There are heaps of free WordPress plugins that can provide helpful functionality to your WordPress site. Plugins can help you create better content, help in marketing your site more effectively and keep it loading quickly. There are various free WordPress plugins that provide a better personal experience. Before selecting the WordPress plugins, you can divide available plugins into four categories and then select the plugin as per the need. These categories can be divided into marketing and SEO, creating various types of content, performance, security, and maintenance, and advanced users who like tinkering. Plugins can help the website to be SEO friendly, robust, secure, and complete with all the things that are required in modern websites.
Here are some of the best free WordPress Plugins available for the website in 2021. These plugins include speed optimization plugins, security plugins, and social media plugins.
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO helps in creating better content and improves the ranking on the search results. This plugin helps in creating the content which is useful and also SEO-friendly. It helps in gaining the trust and sustain ranking also known as sustainable SEO.
2. Everest Forms
The contact page on the website is considered to be one of the fundamental pages. Everest Forms helps to create contact forms and comes with the drag and drop interface and also helps in building contact forms quickly and easily. It includes general fields along with the advanced fields that can be easily dragged and dropped to create forms.
3. MonsterInsights Lite
With the MonsterInsights Lite, the user can connect the WordPress website with the Google Analytics account. This helps the user to see how site visitors find the website and what they do while being there on the website. With this, the user can capitalize on what site visitors like on the website that encourages them to come back.
4. Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML sitemap provides an easy way to create an XML sitemap for search engines like Bing, Google, Ask.com, and Yahoo to index and crawl. By making it easy for crawlers to see how content is organized and update the search rankings when the content is updated on the site. Google XML Sitemaps plugin help to boost the website’s SEO significantly.
5. Jetpack
Jetpack is the plugin by the team behind the WordPress software. Jetpack helps with website security, traffic growth, website performance, website appearance, image optimization and more. It enhances distribution by automatically sharing published content with third-party services like search engines, thereby, increasing the traffic. The most important thing is that it helps in protecting the website by force attacks and monitors the website every five minutes for the downtime and quickly notifies if any issue is found.
6. WooCommerce
WooCommerce plugin can help the user to sell anything on the website. The plugin can be used in case of creating an online store. It includes various features to help the growth of the online store. Multiple options can also be provided to the user through the online store. Meanwhile, WooCommerce also provides extendable shipping options, including local pickups, free shipping, flat rates, and others.
7. Lazy Load
The speed of the website plays an important role in enhancing user experience and Google search rankings. Lazy Loads help to load website images only when images become visible to the site visitor. This plugin reduces the HTTP requests that are made while improving the loading time of the page. Lazy Loads works on post content, thumbnails, iFrame, and avatars images.
8. Nivo Slider
Nivo Slider plugin is available in the free as well as premium version. This plugin makes it easy to add image carousel, post sliders, and slideshows. It comes with an intuitive design structure and is user-friendly. The sliders created using this plugin can also be used as the homepage slider.
9. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus plugin is the free backup solution that helps in scheduling automatic backup for the database and files of the website. It also stores the backups in the cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc., and can restore the website easily and quickly using the restore button.
10. W3 Total Cache
Website speed is the most important SEO ranking factor to boost site conversations, rankings, and site traffic. W3 Total Cache plugin can help in serving cached and compressed files to the visitors on the website while improving overall site speed and minimizing load time.