10 Essential Free WordPress Plugins
One of the great things about WordPress is the thriving community of third-party plugin developers. With over 30,000 plugins between them, and around 20,000 of those offered free of charge, it’s no wonder WordPress as a business CMS has gone from strength to strength.
With all these great tools on tap, it’s easy to get carried away and install more than you really need. And when adding plugins, widgets, and extensions to WordPress, less is definitely more.
WordPress plugins consume PHP memory on your server, and having too many running simultaneously could slow your website to a crawl. Site speed is now an important ranking factor for SEO and mobile-friendliness, and a slow site may get you a Google penalty. And no-one likes a slow website, anyway. You need to choose carefully to maximise website functionality over resource drain on your server.
Here are 10 free WordPress plugins that I consider essential for most business websites.
#1 WordPress SEO by Yoast
WordPress SEO by Yoast, with over 1+ million installs, is one of the most popular plugins of all time, and the go-to solution for adding search engine optimisation to WordPress websites.
Watch the video to get an idea of what WordPress SEO by Yoast can do.Yoast is suitable for all levels of SEO ability. This powerful plugin will guide novices through the various setup functions, while experienced SEO’s will appreciate the advanced settings and configuration options.
#2 W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. This incredibly useful plugin allows you to improve the user experience for your readers without having to change WordPress, your theme, your plugins or how you produce your content.
The feature list is huge, but here are some of the main benefits of W3 Total Cache:
- At least 10x improvement in overall site performance (Grade A in YSlow or significant Google Page Speed improvements) when fully configured.
- Improved conversion rates and “site performance” which affect your site’s rank on Google.
- “Instant” subsequent page views: browser caching.
- Optimized progressive render: pages start rendering quickly.
- Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site; visitors view more pages.
- Improved web server performance; sustain high traffic periods.
- Up to 80% bandwidth savings via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds.
#3 Jetpack
Jetpack is a single plugin that gives you the most powerful WordPress.com features, hooking your self-hosted WordPress site to WordPress.com’s infrastructure.
Built and maintained by WordPress creators, Automattic, Jetpack contains 36 modules designed to add extra functionality in one installation. You can activate individual modules as you like, or use the Jumpstart feature to get you started with a recommended group of the most essential modules. In any case, it’s unlikely that you will use all of them, but the WordPress.com Stats, sharing options and customisation features are especially useful.
Another great feature of Jetpack is the recent addition of Jetpack Protect, using the BruteProtect API – which Automatic recently bought out – and has protected over 2 million WordPress sites against 1.2 billion brute force attacks worldwide.
#4 WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a powerful, extendable plugin that helps you transform your WordPress website into an eCommerce store, delivering enterprise-level quality and features, for free.
WooCommerce works with any theme, including the default WordPress themes.
Whether you’re operating a superstore selling thousands of products, or a just a sole trader selling hand made arts and crafts WooCommerce has you covered. You can read all about WooCommerce’ features on the WooCommerce website.
WooCommerce comes bundled with several popular payment gateway options including PayPal Standard (for accepting Credit Card and PayPal account payments), Simplify Commerce (a US gateway backed by Mastercard), BACS, Cash on Delivery, flat rate shipping, and free shipping. There are many official and third-party extensions that allow you fulfil virtually any eCommerce function you need, from order tracking, processing payments, and managing invoices and shipping.
#5 Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple customisable contact forms and supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and more. It is useful for situations where you need more features and control over settings than the regular contact form. There are many similar contact forms in the free WordPress plugins repository, but for reliability and ease of use, Contact Form 7 is a good choice – it just works.
#6 Akismet
Everybody hates spam. Filtering it manually is confusing and time-consuming and time spent dealing with spam is time stolen from the business of your site. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. This plugin does a great job of filtering spam before it has to be moderated, and is easily integrated into Jetpack and Contact Form 7. It’s free for personal use, and reasonably priced for commercial use.
#7 Disqus
Disqus is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.
This plugin seamlessly integrates using the Disqus API and by syncing with WordPress comments. It is a good alternative comment management system – especially if you have problems with WordPress native comment system, which can be susceptible to spam attacks.
#8 Regenerate Thumbnails
Regenerate Thumbnails is a plug-in for bulk editing thumbnails for image attachments – and chances are, you may never need to use it. But, if you changed thumbnail dimensions after previously uploading images, or changed the theme on an existing WordPress site with thousands of images, you will appreciate this little powerhouse.
When you upload an image, WordPress applies different thumbnail sizes according to the values you have specified in Dashboard –> Settings –> Media. If you change these settings, or change to a different theme, the thumbnails may no longer display correctly and look distorted. This is easily fixed for new or small websites, but can be a major headache if your site has hundreds or even thousands of images.
Regenerate Thumbnails does exactly what it says on the tin, and within a few clicks (and a little processing in the background) your thumbnails are displayed with the correct dimensions.
Job done.
#9 Mashshare
Mashshare is a free (for basic features) social share media ecosystem for social sharing optimisation of your website. Although WordPress includes adequate sharing options, sometimes you just need a better looking sharing solution with more options.
This plugin gives you a large total share counter beside three large Share Buttons for your Twitter tweets, Facebook shares and the option to place a subscribe button for your news feed and mailing list. You can extend functionality with add-ons for Velocity Graph, Google Analytics integration, mobile sharing optimisation, responsive design and more via free and paid extensions.
Mashshare is installed on this page – if you want to see how it works, try sharing this post. 😉
#10 Cookie Notice
If you use services like analytics, conversion tracking, re-marketing, and similar, to collect data and track visitors to your website, then you are setting cookies on your visitors’ device. And if you are based in the EU, you need to tell your visitors this, and also what type of data you are collecting from them. In order to meet the legal requirements (as set out in Statutory Instrument No. 336 of 2011), “the minimum requirement is that clear communication to the user as to what he/she is being asked to consent to in terms of cookies usage and a means of giving or refusing consent is required.”
- Consent may be obtained explicitly through the use of an opt-in check box which the user can tick if they agree to accept cookies.
OR - Consent may also be obtained by implication, e.g. a notice stating, for example, that: “By continuing to use this site you consent to the use of cookies in accordance with our cookie policy”.
Note: Not all cookies require consent to be used. These are cookies essential to delivering the service requested by the user – session cookies, authentication cookies (for the duration of the session,) and user security cookies. For example, for storage of items in a shopping cart on an online website advance consent will not be required. This will generally be the case where the cookie is stored only for as long as the “session” is live and will be deleted at the end of the session.
This Cookie Notice plugin is a neat solution to help you comply with the law, as it stands – for now – the EU cookie directive is an ongoing, contentious issue, with many hoping to have it repealed in the near future.
A Little Disclaimer
So there we go, my top ten must-haves for most WordPress situations. Of course, this is only my opinion, based on my own experience and preferences. Everyone’s needs are different, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
I am interested to know what free WordPress plugins you simply cannot live without, or can recommend? Leave a comment with your suggestions.