And if you are not sure how to get the suitable WordPress plugins for your site, let me give you a hand. Here are top 15 best free WordPress plugins that will help you to build a complete and powerful website. Especially, all of these WordPress plugins are totally free to download, utilize and update.
1. BackUpWordPress
BackUpWordPress is a free WordPress backup plugin that will back up your entire site including your database and all your files on a schedule that suits you. It allows you to create different schedules for your database and files.
This plugin is free, but you will need to purchase the premium version, if you want to store your WordPress backups to a cloud storage service.
2. Jetpack by WordPress.com
Jetpack is a popular plugin in the WordPress repository with more than 13 million download times. This plugin developed by Automattic and other guru folks will supercharge your site with a collection of powerful features, such as custom CSS, carousel, site stats, mobile theme, email subscriptions, contact forms, social networking, spam-free comments, and more.
The latest version of Jetpack introduced support for Multi-site. It means that you will have ability to manage all multi connections in the network admin.
3. Akismet
Akismet is by far the best anti-spam plugin available for WordPress. With more than 27 million downloads, Akismet become the most popular plugin.
It checks your site's comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and then lets you review the spam it catches in the "Comments" section of the WordPress admin area.
In fact, this plugin has pre-installed in every newer WordPress theme, however it's not activated by default, you still need some steps to make it ready to use.
4. bbPress
If you want to build an online forum for your WordPress site, bbPress is the best forum plugin for WordPress. It is developed the WordPress way, utilizes the same WordPress core and follows the same coding standards as WordPress. This plugin integrates with any WordPress theme without any painful modifications.
The plugin supports various languages, such as: Català, English (Australia), Español, Italiano, Nederlands, and 5 other languages. It also has nearly a 100+ plugins available to do just about anything you want. As it does not have a lot of bloat, bbPress is fast and lightweight.
5. WordPress SEO by Yoast
This plugin is one of the most favorite plugins for me. WordPress SEO by Yoast is a free SEO plugin for WordPress site which enables you to improve your WordPress SEO, write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site.
WordPress SEO forces you to choose a "Focus Keyword" when you are writing your articles and makes sure that you use the focus keyword everywhere. Besides, it also provides some other basic functions like XML sitemaps of your WordPress blog, RSS Optimization, Social integration, Defining Meta Description and changing the title and lots of other advanced things like canonical URLS, clean up header section, etc.The average rating of plugin 4.7 out of 5 after thousand of reviews.
6. Disqus comments
One of the easiest, most beautiful and widely utilized commenting platforms is Disqus. This commenting system works right off your standard WordPress setup, allowing you to manage all comments neatly and quickly through the Disqus admin area or straight from the comments section on your blog.
With a powerful set of built in features, this WordPress comment plugin will help you improve comments Section and draw your readers closer to you.
7. Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin provides you with easiest options to build XML sitemap dynamically. Once you installed this plugin, you'll be required to create a sitemap for the first time, then the plugin will keep maintaining the site map itself.
With such a sitemap, it's much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The Google XML sitemaps plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally, it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
8. Google Analytics by Yoast
Google Analytics by Yoast is the great way to track your visitors on your sites. Once this plugin is installed to your site, you'll then be able to use all the Google Analytics functions from within your WordPress site, even tracking error pages, outbound clicks and downloads.
9. Share Buttons by AddToAny
This useful plugin helps people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, Reddit, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, and well over 100 more sharing and social bookmarking sites.
Moreover, this social sharing plugin WordPress comes with a lot of customization options that let you optimize your site's blog posts for the best social sharing engagement.
10. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is the best free contact form for WordPress that I've use so far. It's also the most popular free forms plugin with more than 23 million downloads in WP.org.
The plugin is easy to use. It can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
11. Page Builder by SiteOrigin
Page Builder by SiteOrigin is the most popular drap-n-drop page creation plugin for WordPress. It makes it easy to create responsive column based content, using the widgets you know and love.
Your content will accurately adapt to all mobile devices, ensuring your site is mobile-ready. This free WordPress page builder is easy to learn, so you'll can easily build beautiful, responsive content without any coding knowledge. Page Builder works with standard WordPress widgets and also provides you some useful widgets, so all you need to do is to find the widget you love and drop it into the position you want.
12. Ninja Form
Ninja Forms is another popular free plugin. It has an easy-to-use drag and drop interface and allows you to create contact forms, email collection forms, or any other form you need on your site.
Some of the plugin's features include optional Ajax, new form preview mode, styling and layout options, import and export options, anti-spam field, re-usable fields, customizable field options and easy form creation. For developers, Ninja Forms includes lots of hooks and filters so you can make the most of the plugin's powerful form building framework. because the plugin is free, you'll need to pay for premium add-ons for more additional functions. Besides. It's easy to integrate Ninja Forms with PDF Form Submission, Stripe, PayPal and MailChimp.
13. WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart
This plugin offers a straightforward way that allows you to sell products or services online in one click from your WordPress site. Once this plugin is installed, you can include this button on any post, page or sidebar you want. The shopping cart shows users what they currently have in the cart and allows them to change quantity or remove the items. With this plugin, you don't have to go through a third-party provider. Just install the button, sync it with your PayPal account and your online store is ready to go.
This WordPress Paypal shopping cart plugin is a lightweight solution, so it doesn't slow down your site.
14. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
This free related posts plugin gives you a list of posts or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.
It supports both thumbnail and textual display of related posts. The algorithm for determining whether a post is related is relatively sophisticated. It takes into consideration the body content, title, tags, and categories assigned to the piece.
15. Mailpoet Newsletters
Mailpoet Newsletter is a simple and easy-to-use free newsletter Plugin for WordPress. Its highly powerful drag and drop newsletter editor makes very convenient to create Newsletter. It even lets you drop posts, images, and as well as social icons in your newsletter. With this plugin, you can send newsletters, post notifications or autoresponders from WordPress easily, and beautifully.
Hope this article helped you find the best useful plugins for your WordPress site. Building a robust site requires patience and consistency among other technical requirements and believe me these plugins will help you alot for sure. We wish you have great experience with them.
If you liked this article and found it helpful, so please subscribe to our blog for more WordPress recommendations and tutorials.
Thanks for reading!