20+ Best WordPress Plugins for New Websites (Mostly Free)
Last Updated on 1st December 2022 by Ajmer Singh
Are you wondering what WordPress plugin is best for your newly designed website in 2022? Our list of best WordPress plugins provides a perfect answer to this.
This post does not list all the WordPress plugins out there.
Instead, it is tailored down to the list of best paid and free WordPress plugins I have personally used on my website,
and also from the thousands of great reviews gotten from website owners.
There are over 50,000+ plugins that exist, and choosing which is best for your site can be tasking and frustrating.
However, this post is channelled towards reducing that stress for you.
Plugins are a necessary and crucial extension needed for your site’s speed, security, and running.
At a glance, below is a list of the best WordPress plugins for your website in 2022.
20 Best WordPress plugins for your website in 2022
1. Wpforms
WPforms is an essential plugin you need to add to your WordPress site as it provides a user-friendly interface.
Do you want direct contact with your visitors? WPforms is the perfect idea for you.
The WPforms plugin is a drag and drop online form builder that gives website owners the opportunity to get in touch with their visitors.
Like contact forms, email subscription forms, and all other types of online forms available.
It has pre-built form templates that save you the time and stress of having to design a new template.
Another unique feature of this plugin is that you can easily embed forms in your blog, pages, sidebar widget, and post, depending on your preference.
With reviews gotten from over 3million+ users, I can guarantee that the WPform is the best online form built out there.
The plugin also comes with a free and paid version.
Want something simple?
I will suggest you subscribe to the free version called the WP forms lite, but the pro version comes with a lot of great features.
It is one of the best WordPress plugins for your website.
Read our guide to build a contact form step by step.
2. Yoast SEO
The Joy of every blogger is to see that their content/product appears on the first page of Google as this gives your page more visitors from search engines.
The Yoast SEO plugin is an effective tool for on-page SEO
It has a free and paid version.
The free version provides a lot of features that include, adding a meta description to your content,
generating XML sitemaps that make it easy for Google to understand your site, connecting your site to the Google search console, and much more.
Check the difference between XML & HTML Sitemaps.
Do you want a plugin for SEO that can be easily accessed? The Yoast SEO plugin is one of the best WordPress plugins for SEO.
The premium version also provides you with synonyms and related keyphrases, internal linking suggestions, a 404 redirect, and much more.
It can also be integrated with myriad options of themes and plugins such as the AMP plugin, elementor, WordPress block editor, etc.
Yoast SEO is one of the best WordPress plugins for your website.
It can handle all of your on-page SEO.
Follow our guide to setup yoast SEO step by step.
3. Updraftplus
The updraft plus plugin allows you to set up backup automatically for your site and safely keeps your files in a remote location.
It allows you to easily restore your website after a backup.
It also comes in a free and premium version.
The premium version comes with great features and benefits.
Follow our guide to create a backup of your site using the free version of Updraftplus.
4. W3 total cache
This is a free plugin that helps to improve the speed of your website to help boost your ranking on the search engine.
Do you have fears about your site crashing due to the tonnes of traffic received on a daily basis?
The W3 total cache is the best plugin to use.
It has many caching features, including page cache, browser caching, database cache, etc.
It also has the option to minify and compress HTTP, HTML, JS, and CSS files.
This helps to free up space on your site, hence your bandwidth is saved.
The plugin is integrated with CDN which helps to accelerate your site and decrease the server load.
It is free.
However, I am using Autoptimize. It is one of the best WordPress plugins for your website to minify Java, CSS and Html.
Follow our Autoptimize setup guide and don’t forget to check how I achieve a 100 score in Gtmetrix and Pagespeed Insights.
5. WooCommerce
The woo-commerce plugin is the best free WordPress plugin for E-commerce.
The plugin stands as the best plugin for people who want to sell their products online.
It is a plugin that is very effective in creating an online store due to its great features.
It is a must have plugin to create a successful online business.
The insert header and footer is a plugin that allows you to easily add a code snippet to the header or footer of your website.
Do you want to monetize your site?
The insert header and footer have a feature that allows you to easily add a code snippet,
to the head or footer of your site for verification as requested by the advertisement company.
This WordPress plugin is very easy to set up, you can easily insert script and footer code without having the knowledge of any programming language.
It is entirely free and one of the best WordPress plugins for your website.
7. Prettylinks
This plugin is for those that specifically run affiliates on their sites.
Due to the gigantic and imprecise look of an affiliate link, it can be really challenging for your audience to remember.
Hence, this free WordPress plugin allows you to easily manage your affiliate links by making them short and memorable.
