July 17th, 2019 | Updated on January 12th, 2023
When you decide to set up your website you always look out for information over how to do it. Especially if you have not done it before you find the entire process confusing.
However, WordPress makes the entire effort quite easy. With its numerous plugins, you can choose what to incorporate or not on your website.
If the budget seems to be an issue then you can opt for free plugins too as WordPress some unique ones in this category too. To assist you in making the choice we have compiled a list of the 10 best free Word press plugins available.
These plugins have almost similar features to the paid ones and once you are comfortable with any one of them you can move ahead and decide. We have also demarcated their features and benefits together so that your work reduces.
1. Ninja Forms
Ninja Forms is the ultimate FREE contact form creation tool for WordPress. Build forms within minutes using our simple, yet powerful, drag-and-drop form creator. For beginners, quickly and easily design complex forms with absolutely no code. For developers, utilize built-in hooks, filters, and even custom field templates to do whatever you need at any step in the form building or submission using Ninja Forms as a framework.
Features Of Ninja Forms Include, But Are Not Limited To:
- No Limitations on the number of forms, fields, emails, actions, or submissions that can be included.
- Give the user additional information with a success message or redirect them elsewhere after they complete a form.
- Email form data to administrators and/or users every time a form is processed.
- Dedicated fields for emails, dates utilizing a datepicker, phone numbers, addresses and more.
- Validate required fields and define specific entry formats with custom input masks
Review: WordPress
Last year, we switched from Contact Form 7 to Ninja Forms due to CF7 being so large and taking up so much of our site’s resources, and we have never looked back! Ninja Forms is fantastic as a free plugin, but the paid Add-Ons have been well worth the money for us. We recently had an issue with an update, and when we contacted support, they responded immediately and worked with us to find a solution.
They discovered the issue and there was a new version available the next morning when I got to work! I was unable to give admin credentials to the support team, as the site is live, but they worked with me anyway.
Many plugin authors will not help you without admin credentials, and more than one has brought down our staging site, so it’s a huge relief to work with a plugin that has integrity and cares about the everyday folks who are using it. We have extremely complicated forms that use a lot of conditional logic, so we need a very robust form solution. Ninja Forms has never let us down. Don’t waste time and site resources on other form plugins!
2. Elementor Page Builder
Instant reaction was a key feature we wanted to achieve. And we did. Instant drag & drop page builder, instant live edit, instant page load.
The speed of Elementor is not matched by any other page builder, free or paid. This makes the interface fun and easy to work with, as well as reduces the time it takes to design.
Never again work on the backend and guess what the frontend will look like. With Elementor page builder, you edit the page and simultaneously see exactly how it looks like.
Elementor features live design & inline editing, so the whole process of writing and designing is done directly on the page, with no need to press update or go to preview mode. It also works perfectly with or without Gutenberg.
Review: WinningWP
Elementor is a drag-and-drop page builder plugin for WordPress, which means a couple of things:
- It gives you a completely original and separate interface for creating posts, pages, and custom post types. Basically, when you visit your standard post/page editing screen in WordPress, you get a new button that allows you to enable Elementor, and then let it take over the page-editing process entirely.
- It doesn’t require you to possess any HTML or PHP knowledge or skills. Everything can be done through a handy user interface.
- It works on the front end, meaning it shows you the outcomes of your work right away in a true ‘what-you-see-is-what-you-get’ manner.
3. WP Menu Icons Lite
WP Menu Icons Lite is a free plugin which is used to assign font icons to display visually informative menus for your WordPress Site. Best menu icon integration plugin with a wide range of 5 pre available font icon packs for WordPress Menus to configure and display it for each menu items individually using WP Menu Icons Lite.
WP Menu Icons Lite is one of the best WordPress Free Plugins to display icons in a unique, responsive and informative way. You can display the different icon for different menu items individually. Resulting in your site to the better online performance, visually informative menus display with splendid appearance.
Features Of The Plugin:
- 5 Pre Available Menu Font Icon Sets
- Font Awesome
- Dashicons (WordPress core icons)
- Genericons
- Icomoon
- Themify Icons
Review: accessKeys
WP Menu Icons Lite is a free plugin which is used to assign font icons to display visually informative menus for your WordPress Site.
Best menu icon integration plugin with a wide range of 5 pre available font icon packs for WordPress Menus to configure and display it for each menu items individually using WP Menu Icons Lite.
4. WP Product Gallery Lite
WP Product Gallery Lite is a plugin which is used to solve the problem of custom programming/design to showcase products ( Woocommerce, Easy digital download ) on the WordPress site. Eg. Themes listing / Plugins listing, Real Estate items listing/ other products listing etc…
WP Product Gallery Lite is the finest WordPress plugin to showcase your products. This powerful plugin supports WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads. The plugin offers multiple layout options – whether you use WooCommerce or EDD, it has outstanding design integration for all. It includes Grid Layout, List Layout, and Carousel Layout. If you want to showcase your online shop’s products in the most appealing and unique way – WP Product Gallery Lite is made for you.
Review: WordPress
This review plugin helps you to interact with your users with improved comments, you can expose your reviews in an easier to read way and will help you generate money by adding a buy now button in your post. Rich snippets are also supported.
- After you install the plugin, go on a post admin page and you should be able to see a checkbox called: “Is this post a review ?”, once this is checked you can add review details and those will appear on the post page.
- If you want to edit the colors, enable/disable the affiliate button, change icons go on the plugin options page.
