Almost every WordPress developer takes advantage of useful WordPress plugins to add functionality to WordPress Websites. There are thousands of free and premium, useful WordPress plugins available to download and use for the WordPress site. It depends on the individual requirements that what type of plugins shall be suitable for the website.
Table of Contents
Best Free & Useful WordPress Plugins
Below are the top free and useful WordPress plugins to be considered for your website development.
Most of the useful WordPress plugins are Freemium, which means most of the options are free and customizable. For extra options, it has to be purchased.
Search Engine Optimization Plugins
SEO might be the best and most consistent source of traffic for one’s website, but it’s not without its quirks. The constant process of optimizing your posts can sometimes take more time than actually writing the content. Therefore, selecting the right SEO useful WordPress plugin is important.
RankMath
If you always feel that you can do more on the SEO front for your website but don’t have the time, then Rank Math SEO is what you’re looking for.
Its host of intelligent features brings top SEO capabilities in your hands that were previously out of reach. The smart automation features give you the power of an entire SEO team with just a few clicks.
A well-thought-out design, powerful features, and years of development by the MyThemeShop squad make Rank Math SEO a game-changing SEO WordPress plugin that will level the SEO playing field in your favor to help increase traffic.
YOAST SEO
Since 2008 Yoast SEO has helped millions of websites worldwide to rank higher in search engines. Yoast SEO Free contains everything that you need to manage your SEO, and the Yoast SEO Premium WordPress plugin and its extensions unlock even more tools and functionality.
Image Optimization Plugins
Smush
Optimize images, turn on lazy load, resize, compress & improve your Google Page Speed with the incredibly powerful and 100% free WordPress image smusher, brought to you by the superteam at WPMU DEV!
And whether you spell it ‘optimise’ or ‘optimize’, Smush will compress images without a visible drop in quality.
Image optimization is the easiest way to make your site load super fast!
TinyJPG
Make your website faster by optimizing your JPEG, PNG, and WebP images. This plugin automatically optimizes all your images by integrating with the popular image compression services TinyJPG and TinyPNG.
After you upload an image to your WordPress site, each resized image is uploaded to the TinyJPG or TinyPNG service. Your image is analyzed to apply the best possible optimization. Based on the content of your image, an optimal strategy is chosen. The result is sent back to your WordPress site and will replace the original image with one smaller in size.
On average, JPEG images are compressed by 40-60% and PNG images by 50-80% without visible loss in quality. Your website will load faster for your visitors, and you’ll save storage space and bandwidth!
Translation Plugins
Gtranslate
Translate WordPress with GTranslate plugin uses Google Translate automatic translation service to translate WordPress site with Google power and make it multilingual. With 103 available languages, your site will be available to more than 99% of internet users.
Paid versions are fully SEO compatible, which will increase your international traffic and sales. This translates plugin is a budget multilingual WordPress solution that combines automatic and human translations to save money and is easy to implement.
TranslatePress
Experience a better way to translate your WordPress site and go multilingual, directly from the front-end using a visual translation interface.
The interface allows you to easily translate the entire page at once, including output from short codes, forms, and page builders. It also works out of the box with WooCommerce.
Built the WordPress way, TranslatePress – Multilingual is a GPL and self-hosted translation plugin, meaning you’ll own all your translations, forever. It’s the fastest way to create a bilingual or multilingual site.
Polylang
Polylang allows you to create a bilingual or multilingual WordPress site. You write posts, pages and create categories and post tags as usual, and then define the language for each of them. The translation of a post, whether it is in the default language or not, is optional.
Push Notification Plugins
Hustle
Hustle is the ultimate marketing plugin for building a mailing list and converting site traffic. The lead generation just got easier with simple setup opt-in forms, targeted marketing popups, and designer-made templates. Build a social following while you’re at it with Hustle’s diverse social sharing capabilities.
Hustle lets you easily grow your mailing list or display targeted ads across your site with popups, opt-ins, slide-ins, widgets, and short codes.
OneSignal
It is an easy way to increase user engagement. Use OneSignal to send visitors targeted push notifications so they keep coming back. It takes just a few minutes to install.
As a WordPress VIP Gold Partner, OneSignal has been rigorously tested to handle even the highest volume use cases with reliability and ease of use.
After setup, your visitors opt-in to receive push notifications when you publish a new post. Visitors receive these notifications even after they’ve left your website, thus driving re-engagement.
You can configure notification delivery at preset intervals, create user segments, and customize the opt-in process for visitors.
OneSignal’s free plan allows targeting up to 10,000 subscribers with push notifications.
