15 Free WordPress Plugins Every WP Beginner Must Install

Are you taking your first steps in the exciting world of WordPress? Then starting your website with the best tools is important! This quick guide advises you on top must-have FREE WordPress plugins that will upgrade your WP experience drastically. Try these plugins for SEO optimization like Yoast SEO, security with Jetpack, contact form creation with WPForms, and social media sharing with Post Thumbnail Editor. These free plugins offer lots of features to simplify your workflow, improve website functionality, and help you build an attractive and interesting online presence. By adopting these powerful tools, you'll glide smoothly on your way to becoming an expert WordPress user.

Free WordPress Plugins —
WordPress is the most widely used CMS platform with more than 27% Websites across the world-wide-web running on it. And for websites using CMS, this figure is much more impressive at 59%. And the heart of WordPress according me is the PLUGINS, which significantly enhance the WP functionality of the already feature rich WordPress.

However, with over 42,000 WP plugins available for download in the WordPress Plugin Directory itself, for a beginner, choosing the right WordPress plugin can be quiet a tough task.

Also, as a beginner one may not want to spend too much money for buying required WordPress Plugins.

So in this guide am going to list out the Top 15 most essential FREE WordPress plugins which are free to use.

15 FREE WORDPRESS PLUGINS YOU MUST INSTALL

1. WordPress SEO By Yoast Plugin

WordPress Seo By Yoast is one of the most downloaded WordPress plugin.

It takes care of most of your On-Page SEO Optimization needs.

Apart from this, it also generated XML sitemap for your blog and integrates the Google Search console to keep track of any 404 errors or other issues with your website

I have written a detailed review of WordPress SEO by Yoast which you must check out at The #1 WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast: Is It? A Honest Review

2. Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed, & Growth

Jetpack is one massive plugin developed by 'Automattic' which contains 35 free modules within it to enhance your WordPress experience.

You can always disable the modules which you do not require. For rest of the functions, I use different widgets which provide better functions than Jetpack corresponding Jetpack modules.

You may however use Jetpack for everything.

Check Jetpack

3. Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection

With more than 1 million current installations, Akismet is one of the most popular WordPress plugins.

Akismet, filters out spam comments from good ones.

It is very essential because a lot of people, in order to get backlinks and more traffic, spam comments section in other blogs. If not moderated, it can drive your visitors to their blog increasing your bounce rate and in case you are using do-follow links, it can even lead to Google Penalizing your blog. Check 12 Google March Updates to Master Your Search Rankings

Akismet is by default downloaded along with a standard WordPress installation, so you just have to activate it from the plugins option in your WordPress dashboard.

Check Akismet

4. Contact Form 7

If you are not a fan of Jetpack’s contact form Widget, Contact Form 7 is a must download plugin for you.

It is the most popular Contact form WordPress Plugin and is very simple to use.

You can customize it the way you want. It also supports Akismet and CAPTCHA filtering.

Check Contact Form 7

5. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is one of the best Caching plugin for WordPress and is used by the likes of AT&T, Mashable, Yoast and mattcutts(.)com among others.

W3 Total Cache (W3TC) optimizes blog performance, improves SEO, and enhances user experience.

You can drastically reduce your Page load times by tweaking advanced settings in W3 Total cache which includes browser, page, object & database caching, minfying CSS & JS and integrating Content Delivery System. You must check; Configure W3 Total Cache to Reduce Page Load Time

By properly configuring, W3 total cache plugin, you can improve you website load time by over 52%.

With features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and adherence to best practices, W3TC reduces load times and boosts website performance.

Check W3 Total Cache

6. Contextual Related Posts

Contextual Related Posts allows you to display your visitors, number of posts that are related to the one they are reading.

This WP plugin ensures better visitor engagement and lower bounce rates.

Once you activate the plugin, related posts are displayed at the bottom by default, though you can turn it off completely or for individual posts.

You can also display the related posts using the sidebar widget or use Shortcode to display related posts within the content. It has a nicely written algorithm, which correctly detects the related posts by comparing keywords in your current post with other posts at your blog.

Check Contextual Related Posts

7. Getsitecontrol — Email Marketing Plugin

GetSiteControl is a web-based service, which provides visitor engagement tools for your Blog.

