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You’ve probably heard the old adage “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch“. But, as much as I love Heinlein, in the world of WordPress, there is!
Without looking too hard, you can find heaps of amazing free WordPress plugins that add all types of helpful functionality to your WordPress site. Such plugins can help you create better content, market your site more effectively, and keep it loading quickly and humming along smoothly…all without you needing to spend a dime.
As an ode to the generous developers behind these plugins – and to help you find some great free WordPress plugins for your site – we’ve collected what we consider to be the best free WordPress plugins of all time, based on both personal experience and the user reviews/popularity at WordPress.org.
We’ll divide these plugins into 4 broad categories. Plugins that are good for…
Whether you’re a casual user or someone who likes playing around with custom fields and post types, you should find some great free options on this list.
Let’s get started…
Best Free WordPress Plugins For Creating Content Of All Types
Whether you want to create a contact form, build more beautiful pages, or add eCommerce functionality to your WordPress site, these plugins can help.
1. Ninja Forms
Every website needs a contact form. And when it comes to contact forms (or other types of forms), Ninja Forms is one of the best free options that you’ll find, which is why it’s active on more than a million websites.
It features a beginner-friendly drag-and-drop interface and AJAX form submission so that people can submit a form without a page reload.
And if you ever feel limited by the (generous) free core version, you can always get extra functionality with Ninja Forms’ huge library of premium extensions.
2. Elementor
Elementor is a front end drag-and-drop page builder. That means it lets you design complicated-looking pages without needing to know a single line of code.
Essentially, it makes web design accessible to anyone.
Even though Elementor only launched in 2016, it’s already grown to the point where it’s active on over 800,000 websites. And it’s also maintained a 4.8-star rating on over 740 reviews.
Read our Elementor review for more information.
3. WooCommerce
If you want to create an eCommerce store with WordPress, WooCommerce is the way to do it. Heck, if you want to create an eCommerce store period, WooCommerce is the way to do it. According to BuiltWith, this free plugin powers over 42% of all the eCommerce stores on the entire Internet.
It’s active on over 4 million sites, has a 4.6-star rating on over 2,900 reviews, and, most importantly, it just plain works.
Check out some examples of WooCommerce stores.
4. TablePress
TablePress has one of the most impressive ratings I’ve ever seen for a WordPress plugin:
It has a perfect 5-star rating on over 3,286 votes at WordPress.org.
And as someone who has used this plugin quite a bit, I can say that it deserves every one of those 5-star reviews.
If you need to display any type of table on your WordPress site, TablePress can handle it.
It gives you a simple, Excel-like interface right in your WordPress dashboard. You can import data from Excel or Google Sheets, use any type of media in your table, and extend it with a huge variety of free add-ons.
5. Envira Gallery
If you have a ton of images that you want to display at once, you need a gallery. WordPress includes basic gallery functionality built into the core…but it’s not very flexible and the end-product looks pretty basic.
Envira Gallery changes that by giving you a user-friendly interface to create great-looking galleries. That’s why it has a 4-8-star rating on over 870 reviews.
6. Smart Slider 3
Like galleries, slider plugins provide you with another helpful way to display media content on your site. And when it comes to free slider plugins, Smart Slider 3 is one of the best you’ll find, which is why it has a 4.9-star rating on over 450 reviews at WordPress.org.
Smart Slider 3 gives you a beginner-friendly live slide editor, as well as some beautiful templates to get you started. Even in the free version, you’ll feel like you’re using a premium plugin.
Best Free WordPress Plugins For Marketing And SEO
Whether you’re marketing by ranking your site in the SERPs or growing an email list, these free plugins can help move the needle on your marketing efforts.
7. Yoast SEO
Active on more than 5 million sites and with an impressive 4.9-star rating on over 21,000 reviews, Yoast SEO is the de facto SEO plugin for most WordPress sites, WinningWP included.
This free plugin can handle all the important aspects of your site’s on-page SEO. From controlling your titles and meta descriptions to creating XML sitemaps, Yoast SEO does it all.
It can even help you analyze your content for SEO optimization and readability.
All in all, there’s a reason why Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugins in existence.
8. Redirection
At some point while you’re running your site, you’re probably going to want to change the URL of a post or page. It happens to all of us.
When that happens, you need a way to redirect traffic from the old post to the new post.
That’s what Redirection does.