Contact Form Plugins
Fluent Forms with Fluent CRM
A webform is one of the most effective ways you can collect leads without breaching any boundaries. FluentCRM includes forms that help you gain information about your prospect and add contacts who are already interested in what you have to offer.
We all know consent comes first when you are asking someone for their information. You need to make sure it was deliberate as well. When creating a form with FluentCRM, one click on the enable double opt-in checkbox will allow you to do that without any fuss. This keeps you safe from data breaches and adds interested people to your list.
Forminator
Not your typical form-making plugin. Forminator is the easy-to-use WordPress form builder plugin for every website and situation. It’s the easiest way to create any form – contact form, order form, payment form, email form, feedback widgets, interactive polls with real-time results, Buzzfeed-style “no wrong answer” quizzes, service estimators, and registration forms with payment options including PayPal and Stripe.
It’s the magical WordPress form builder for, well, everyone!
Forminator’s drag and drop visual builder makes it easy to set up and add forms to your WordPress website. Collect information, make your content interactive and generate more conversions with Forminator.
Caching Plugins
WP Super Cache
This plugin generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an HTML file is generated, your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
The static HTML files will be served to the vast majority of your users. 99% of your visitors will be served static HTML files. One cached file can be served thousands of times. Other visitors will be served custom cached files tailored to their visit. If they are logged in, or have left comments those details will be displayed and cached for them.
LiteSpeed Cache
LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress (LSCWP) is an all-in-one site acceleration plugin, featuring an exclusive server-level cache and a collection of optimization features.
LSCWP supports WordPress Multisite and is compatible with most popular plugins, including WooCommerce, bbPress, and Yoast SEO.
LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress is compatible with ClassicPress.
WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache
The WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache plugin helps you to make your website blazing fast by taking the website caching to the next level. This plugin will help you to cache not only the static files (e.g. CSS, JS, images, etc.) but also the HTML webpages generated by WordPress; both at server disk-level and to the global Cloudflare CDN.
Moreover, this plugin works completely out of the box, all you need to do is provide your Cloudflare Account’s API Key or API Token details and the plugin will do the rest. But if you are a curious/advanced user, there are detailed settings inside the plugin which you can tweak to make it work as you like.
But for most users, you don’t need to change any settings as this plugin will work perfectly with the default settings, out of the box.
Unlike most caching plugin out there which only provides disk caching (i.e. the cached webpages will be served from your webserver), this plugin will cache your webpages and static files to the Cloudflare CDN, one of the fastest CDN networks in the world.
Spam Protection Plugin
WP Cerber Security
Defends WordPress against hacker attacks, spam, Trojans, and malware. Mitigates brute-force attacks by limiting the number of login attempts through the login form, XML-RPC / REST API requests or using auth cookies. It tracks user and bad actors activity with flexible email, mobile and desktop notifications.
Stops spammers by using a specialized anti-spam engine. Uses Google reCAPTCHA to protect registration, contact, and comments forms. Restricts access with IP Access Lists. Monitors the website integrity with an advanced malware scanner and integrity checker.
Reinforces the security of WordPress with a set of flexible security rules and sophisticated security algorithms.
Akismet Spam Protection
Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
You’ll be prompted to get an Akismet.com API key to use it, once activated. Keys are free for personal blogs; paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites.
AntiSpam Bee
Say Goodbye to comment spam on your WordPress blog or website. Antispam Bee blocks spam comments and track backs effectively, without captchas and without sending personal information to third-party services. It is free of charge, ad-free, and 100% GDPR-compliant.
Cleantalk
No CAPTCHA, no questions, no animal counting, no puzzles, no math, and no spambots. Universal AntiSpam plugin.
Native spam protection for WordPress, JetPack comments, and any other comment plugins. The plugin moves spam comments to the SPAM folder, or you can set the option to ban spam comments silently. You can also enable the option in the plugin settings to auto-delete comments from the SPAM folder.
Security Plugins
Ithemes security
Using iThemes Security, you can identify and stop attacks on your website. Saving yourself the time and cost of repairing a hacked website.
The iThemes Security setup and onboarding experience is designed to allow anyone to secure their WordPress website in under 10 minutes, without needing a degree in cybersecurity.
Knowing that you have enabled all the right security settings for your website will leave you feeling like your site has never been more secure.
Wordfence security
Wordfence includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that was built from the ground up to protect WordPress. Threat Defense Feed arms Wordfence with the newest firewall rules, malware signatures, and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your website safe.
Rounded out by 2FA and a suite of additional features, Wordfence is the most comprehensive WordPress security solution available.
Analytics
Site Kit by Google
Site Kit is the official WordPress plugin from Google for insights about how people find and use your site. Site Kit is the one-stop solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make the site successful on the web.
