WordPress is one of the most used website-building platforms in the world. It’s been used by businesses of all sizes, individuals, and private groups whenever they need to make a website.
A key feature of WordPress that makes it so loved by website developers is its ability to add endless plugins and themes to change how the platform works.
There are thousands of developers constantly making and updating WordPress plugins. With so much variety, it can be hard to decide which plugins can be deemed essential. We’ve compiled a list of our top 10 most helpful WordPress plugins that you can download and install on your website for free.
10 Most Useful Free WordPress Plugins In 2022
- Yoast SEO
- Contact Form 7
- Redirection
- Better Search Replace
- Duplicate Page
- Password Protect
- Converter For Media | Convert WebP and AVIF Images
- Litespeed Cache
- Really Simple SSL
- Header and Footer Scripts
While these are our top 10 favourite free WordPress plugins, there are thousands of other plugins available for you to test out and try for yourself. Let’s go into detail about what makes each of these WordPress plugins so great!
#1 Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most used WordPress plugins in the world for a good reason. Their free plugin gives you everything you need to take care of your website’s SEO. This includes 6 free courses and plenty of tools to improve your website’s technical and on-page SEO metrics.
The Yoast SEO plugin can help you create internal links, manage your title tags, help you improve your meta descriptions, generate XML sitemaps, create structured data, analyze the keyword quality of your posts, and much more. With all these features being offered for free, it is clear why millions of website developers choose Yoast SEO as their favourite WordPress plugin. For many, it is the first plugin they install when building a new website.
While Yoast SEO does offer a premium version with even more features, the free version is more than enough to take your website’s SEO to the next level and climb the search engine ranks fast. Some of the features available in Yoast’s Premium version are also available from some of the other plugins mentioned in our list, but for free.
#2 Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is a free WordPress plugin that lets you create and set up multiple contact forms on your website. This plugin makes creating email forms easy. It is also one of the oldest WordPress plugins that still gets regular updates and is constantly being improved with new anti-spam support, including CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filters. Contact Form 7 is so popular that over 5 million websites use it to manage their contact forms worldwide.
Using this WordPress plugin, you can quickly implement forms to be filled out and sent to your email address in minutes.
A key benefit of using Contact Form 7 over other contact form plugins, is that plenty of free add-on plugins integrate with it and allow you to use HTML and CSS in each contact form. This added flexibility makes Contact Form 7 our top recommended free WordPress contact form plugin.
#3 Redirection
No website would be complete without a redirection plugin. This Redirection plugin is the most popular redirection plugin on WordPress. Once installed and activated on your website, you can better manage your 301 redirects and control your website traffic.
This plugin makes creating URL redirects easy. You don’t need any knowledge of apache or other coding knowledge to set up and enable redirects using this plugin. In addition to the ability to create and manage redirects. This plugin also logs 404 errors and allows you to make certain exceptions for redirects. These exceptions can be based on user location, cookies, or their web browser.
When you change the URL of a page, point all traffic from the old URL to the new one. A redirect is the best way to make this happen. Search engines will also reward you for redirecting old dead links and reducing the number of 404 errors caused on your website.
#4 Better Search Replace
If you migrate a website from one domain to another, or change servers, there is a good chance you will need to replace any instance of the previous domain for assets to load correctly. This WordPress plugin will crawl your website’s database and all its assets for any instance of whatever you input into its search bar and allow you to choose what it gets replaced with. The best part is that the whole process usually takes less than a minute.
Instead of manually going through every page and database of your website, this WordPress plugin handles all the hard work to ensure a smooth website transition.
It also works for replacing colours across your website or just to check how many instances of text/code are on a website. Its ability to issue a dry run can help you scan your entire website for a specific word, color, phrase, or code error and allow you to replace it automatically.
#5 Duplicate Page
If you ever wanted to create a consistent theme across several pages, whether you want to use the same layout, colours, visual assets, or even text; the Duplicate Page WordPress plugin is exactly what you’ve been looking for. This plugin allows you to duplicate pages, blog posts, custom posts, sliders, and more all with just one click. The duplicated page will appear as a draft so you can easily distinguish between your current/live page and your new/duplicate page.
The Duplicate Page WordPress plugin is straightforward to set up and start using. We’re sure that once you start using it, you will save countless hours designing each new webpage.
#6 Password Protect
This WordPress plugin will be handy for SEOs and website developers when building a new website that they don’t want to be indexed or for the public to see. It password-protects every page on your website. This makes it so users won’t be able to see your content even on a published URL.
This can be very useful when you need to show a client a website build. It is also helpful when you don’t want a “work-in-progress website” to be indexed on search engines before it is ready.
A new feature of the Password Protect plugin is that you can now edit the password entry page. A great way to showcase your brand logo to your client, is through the login to their website.
#7 Converter For Media | Convert WebP and AVIF Images
Next-gen image formats are becoming more important as search engines like Google reward websites that use them. In order to decrease page loading times and improve user experience, you may need to update image formats. However, making WebP images can be a bit of a struggle. This is due to cameras not naturally saving images in this file format. The WebP file extension requires photoshop add-ons to save an image with the WebP file extension.
This WordPress plugin gets rid of those hurdles and will automatically convert and serve WebP versions of the photos on your website so you can simply upload them and let the plugin do the rest. If your website is full of unoptimized images, the Converter For Media plugin will likely increase your website speed score and increase your organic search rank.
Google and other search engines are known to rank websites that use WebP and other next-gen image formats, higher in search results than websites that don’t use them.
#8 Litespeed Cache
Have a slow website? Litespeed Cache is a WordPress plugin that accelerates your website’s loading speed and takes advantage of your website’s server.
It is also fully supported by other WordPress plugins like Yoast, WooCommerce, bbPress, and more.
#9 Really Simple SSL
Having an SSL certificate on your website is a significant aspect of a page nowadays. With a worldwide increase in the importance of online security, most internet users in 2022 understand that having a padlock in the top left of their search bar is a good thing, and means a website is secure. If not the padlock alone, many know that the HTTPS protocol is secured while HTTP isn’t.
The Really Simple SSL WordPress plugin allows you to easily set up that browser padlock. It also switches your website’s protocol from HTTP to HTTPS with just one click.
There’s no other WordPress plugin that makes enabling an SSL so easy. Really Simple SSL is definitely one that everyone should be using.
#10 Header and Footer Scripts
You may be surprised to see a plugin like this on our list. There are many reasons why you’d want a plugin to allow you to input header and footer scripts onto each page or across every page of your website.
This WordPress plugin lets you either set a global header or footer script that will run on every page of your website. It also lets you set a header or footer for just one specific page. You can use the global header to run Google Analytics or tracking code while setting up event tracking code only on certain pages.
You can even use this plugin to set up header CSS scripts that you can easily edit in the future. There are endless possibilities with this WordPress plugin making it an excellent tool for anyone who works in web development or SEO.
And there you have it! These are our top 10 most useful free WordPress plugins. If you want to learn more about SEO, website design or find other valuable plugins check out the rest of our blog!
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