All the above widgets can be set at 9 different locations including Pop-ups, top bar and bottom bar which greatly helps you Improve your visitor experience.

The best part of GetSiteControl is, unlike most other social widgets, it is very light and the script loads in few micro seconds.

It's like a one-stop shop for email marketing. Collect email addresses, design professional newsletters, and send them to promote your products and sales.

This keeps your audience engaged and drives them back to your website – all for free!

Check Getsitecontrol

8. Generate Images – Magic Post Thumbnail

How often do you find that your images get skewed or cropped wrongly? Magic Post Thumbnail Editor helps you to just overcome that problem.
The plugin is easy to set up and works great for automatically generating images for blog posts.

The developer is very helpful. It is highly recommend who needs an automatic image tool.

With this plugin, you can crop the images manually for using it at your blog.

You can generate image as much as you want.

Check Generate Images

9. Force Regenerate Thumbnails WordPress Plugins

Force Regenerate Thumbnails helps you to regenerate all your thumbnails, whenever you change the size of image thumbnails you use at your blog.

This is especially useful, when you change your Theme, as the new theme may not have same sized thumbnails.

Check Force Regenerate Thumbnails

10. WP Smush Image Optimization WordPress Plugin

Since we are talking about pictures, it wouldn’t be fair if we skip WP Smush.

Smush Image Optimization is a simple to use plugin which automatically compresses the images you upload, to reduce its size without affecting quality.

A lighter image can greatly improve your page loading time, which is one of the On Page SEO factors for ranking.

With over 3 lacs total downloads, this is one plugin you should not miss.

Check Smush Image Optimization

11. Anti-Spam: Spam Protection WordPress Plugin

Spam Referral visits can be a nightmare for most bloggers. Not only do they affect your Google Analytics data, they also eat up your Server bandwidth. Check Web Hosting Glossary: Terms, Types, Definitions (Terminologies).

Antispam is a tiny little plugin which you can use, to block those referral spam which actually visit your website.

Anti-Spam - Stop Spammers is a best security plugin that can help destroy a lot of your worries about spam right from the get-go.

Every website is unique, particularly if you have a payment gateway installed, and that's why it offers more than 50 features for you to customize and fulfill your specific needs. It's super easy to personalize!
Please note this plugin or any other Plugin cannot block Ghost Referral Spam as they never visit your website.

It filters incoming traffic and blocks spammers from sending referrer URLs to your website.

Setting it up is a smooth. Just search for it in the WordPress Plugin search, install it with a click, and you're good to go.

Once installed, a new category called "Spam Referrer Block" will appear under Settings. Go to Settings >> Spam Referrer Block to access the setup page.

Check Anti-Spam

12. Thirsty Affiliates

Thirsty Affiliates plugin is an affiliate link management plugin which lets you save your affiliate links and then allows you to quickly add them from your WordPress Post Editor.

It also lets you cloak an affiliate URL using your website URL. This plugin also allows you to add no-follow attribution to all affiliate links.

Check Thirsty Affiliates

13. Limit Login Attempts Reloaded

By default, WordPress allows unlimited login attempts. This makes your WordPress account prone to Brute Force attacks.

As the name suggests, Limit Login Attempts limits the number of login attempts from an IP Address to a specified number and for a specified period of time.

The plugin functions by automatically preventing further attempts from a particular Internet Protocol (IP) address and/or username once a predetermined limit of retries has been surpassed. This significantly weakens the effectiveness of brute force attacks on your website.

It also logs the IP address of the person who tried to break in to your account.

Check Limit Login Attempts Reloaded

14. Copyrighted Post

Adds copyright notice in the end of each post of your blog.

Whenever someone copies text from your blog for sharing through email or posting on Social websites, Copyrighted Post plugin automatically adds a link to your blog post at the end of text thus creating easy links for you, to generate more traffic.

Check Copyrighted Post

15. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is the most popular WordPress Plugin for backing up data.

It backs up your WP data to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google drive and many more.

Restoration too is very simple with a single click.

Check UpdraftPlus

Bottom Line

There are variety of Free and Paid WordPress plugins for you to download. While it is not possible to generalize usefulness of a particular plugin for everyone as everyone has different needs, the above plugins will be useful for most of the people.

Hope you enjoyed my article. Do share your views about the above list of best WordPress plugins and if there’s anything I can add to it.