It provides authoritative, up-to-date insights from multiple Google products directly on the WordPress dashboard for easy access, all for free.
GA Google
This plugin enables Google Analytics for your entire WordPress site. Lightweight and fast with plenty of great features.
Connects Google Analytics to WordPress
Supports Universal Analytics / analytics.js
Supports Global Site Tag / gtag.js
Supports Google Analytics 4
MonsterInsights
With over 3 million active installs, MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.
We believe that it’s easy to double your traffic and sales when you know exactly how people find and use your website. MonsterInsights shows you the analytics and stats that matter, so you can grow your business with confidence.
At MonsterInsights, we make it “effortless” to properly connect your WordPress site with Google Analytics, so you can start making data-driven decisions to grow your business.
Unlike other Google Analytics plugins, MonsterInsights allow you to enable all advanced Google Analytics tracking features with just a few clicks (no need to hire a developer).
The best part is that MonsterInsights comes with an analytics dashboard for WordPress that shows you actionable analytics reports right inside your WordPress dashboard. We have created customized reports that eliminate the fluff and only show you the stats that matter, so you can see exactly what’s working and what’s not!
Simply put, MonsterInsights is the most complete Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that’s both EASY and POWERFUL.
That’s why millions of small businesses and top companies like Microsoft, Bloomberg, FedEx, Yelp, Subway, etc. use MonsterInsights to set up Google Analytics on their WordPress sites.
Backups / Migration
All In One Wp-Migration
Introduced in 2013 and used by over 60 million websites, All-in-One WP Migration is verifiably one of WordPress’ most trusted and utilized plugins for moving websites with absolute ease.
Intently built with the non-technical user in mind, All-in-One WP Migration comes loaded with newbie-friendly functions that allow you to migrate your WordPress website with little to no technical knowledge or experience.
Duplicator
Duplicator is the most powerful migrator available. It enables you to:
Move, migrate or clone a WordPress site between domains or hosts with zero downtime. Pull down a live site to localhost for development. Transfer a WordPress site from one host to another. Manually back up a WordPress site or parts of a site.
Duplicate a live site to a staging area or vice versa. Bundle up an entire WordPress site for easy reuse or distribution, and perform a full WordPress migration without struggling with messy import/export SQL scripts.
UpDraft Plus
It simplifies backups and restoration. It is the world’s highest-ranking and most popular scheduled backup plugin, with over three million currently-active installs. Back up your files and database backups into the cloud and restore with a single click!
Backup into the cloud directly to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email. The paid version also backs up to Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, and WebDAV.
Page Builder Plugins
Elementor
Introducing a WordPress website builder, with no limits of design. A website builder that delivers high-end page designs and advanced capabilities, never before seen on WordPress.
Whether you’re a web designer looking for a way to achieve pixel-perfect websites, a marketer looking to get online fast, or a developer who wants to expand their capabilities, Elementor’s website builder has what you need – an intuitive drag-and-drop Editor, advanced design features, and a full open-source approach.
Instant reaction was a key feature we wanted to achieve. And we did. Instant drag & drop website builder, instant live edit, instant page load. This makes the interface fun and easy to work with, as well as reduces the time it takes to design.
Never again, work on the backend and guess what the frontend will look like. With Elementor, you’re editing the site live, and simultaneously see exactly what it looks like. Elementor features live design & inline editing, so the whole process of writing and designing is done directly on the page, with no need to press update or go to preview mode. It also works perfectly with or without Gutenberg.
With Elementor’s unique features, you can create websites that have that certain ‘designer touch’. Among our design features are Box Shadows, Background Overlays, Hover Effects, Headline Effects, Animations, Shape Dividers, Gradient Backgrounds, and much more.
Beaver Builder
Beaver Builder is a flexible drag and drops page builder that works on the front end of your WordPress website. Whether you’re a beginner or a professional, you’re going to love taking control of your website. Stop writing HTML or wrestling with confusing short codes. With Beaver Builder, building beautiful, professional WordPress pages is as easy as dragging and dropping.
Beaver Builder is designed to work with almost any WordPress theme. Try Beaver Builder on your existing website today, or consider upgrading and using Beaver Builder’s outstanding framework theme (available in Pro and Agency packages) for your next project.
Every part of a Beaver Builder layout or landing page is fully responsive and looks gorgeous on any screen size. Responsive web design has never been easier.
Wp Page Builder
WP Page Builder is a free drag and drop WordPress page builder to create websites easily. Whether you’re an experienced developer or just a beginner, you can build stunning websites independently with this tool. Create beautiful web pages effortlessly using the intuitive live page composer without coding in minutes. No design experience needed.