It gives you a graphical interface where you can easily manage all the 301 redirects at your site, which is a lot more user-friendly than trying to dig into your .htaccess file every time you want to add a new redirect.
You can also get more creative with your redirects – like conditionally redirecting someone based on whether or not they’re logged in.
And all of this is available for free from a responsive developer who works at Automattic.
9. Pretty Links
If you use affiliate marketing on your WordPress site, you know how ugly affiliate links are.
Pretty Links lets you change that by cloaking affiliate links using your own domain.
For example, cloaking is why any affiliate links you see here at WinningWP use the format “winningwp.com/ref/product_name”.
If you want, you can even track how many clicks each link receives.
10. Broken Link Checker
As your site ages, it’s invariably going to pick up broken links. By broken links, I mean either internal links or external links that no longer go where they’re supposed to.
Broken Link Checker can help you automatically catch these links by scanning all your internal or external links. Then, you can easily update all the broken links to ensure your visitors have a great experience.
*While Broken Link Checker is a great plugin, I recommend that you leave it disabled when not in use to avoid any performance hit.
11. AddToAny Share Buttons
There are a lot of great social media share button plugins, so it’s hard to choose just one. But if you want a huge selection of social networks (100+), great-looking buttons, and a free price tag, it’s hard to go wrong with AddToAny Share Buttons.
Active on over 500,000 sites, it’s the most popular share button plugin at WordPress.org. And it has a great 4.7-star rating on over 730 reviews to go along with that popularity.
12. MailChimp for WordPress
If you want to build an email list, you can find a lot of great email marketing services. But one of the biggest names, and one that also offers a generous free plan, is MailChimp.
And to help you build your MailChimp list on WordPress, you can use the massively popular MailChimp for WordPress plugin. This plugin is active on over 1 million sites, has an impressive 4.9-star rating on almost 1,000 reviews, and makes it easy to create great-looking opt-in forms for your MailChimp newsletter.
You can learn how to use this plugin, as well as MailChimp in general, in our big guide on how to set up a newsletter for your WordPress site.
13. MonsterInsights
After you’ve used the above plugins to boost your site’s SEO and social media, you’ll want a way to actually analyze how all your marketing efforts are doing.
That’s where MonsterInsights comes in. It helps you not only install the Google Analytics tracking code at your WordPress site, but also view data from Google Analytics without leaving your WordPress dashboard.
And if you want, it can even help you track your visitors’ actions, like which buttons and links they click on the most.
Best Free WordPress Plugins For Performance, Security, And Maintenance
Back end site management isn’t sexy, but the free plugins in this section might just be the most important on this list. They’ll help you speed up your site, make it secure, and just generally keep everything humming along.
14. Really Simple SSL
Moving your WordPress site to HTTPS/SSL is a great way to make it more secure for both you and your visitors. And it also helps you avoid the nasty Not Secure warnings that Google is adding to Chrome for ALL non-HTTPS sites.
With the availability of free SSL certificates, it won’t even cost you a dime – you just need a way to safely migrate your WordPress site to HTTPS.
That’s what Really Simple SSL does. It’s basically a one-click solution to set up redirects, update your old URLs, and handle everything else you need to do to safely migrate your site to HTTPS.
That’s why Really Simple SSL has quickly amassed a 4.8-star rating on over 375 votes at WordPress.org and is already used on over a million sites.
15. Wordfence Security
Active on over 2 million sites, Wordfence is the most popular WordPress security plugin. It can implement most of the important WordPress security hardening in an all-in-one package, including:
- A firewall
- Malware scans
- Login hardening
While there is a premium version, the free version is still a great option for most sites, which is why Wordfence has a 4.8-star rating on over 3,200 reviews.
16. UpdraftPlus
It’s absolutely essential that you back up your WordPress site so that if anything ever goes wrong, you have a working copy just in case.
There are some great premium backup services – like VaultPress. But when it comes to free backup plugins, nothing beats UpdraftPlus.
This free plugin has a 4.8-star rating on over 2,800 reviews and is active on over a million sites.
It lets you manually or automatically back up your site with a single click. You can even automatically have UpdraftPlus store your backup at cloud services like Dropbox or Google Drive.
And if you ever need to restore your site, UpdraftPlus lets you do it with one click.
17. Duplicator
There are all kinds of reasons you might need to move your WordPress site at some point. You might want to:
No matter what your reason, the free Duplicator plugin can help. This handy plugin exports your entire WordPress site as two simple files. To move your site, all you need to do is upload those files to the new location, run the automated installer, and call it a day.
