Best Free WordPress Plugins for 2024

You probably have heard that WordPress is the best content management system to use on your website. And best case, you have registered your domain, hosted your WordPress website, and beautified it with the best WordPress themes and templates.

Now you’re looking –perhaps too hard– for the best free WordPress plugins to have on your website out of the numerous must-haves.

These free WordPress plugins can do a lot for you as a website owner: save money as they are available for free at zero cost, helps improve your site’s functionality, enhance SEO, create contact forms, add more beautiful pages to your site, add eCommerce functionalities to your site, etc.

Luckily, there are quite a number of these (effective and powerful) free plugins. But before you rush to install all the free plugins at your disposal, you should know that the plugin you have on your website can either give visitors a terrific experience and ultimately grow your website or turn it into another random website on the web.

Using the right free WordPress plugin can mean the difference between a very successful website and an average one.

Let’s highlight some of the best free WordPress plugins to have on your website and what they do.

Best Free WordPress Plugins

1. Yoast SEO

- Advertisement -

Aside being one of the best free WordPress plugins, Yoast SEO is also the most used and popular plugin used by almost all WordPress websites.

The functionality of Yoast SEO goes beyond making your site visible on search engine pages but also extends to content analysis, readability and optimization.

To up your website’s SEO game, Yoast SEO is one of the best tools to have in hand. And since it is totally free, there really is no reason why you shouldn’t take full advantages of the tool. Learn More Here

2. W3 Total Cache

This comes in right after Yoast SEO because it also (albeit indirectly) helps improves your site’s ranking by enhancing the speed (read: load time) of your pages.

- Advertisement -

As site speed is one of the important SEO factors for ranking websites, having W3 Total Cache plugin on your site is equally important.

This plugin is available for free and it enhances site speed by compressing pages and files. It then serves this cached/compressed pages to visitors so when next they visit them, the load time will be relatively faster.

W3 Total Cache helps boosts your website’s traffic, save you bandwidth space, heightens your ranking and more. Learn More.

3. WP Smush

Like WP Total Cache, WP Smush also helps enhance your websites speed. But instead of compressing pages, WP Smush works with images.

It is an absolutely free plugin that helps optimizes your images, resizes them, and even bulk compresses them as you upload them in your media library.

Smaller image sizes means faster page load time. And about image quality, you have nothing to worry about as they stay the same despite the compression. That’s one of the best thing about this WordPress plugin. Learn More

4. Broken Link Checker

This list of best free WordPress plugins would be incomplete without mentioning Broken Link Checker. The tool actively merry-go-rounds your website’s pages in search of bad or broken links.

The list of broken links will be displayed so that you can fix them.

Not just pages, but also posts and comments. Truth is, if you have many posts, pages, and comments on your website, chances are you most likely have broken link(s) somewhere.

These broken links will lead to poor visitor usability on your website and reduce your website’s SEO performance.

Broken Link Checker is a free WordPress plugin that comes in handy in removing bad links and improving your website’s usage experience. To add, this plugin also sends you reports of missing images on your website. Learn More.

5. JetPack

Built by Automattic, the developers of WordPress, JetPack is a plugin that is available to use for free for the optimal performance of your WordPress website.

It contains a handful of tools that can be used for a bunch of useful functionalities like daily backup, spam filtering, malware scanning and blocking, provides website usage statistics, social media sharing, and other features that revolve around marketing and security.

JetPack is also one of the best WordPress security plugins and is also great for SEO and overall performance of your website. Learn More.

6. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is one of the best eCommerce plugins for your online store or your WordPress website. It is one of the best eCommerce solution which allows you sell physical or digital products on your website.

Basically, it allows you convert your website into an online store. The basic WooCommerce features you need to kick off your online store are available for free and very easy to set up.

WooCommerce is loaded with the essentials you need to get started with selling online. Learn More.

7. Akismet

Akismet is an anti-spam plugin that helps rid your website of spam comments. WordPress websites are popular and this makes them attract spam comments.

This is why you need Akismet. The plugin will automatically screens incoming comments to identify spam and block them.

It is available for free and easy to install and activate on your site. It is used by almost all WordPress users to eradicate spammy comments and has been reviewed positively (4.7/5) by thousands of users who have installed in on their websites. Learn More

Above we have listed some of the best free WordPress plugins, there are thousands more, but these ones should get you started. Do you have a favourite free WordPress plugin you think should be on this list? Share your thoughts as a comment below.

Best Free WordPress Plugins for 2024