When you have the perfect tool in hand, you can go beyond your imagination. WP Page Builder is such a web page composer plugin that empowers you to create a great website easily. Seeing the result, you’ll just say “WOW!”. There are lots of design elements such as built-in page layouts, shape dividers, design blocks, and many more inside WP Page Builder. You can build a classy professional website with this tool that can attract the maximum number of visitors.
WP Page Builder is so lightweight, thus takes remarkably less time than all other counterpart tools to create a stunning and functional site. The plugin is well-coded in order to ensure as little run-time as possible. Therefore, it takes almost no time for a command to be executed while building web pages with it.
You don’t need to hire any designer or developer to build professional websites. You can do it all by yourself. It saves you a lot of money and time at the same time. Just use all available elements of WP Page Builder and capitalize the functionalities.
E-Commerce Plugin
WooCommerce
Whether you’re launching a business, taking brick-and-mortar retail online, or developing sites for clients, use WooCommerce for a store that powerfully blends content and commerce. WooCommerce is the world’s most popular open-source eCommerce solution.
Core platform is free, flexible, and amplified by a global community. The freedom of open-source means you retain full ownership of your store’s content and data forever.
Built-in tools and popular integrations help you efficiently manage your business operations. Many services are free to add with a single click. Developers can use WooCommerce to create, customize, and scale a store to meet a client’s exact specifications, making enhancements through extensions or custom solutions.
Unlike hosted eCommerce solutions, WooCommerce store data is future-proof; should you wish to migrate to a different platform, you’re free to export all your content and take your site wherever you choose. No restrictions.
Easy Digital Downloads
Easy Digital Downloads is a complete eCommerce solution for selling digital products on WordPress. Extensible, adaptable, and open source — Easy Digital Downloads is created with developers in mind.
Do you prefer an eCommerce solution that is simple and intuitive or one which is rich in features? Too often, that tradeoff is one online seller needs to make. Fortunately, Easy Digital Downloads manages to be easy enough for eCommerce beginners to configure without sacrificing any important functionality.
Community Plugins
BuddyPress
Are you looking for modern, robust, and sophisticated social network software? BuddyPress is a suite of components that are common to a typical social network and allows for great add-on features through WordPress’s extensive plugin system.
Aimed at site builders & developers, BuddyPress is focused on ease of integration, ease of use, and extensibility. It is deliberately powerful yet unbelievably simple social network software, built by contributors to WordPress.
Members can register on your site to create user profiles, have private conversations, make social connections, create and interact in groups, and much more. Truly a social network in a box, BuddyPress helps you build a home for your company, school, sports team, or other niche community.
Courses (LMS)
LifterLMS
LifterLMS is a powerful WordPress LMS plugin that makes it easy to create, sell, and protect engaging online courses and training based membership websites. LifterLMS is a complete course building an LMS solution that works with any well-coded WordPress theme, modern WordPress blocks, and all the popular WordPress page builders (like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, Gutenberg, etc.).
As an engaged WordPress community member, LifterLMS actively encourages and helps other great plugins integrate with LifterLMS like Affiliate WP, Monster Insights, WP Fusion, the most popular form plugins, GamiPress, Astra Pro, the Course Scheduler, and many more.
You can also connect your WordPress LMS website to 1,500+ other apps via Zapier. LifterLMS is one of only 11 WordPress plugins listed in the Zapier app directory.
As an innovative self-hosted LMS platform solution, LifterLMS strikes a beautiful balance in being an all-in-one LMS solution while also integrating with other best-of-breed technologies relevant to course creators and membership site owners.
TutorLMS
Tutor is a complete, feature-packed, and robust WordPress LMS plugin to create & sell courses online easily. All the features of this learning management system hit all the checkpoints for a full-fledged online course marketplace.
You can create challenging and fun quizzes, interactive lessons, powerful reports, and stats making Tutor potentially the best free WordPress LMS plugin. Manage, administer and monetize your education, online school, and online courses without having to write a single line of code.
Tutor LMS is a completely free WordPress LMS plugin with premium high-quality addons that you can add to empower the core plugin more! This WordPress LMS plugin is lightweight with addons to enable certificates, e-mail notifications, shopping carts and so much more!
Create, customize, manage, and sell online courses by building a functional e-learning website with this free LMS plugin for WordPress. Get Tutor, the most advanced and powerful WordPress online course plugin.
Create courses with their details like videos, attachments, excerpt, additional data, the benefit of the course, requirement, topic, summary, announcement, and video banners in this WordPress LMS plugin. Have lessons under course and attach video and other attachments to each lesson. Tutor, the advanced WordPress LMS plugin lets you present courses on an intuitive user interface with all required options to offer a top-notch learning system.