That ease-of-use is why Duplicator has a 4.9-star rating on over 1,700 reviews at WordPress.org.
18. Autoptimize
Autoptimize helps you speed up your WordPress site by optimizing your site’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. It does this via:
- Minification – it removes unnecessary characters from your site’s code (like white space)
- Concatenation – it combines multiple separate files into one.
And it also has some other optimizations – like the ability to defer JavaScript and optimize Google Fonts.
19. Smush Image Compression and Optimization
Smush is another free plugin that can improve your site’s performance. This time, it does that by automatically compressing and resizing the images that you upload to your WordPress site.
Smush uses lossless compression, which means your images won’t lose any quality – they’ll just have a smaller file size!
It lets you optimize unlimited images for free (with a 1 MB file size max per image) and is super easy to use, which is why it has a 4.8-star rating on over 3,800 reviews and is active on over a million sites.
20. Login Lockdown
Beyond using a strong username/password combo, one of the best ways to secure your login page from brute force attacks is limiting the number of attempts a user can make.
This is why if you enter the wrong information at your online banking, you’ll usually get locked out after three incorrect attempts.
Login Lockdown lets you add that same functionality to your WordPress site. And it even lets you control the exact criteria for how many attempts a user can make and how long they get locked out for.
21. Google Authenticator
The free Google Authenticator plugin lets you lock down your login page even more by adding two-factor authentication via the Google Authenticator app.
It’s free for unlimited users, and it’s also really easy to implement.
For absolute peace of mind when it comes to brute force attacks, this is a great option.
22. Enable Media Replace
Enable Media Replace solves one problem really well:
It lets you replace any file in your WordPress Media Library by uploading a new file in its place. No more need to go through the annoying process of deleting a file and then making sure you upload a file with the exact same name.
23. Akismet Anti-Spam
Because of WordPress’ popularity, an unfortunate side effect is that WordPress sites attract a lot of comment spam.
Akismet Anti-Spam helps you eradicate that spam by automatically screening all your incoming comments for spam.
It does a great job, which is why it has a 4.7-star rating on over 775 reviews. And it’s also developed by Automattic, so you can trust its quality and longevity.
Best Free WordPress Plugins For Advanced Users Who Like Tinkering
If adding code snippets and custom post types is your idea of a fun Saturday evening (or if you’re just an advanced user), these plugins will make your life easier without costing a penny.
24. Advanced Custom Fields
Advanced Custom Fields makes your WordPress site a lot more flexible. As the name suggests, it does that by making it easy for you to add a variety of custom fields to your WordPress site.
You can use these custom fields for…well, pretty much everything! That’s why this plugin is massively popular with developers and has a 4.9-star rating on over 1,000 reviews at WordPress.org.
If you’ve ever felt limited by the basic WordPress Editor, you can use Advanced Custom Fields to create a more customized editor with fields that make your life easier and improve your productivity.
You will need a little tech-savvy to benefit from the plugin – but you definitely don’t need to be a developer to use it. I’m not and I still love it.
25. Code Snippets
If you like to tinker with your WordPress site, you probably already have an intimate relationship with your theme’s functions.php file.
Code Snippets greatly simplifies using functions.php code snippets in two ways:
- It lets you add each code snippet separately using a custom title. You can also activate/deactivate individual snippets as needed. This makes it a lot easier to stay organized.
- Your code snippets will stay with your site even if you switch themes.
Those benefits are why it has a 4.8-star rating at WordPress.org.
26. Head, Footer and Post Injections
Head, Footer and Post Injections operates on a similar principle to Code Snippets. Only instead of helping you add code to your functions.php file, it helps you add code snippets to your…
- Header
- Footer
- Post content
Makes sense given the name, right?
This functionality actually opens up a lot of benefits. You can:
- Add tracking scripts like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or any other JavaScript code that needs to go in your <head> section.
- Inject ads or other content above or below your post content
And the plugin even lets you conditionally inject code depending on whether a visitor is on a desktop or mobile device.
All those features explain why Head, Footer and Post Injections rocks a 4.9-star ratingon over 400 reviews at WordPress.org.
Which Are Your Favorite Free WordPress Plugins?
And there you have it! Based on personal experience, as well as the many reviewers at WordPress.org, these are 26 of the most helpful and best free WordPress plugins.
Used/using any of these? Any we’ve missed? Thoughts?
