Igor Zagradanin
Image by Werner Moser from Pixabay
Last Updated on
WordPress is an amazing platform for building any kind of website, from portfolio and business to real estate and logistics websites. Its users range from different walks of life – some are musicians, some love food above all else, and some love arts or want to share some of their own art with the world.
And while WordPress is brimming with features to help you build a professional-looking website and maintain its performance, its plugins make it even better. In this post, you will learn about some of the best free WordPress plugins for your site. Some of them enhance SEO, some create galleries or contact forms, and some act as drag-and-drop builders.
SearchWP
As the name suggests, SearchWP helps visitors find the content they need. It’s a big update to WordPress’s own built-in search tool. Since the search functionality offered by WordPress isn’t as efficient as possible, this plugin is a must for anyone who doesn’t want to lose visitors that can’t perform a decent on-site search.
There is also a list of advanced search features including the indexing of post titles, keywords and descriptions, as well as Office, PDF, and text document content. Not to mention the option of building multiple search options, each with their own settings – for instance, a possibility to search only for products.
WPForms Lite
WPForms Lite was created with one thing in mind – the ability to build a WordPress contact form without hiring a developer. The plugin is a drag-and-drop WordPress form builder that’s simple yet strong.
It enables you to build amazing:
- contact forms
- subscription forms
- feedback forms
- payment forms
- other kinds of forms for your website
For all of this, you will only need minutes, not hours of work. Since the plugin makes user experience number one priority, its pre-built form workflows and templates make it the most novice-friendly contact form plugin.
WPForms Lite has complete smartphone responsiveness for all of its contact forms, which means that they will look great on all devices – tablets, mobiles, desktops, and laptops. In addition, all contact forms are highly optimized for server and web performance so that SEO, conversions, and marketing don’t suffer.
Sucuri
This plugin is a leader when it comes to website protection. It is full of features like remote malware scanning, security notifications, activity audits, blacklist monitoring, and post-hack protection actions.
The best thing about Sucuri is that in spite of its numerous features, it is so lightweight that it won’t hinder your website resources and loading time. Its Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) provide all the security needed against website threats.
It also comes with a Zero-Day Exploit Prevention that mitigates new threats after every new patch. When speaking about mitigation, Sucuri is also great for DDoS attacks since it blocks layer 3, layer 4, and layer 7 DDoS attacks.
Redirection
Redirection remains to be one of the most popular redirect managers for WordPress websites. It’s been used by a number of developers for over 10 years and recommended countless times.
With this plugin, you can easily manage 301 redirections, monitor 404 errors, and solve other redirection problems on your website. The plugin was designed to be used on websites with a couple of redirects as well as on websites with thousands of redirects.
You won’t need any Apache or Nginx knowledge whatsoever to manage and build redirects. If your website supports permalinks, then you can use this plugin to redirect any URL. It also offers full support for regular expressions so you can build redirect patterns to match any number of URLs.
TrustPulse
TrustPulse is all about leveraging FOMO – the Fear of Missing Out – to enhance conversions and sales via the so-called social proof method. Social proof is a social and psychological phenomenon through which individuals base their decisions on the feedback and actions of other consumers on the market.
This plugin is crucial for online retailers using the WooCommerce plugin, since social proof definitely boosts sales, increases membership and signups on the site, ensures more email subscriptions, and so on.
You will need to create a TrustPulse account to take advantage of this easy-to-use social proof notification builder. You have the option to create your own beautiful WordPress FOMO pop-up. In it, you can customize everything – from the message and colors to the images.
There is also an option to livestream recent changes such as:
- registrations
- purchases
- email signups
- ‘on-fire’ campaign that shows the number of people that took action on your website during a specific time
Envira Gallery
Envira Gallery is a drag-and-drop photo gallery plugin that’s fast, easy-to-use, and powerful. It has over 1,000,000 downloads, which makes it one of the most popular plugins out there.
The plugin is highly optimized for server and web performance, making SEO and conversions a much easier process. How? By having a 100% responsive and mobile-friendly code. Also, every query on the front-end and the back-end is optimized for maximum speed.
Envira Gallery easily adapts to your workflow and enables you to build in minutes. By utilizing this user-friendly drag-and-drop builder, you will be able to upload your images, rearrange them in whatever manner you see fit, and build a photo gallery in as little as five minutes. Not to mention the option of adding gallery blocks for the new WordPress 5.0 Gutenberg block editor.
Sharing and selling your images is easy with this plugin, as it offers social media integrations, WooCommerce store integration, and image proofing.
Yoast SEO
Everyone who is serious about search engine optimization will love Yoast. The plugin helps you build an automatically updated XML sitemap for your site (e.g. Google XML Sitemaps), preview your content’s search snippets so you can look at what website users see, and it even gives you a green light when you thoroughly optimize your content for search engines.
Besides this, it offers real-time page analysis to help you optimize your images, content, keywords, and meta descriptions.
The plugin also enables you to tell search engines not to index a page. Moreover, you can add meta tags, as well as set canonical URLs to avoid duplicating the content and hence, Google penalties. Integration with Google Search Console allows you to view how search engines are indexing your website and repair any crawl errors.
MonsterInsights Lite
MonsterInsights Lite provides the user with an easy way to integrate a WordPress website with a Google Analytics account. With this plugin, you will be able to view just how website visitors find your site and what they’re doing on it. This data will enable you to capitalize on the things that keep your website visitors coming back for more. Tracking your visitors’ actions – like what links and buttons they click the most – is also included.
You can view real-time stats in its user-friendly reports on the right side of the dashboard. Moreover, its universal tracking system will never allow your stats to get skewed.
WooCommerce
The WooCommerce WordPress plugin is currently used by more than 30% of online stores. It has a smooth integration with WordPress and it provides you with total control over the functionality and design of your website.
The free version is able to calculate the expenses of shipping and taxes. It also accepts most major credit cards, bank transfers, PayPal, as well as cash on delivery. It also includes some very powerful stock management tools to improve your inventory tracking.
Moreover, you can offer a broad range of shipping options such as shipping calculated in real-time or free shipping. Best of all, security is top-notch, so you’ll never need to worry about a third-party platform taking your store’s data.
Elementor
Elementor is a drag-and-drop page builder WordPress plugin. It gives you a completely unique and separate interface for building pages, posts, and custom post types. In short, when you go to your standard page/post editing screen in WordPress, you just need to click a button that turns on the Elementor which will take over the page-editing process.
No prior knowledge of PHP or HTML is required, since everything can be built through a simple user interface. But there’s even more – if you don’t want to create everything from scratch, you can use a number of templates and tweak them however you like.
Elementor includes features like:
- library of over 35 pre-made page templates that can be imported and customized
- Elementor Canvas custom page template – a blank page template designed to let you create a page without elements such as footer, header or sidebar