Custom Post Types Plugins
Pods
With Pods, you can create entirely new content types and settings pages.
Let Pods help you grow your development and site building skills so that you can manage content beyond the standard WordPress Posts & Pages.
Create any type of content that you want — small or large — we’ve got you covered. Every content type created with Pods gets all the love it needs to grow up big and strong. You’ll get an easy-to-use interface that lets you manage field groups, custom fields, and how your content type will look or function.
Advanced Custom Fields
Advanced Custom Fields turns WordPress sites into a fully-fledged content management system by giving you all the tools to do more with your data.
Use the Advanced Custom Fields plugin to take full control of your WordPress edit screens & custom field data.
Add fields on demand. Our field builder allows you to quickly and easily add fields to WP edit screens with only the click of a few buttons!
Add them anywhere. Fields can be added all over WP including posts, users, taxonomy terms, media, comments, and even custom options pages!
Show them everywhere. Load and display your custom field values in any theme template file with our hassle-free developer friendly functions!
Custom Post Type UI
Custom Post Type UI provides an easy to use interface for registering and managing custom post types and taxonomies for your website.
While CPTUI helps solve the problem of creating custom post types, displaying the data gleaned from them can be a whole new challenge. That’s why we created Custom Post Type UI Extended.
Social Sharing Plugins
Social media plugin which let’s you add share icons for RSS, Email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, ‘Share’ (covering 200+ other social media platforms) and upload custom share icons of your choice.
This free plugin has a lot to offer.
Super Socializer
Integrate Social Login, Social Share, and Social Comments at your website easiest and simplest possible way.
Enables users to login to your website through their existing IDs on popular social networks.
Enables users to share your website content over popular sharing networks resulting in increased user traffic.
Enables users to comment on your website using their Social Media accounts.
Every time a user logs in, the plugin fetches the profile data of the user and store that in your WordPress database.
Social Login Plugin
Nextend
Nextend Social Login is a professional, easy-to-use, and free WordPress plugin. It lets your visitors register and login to your site using their social profiles (Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.) instead of forcing them to spend valuable time filling out the default registration form. Besides that, they don’t need to wait for validation emails or keep track of their username and password anymore.
Nextend Social Login seamlessly integrates with your existing WordPress login and registration form. Existing users can add or remove their social accounts on their WordPress profile page. A single user can attach as many social accounts as they want, to allow them to log in with Facebook, Google, or Twitter.
Booking Plugins
Amelia Booking
Amelia Lite is a free appointment and event booking plugin that allows setting up a fully-featured automated booking system on your WordPress website. Businesses and individuals who depend on stable appointment booking processes or those who want to manage events on their WordPress websites can rely on this tool.
Amelia Lite is made with enterprise-level businesses in mind ensuring a smooth and slick user experience. All front-end and back-end elements were designed with the mobile-first concept in mind, so all the admin and customer interfaces are perfectly responsive.
No coding or design skills are required to embed Amelia into your website. It is easy to customize booking forms to your branding and start accepting bookings professionally while sending confirmations and avoiding double bookings. Configuring Amelia to receive your first appointment through WordPress is a 5-minute job.
Bookly
Bookly is a free scheduling plugin for WordPress that allows accepting online bookings on your website and automating your reservation system. Manage your booking calendar, services, client base, save time and money – all in one place. Join more than 50,000 businesses all around the world that have already automated their online booking system!
Bookly is designed to grow your online sales and make easy appointments. This is a one-stop shop for any business from hair salons or photography to wealth management and transportation. You can start easily with the free version of Bookly and once your business scales you can operate ultimate scheduling software with the paid version available with the Bookly Pro add-on, and various add-ons.
Membership Plugins
Paid Membership Pro
Paid Memberships Pro gives you all the tools you need to start, manage, and grow your membership site. The plugin is designed for premium content sites, online course or LMS and training-based memberships, clubs and associations, members-only product discount sites, subscription box products, paid newsletters, and more.
Users can select a membership level, complete checkout, and immediately become members of your site. You decide what content your member can access. Members can log in, view payments, update billing info, or cancel their account directly on your site.
Extend the features of your membership site or integrate with third-party services through our library of over 65 Add Ons.
Ultimate Members
Ultimate Member is the #1 user profile & membership plugin for WordPress. The plugin makes it a breeze for users to sign-up and become members of your website.
The plugin allows you to add beautiful user profiles to your site and is perfect for creating advanced online communities and membership sites. Lightweight and highly extendible, Ultimate Member will enable you to create almost any type of site where users can join and become members with absolute ease.
