WordPress has thousands of free plugins available. Here is a ranking of what I consider to be the top 10 free WordPress plugins!
WordPress is an exceptional CMS. It is the ideal platform to create a professional or personal blog, or a company website and so on. Do you think or very day are produced 100,000 new portals in WordPress and the world today there are over 75 million sites.
It is excellent for the creation of websites (which I have been dealing with for years), but it stands out from its competitors like Drupal and Joomla above all because of a great feature: the presence of thousands of plugins, with a very high percentage of free plugins!
A plugin is a non-autonomous program that interacts with another program (WordPress in fact) and can be easily installed from the WordPress control panel, greatly expanding its functions.
Let’s see now the top essential free WordPress plugins you can download.
1) WordPress SEO by Yoast
For those not familiar, it is an essential tool to increase the visibility of your pages in search engines. After installing and configuring it properly, you’ll find a box dedicated to Yoast at the end of each of your posts in the editor. From there it will be sufficient to enter the keywords, a title and a description. Absolutely a free WordPress plugin to have!
2) Contact Form 7
Free plugin used by thousands of users, it’s great to create your contact form. It is highly customizable and you have the option to enter the relevant code in each desired page. Also in a text widget to make the contact form appear in a sidebar or in the footer. Don’t let it get away!
3) Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps is a great free plugin to make sure that Google indexes all the pages of the site without problems. This plugin automatically generates an XML sitemap for your portal every time you publish new content, allowing search engine crawlers to register your new content much more easily. I also highly recommend this. Even WordPress SEO by Yoast allows you to create a sitemap. If you feel comfortable you will not need to install this free plugin.
4) Disqus Comment System
Disqus is a great commenting system, suitable for those who love “social” comments or for those looking for a free plugin to fully manage their comments section. The user can “log in” with various accounts or participate in the conversation with a nickname.
5) Floating Social Media Icon
This social plugin has received a lot of positive feedback from users and should be taken into consideration. Floating Social Media Icon stands out from the competition thanks to the social icons that will always be present near the content that the reader is viewing even if the page scrolls up or down. There are over 20 icons to choose from.
6) W3 Total Cache
Too many plugins, free or paid, make the site burdensome by increasing the response time, the CSS code may not be the most linear and in general your site may have some activated features that slow it down. Install W3 Total Cache immediately to optimize site performance in terms of upload speed. You will be amazed!
7) TinyMCE Advanced
One of the most useful free plugins. Through this plugin you can increase the options of the WordPress visual editor. You will, for example, the ability to create the tables, insert lists, change the type of font and size of characters and much more! Check the official website (link always on the title of the plugin) to check its incredible capabilities!
8) P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)
As I said before, the more plugins you install and the heavier and slower the site will become. So install only those that are strictly necessary for your business! Now, how can you identify which plugin is slowing down your site the most? And here’s the solution: P3! Once installed it will scan your portal and create a ranking of the heaviest plugins. Useful, isn’t it? After its use it analyzes the plugins you can also do without and deactivate them. Finally, if I can give you further advice, also deactivate P3 until its next use.
9) EWWW Image Optimizer
Your site can also slow down due to excessive, or too thoughtful, images uploaded to the database. EWWW Image Optimizer will scan your multimedia department and make your images more readable without receiving a “pack” in terms of quality. It can also optimize the images you’ve already uploaded in the past. This is also a must have!
10) Auto Post Thumbnail
This plugin is for the laziest! Its function is as simple as it is useful: it automatically generates the highlighted image (the Featured Image) of a post using the first image you uploaded in the article itself. Obviously it will work only if you have not already selected a highlighted image.
I hope I was helpful in choosing your ideal free plugin! Remember not to abuse it too much and do not activate too many plugins on the site otherwise you could be subjected to considerable delays!
PS: If you have suggestions for other users or some questions to ask, leave a comment below!
Tags: Free WordPress Plugins, WordPress, WordPress Plugins
Leave a Reply