them to the most appropriate page or post on your site.

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Nextend Social Login

Make it easy for your users to login to your site with their social media accounts with the help of this plugin. They won’t have to worry about creating a WordPress account or an account for your site.

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Icegram

Use the Icegram plugin to add popups, announcement bars, sliders, and more. Thanks to this plugin, you will be able to easily grow your email list.

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Peepso

If you want to create a social media network on your site, Peepso is the plugin to consider. It offers a lot of functionality for free and it even has a theme that will make your social network look great.

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WooCommerce

If you’re looking to sell products from your site, WooCommerce is hands-down the best plugin out there.

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WP File Manager

Lastly, with the help of this plugin, you can easily download, upload, edit, and delete your website’s files without the need to login to the cPanel or install an FTP client on your computer.

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Video: 25 Best Free WordPress Plugins

Check out the video below where I explain each plugin more in-depth and show you how they work.