- All the plugin settings/colors are fully customizable, and you can read more about it here
- For updates follow https://twitter.com/themei
5. TablePress
TablePress allows you to easily create and manage beautiful tables. You can embed the tables into posts, pages, or text widgets with a simple Shortcode. Table data can be edited in a spreadsheet-like interface, so no coding is necessary. Tables can contain any type of data, even formulas that will be evaluated. An additional JavaScript library adds features like sorting, pagination, filtering, and more for site visitors. Tables can be imported and exported from/to Excel, CSV, HTML, and JSON files.
Review: isitwp
In the early days of the web, almost every website was formatted using tables. Headers took up one full row, the main body and sidebar were in two separate columns, and the footer was the last full row in the table.
But with the development of CSS and semantic HTML, table markup began to be used for its original purpose: to present data.
Tables can be used to format data that’s a bit more complicated than a list. You might use tables to format:
- product comparisons
- plans and pricing information
- accounting and financial information
- info on people, such as members of a team or organization
- formulas and calculations
6. Envira Gallery
We believe that you shouldn’t have to hire a developer to create a WordPress gallery. That’s why we built Envira, a drag & drop photo gallery plugin that’s both EASY, FAST and POWERFUL.
Envira is highly optimized for web and server performance because we understand the importance of speed when it comes to SEO and conversion.
Envira has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times. Here’s why smart photographers, designers, and developers love Envira, and you will too!
Review: isitwp
You can select a few images in WordPress media library and create a gallery without installing any plugin. The problem is that the default WordPress image gallery lacks important functionality, like keeping the gallery and images responsive on mobile devices, opening them in lightbox popup, showing them as slideshow, etc.
A gallery plugin for WordPress is not required by just photo bloggers any more. Almost all WordPress sites and blogs upload lots of images. The best way to display your images in a gallery is by using a plugin that properly handles the display.
The most common problem with WordPress gallery plugins is that they can be bloated with features. Many of them load external JavaScript and CSS files which makes them slower. See How WordPress Plugins Affect Your Site’s Load Time for more details. Not to mention how difficult it is to find the specific features you’re looking for in so much bloat.
7. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 store to DB Lite is the extension to the contact form 7 plugin used to store all the submission entries submitted via the contact form 7 without losing all the data including the attachments. Entries from the contact form 7 plugin will be stored safely even if the form failed to get submitted or any of your emails get lost, deleted or removed by mistake. You needn’t have to worry about losing email and other important entries content, attachments, or any other detail server issues or misconfiguration
You can protect, manage and store the Contact Form 7 entries of your business which are important to you using the plugin in simple ways.
Features Of The Plugin:
Check out all the major features of the plugin right here :
Custom Post Type Entries:
Custom post type for easy handling of the contact form 7 entries
Attachment Storage In Default WordPress Gallery:
When the attachment is submitted through contact form 7 plugin, plugin store the attachment in the default WordPress Gallery which will be easy to navigate and linked to the file.
Review: WinningWP
If you’re looking to add a contact form to your WordPress website, Contact Form 7 is included on many lists of recommended WordPress plugins, so will likely be one of the first solutions you’ll run into during your research.
However, with so many other great contact form plugins available, is Contact Form 7 the best choice for your website? Let’s take a look at what this plugin can do, how it works, and how easy it is to use.
8.WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source, completely customizable eCommerce platform for entrepreneurs worldwide. Go beyond the confines of traditional eCommerce solutions, and be limited only by your own imagination.
Review: WordPress
WooCommerce is a flexible, open-source eCommerce solution built on WordPress. Whether you’re launching a business, taking an existing brick and mortar store online, or designing sites for clients you can get started quickly and build exactly the store you want.
Activate the free WooCommerce plugin on a new or existing WordPress site, follow the optional guided tour, and set up a new store in minutes with:
- Product, Cart, and Checkout pages
- Secure payments by credit card and alternatives
- Configurable shipping options, including flat rates and label printing
- Integrate content and commerce across your site via modular blocks
- Automated tax calculations
- Google Analytics, MailChimp, and Facebook integration
- Central store dashboard with key metrics, and more.
8. Google XML Sitemaps
Use this plugin to greatly improve SEO to create special XML sitemaps which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your site.
With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
Review: isitwp
Concerned about Google indexing your WordPress site properly? Then you could use the help of the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress. In our Google XML Sitemaps review, you’ll learn all about how this free plugin can help you generate a special sitemap and notify all the major search engines whenever your blog is updated, ensuring your site will get indexed properly.
9. Yoast SEO
Need some help with your search engine optimization? Need an SEO plugin that helps you reach for the stars? Yoast SEO is the original WordPress SEO plugin since 2008. It is the favorite tool of millions of users, ranging from the bakery around the corner to some of the most popular sites on the planet.
With Yoast SEO, you get a solid toolset that helps you aim for that number one spot in the search results. Yoast: SEO for everyone. Yoast SEO does everything in its power to please both visitors and search engine spiders.
Review: isitwp
Are you comparing different WordPress SEO plugins? Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugins ever. It is also one of the best SEO plugin for WordPress powered websites. In this Yoast SEO Review, we will take a look at the features and performance of the plugin.
WordPress uses the best coding practices and outputs clean standard compliant HTML. This makes it SEO friendly out of the box.
However, thousands of websites compete to gain top positions in search results for fewer keywords. This makes it a little bit challenging for new websites to perform better in search results.
An SEO plugin helps you easily optimize your website to perform better in search results. It helps with details where WordPress cannot do much. For example, creating content, managing keywords, submitting sitemaps, using webmaster tools, etc.
10. Akismet Anti-Spam
Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
Major Features In Akismet Include:
- Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
- Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
- URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
- Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.
- A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.
Review: isitwp
Want to reduce comment spam on your WordPress site? Akismet is the most popular WordPress comment spam protection tool. It is also the only other plugin that comes pre-installed with every WordPress website. In this Akismet review, we will take a look at its features, effectiveness, and ease of use.
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