Pinterest is also a search engine that website owners have leveraged to drive traffic to their websites.
The pin it buttons for the hover and post plugin allows you and your visitors to be able to pin your pins to related boards on Pinterest.
The pin it button hovers on your images and with just a click on the image, a pin it button is displayed.
A click on the pin it button takes you directly to Pinterest, hence you share your images to the related board.
It is free.
Read our tips to drive traffic from Pinterest.
9. WP-Optimize
I personally use this plugin on my website and will gladly recommend it to you.
The plugin has great features that help in the cleaning and optimization of your database, compressing images, and caching your WordPress site to increase load time.
It also has a feature that minifies and defers CSS and JavaScript thus increasing your page speed.
The free version provides the aforementioned features.
The paid version provides lots of benefits such as deleting unused messages, optimizing databases for multiple WordPress sites, and much more.
You might want to give it a try.
Follow our step by step guide to WP-Optimize.
10. Monsterinsights
Want an accurate analysis of your WordPress site? The monster insight plugin is the best WordPress analytic plugin for that.
It provides you with an easy way of connecting your site/blog to Google analytics.
Monsterinsight shows your real-time stats on your WordPress dashboard.
It also allows you to keep track of how visitors find your site.
It also has a paid and free version.
Want something more, I will suggest you go for the paid version.
Follow our step by step guide to add Google Analytics.
11. Sucuri
I bet you wouldn’t want your website to be hijacked or hacked by hackers.
The Sucuri plugin provides a long-lasting answer to that.
The plugin monitors and protects your site from brute force attacks, Malware attacks, and much more.
The Sucuri plugin helps in boosting your page speed via its optimized CDN.
In short, the plugin protects your WordPress site from every security threat against your site.
Read our guide on CDNs.
12. Learndash
Do you want to sell or create a course online? This plugin is the perfect answer to this situation.
The plugin features a drag and drop builder that allows you to add quizzes, lessons, and assignments to your course without stress.
13. CookieYes GDPR Cookie Consent & Compliance Notice Plugin
With this cookie consent plugin, you can make your website’s compliance with major cookie consent regulations such as GDPR and CCPA easy.
Its top-notch features including easy cookie scan, auto third-party script blocking, etc.,
make cookie management and compliance easy for WordPress websites.
Other than that, the plugin lets you set up a cookie consent banner that blends with your website’s style,
let users offer granular cookie consent, and offers a privacy/cookie policy generator as well.
Read our guide to install a plugin on WordPress in different ways.
14. LiveChat
Live chat is the best customer conversational plugin for WordPress.
It provides a platform for complete customer service.
It has a user-friendly interface that makes it very easy to use.
The LiveChat plugin has a chatbot feature that helps in generating a lead, create help tickets, etc.
The plugin can be integrated with more than 170+ tools.
15. Rafflepress
For those interested in doing a giveaway on their site, the rafflepress plugin is the best WordPress plugin for that.
The plugin is a drag and drop giveaway builder with give-away templates that can be used to create campaigns within a few minutes.
It also has features that allow you to build your email list, increase your website traffic, and increase your social media following.
The plugin allows you to integrate your social media profiles, WordPress form plugins, etc.
The free version called the rafflepress lite is a great way to get started, but the paid version known as the rafflepress pro exposes you to more features.
Read our guide to increase your email list.
The shared count is the best WordPress social media plugin that allows you to know the total shared count of your content on your social media.
It also displays social media buttons on your website to easily share your content.
With the shared count plugin, you can share content directly from your website on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
The shared count is one of the best and most lightweight social share plugin for your website.
17. Akismet anti-spam
The Akismet anti-spam plugin is the best WordPress anti-spam plugin.
The plugin checks and filters out spammy content automatically.
It equally provides a status history for each comment showing which spammy comment was caught and cleared by Akismet or the moderator.
The plugin also allows you to know the number of comments approved.
It displays the URL of each comment in order to reveal misleading links.
The plugin also blocks the worst spam comment.
It comes in a free and paid versions.
Akismet is the best wordpress plugin for your website to reduce comment spam.
18. WP Smush
The plugin is one of the best when it comes to the optimization of images.
Content without an image on a blog looks extremely long and boring.
Just as these images make your content looks great, they also take a lot of space.
The Smush plugin makes it easier to optimize and compress images without affecting the quality of the image.
The plugin was designed to be compatible with all types of themes, page builders, etc.
Hence you need not worry about whether or not it will be compatible with your theme.
However, we recommend Themify Ultra.
It optimizes all types of image files using an advanced compression technique.
Want an image compression plugin? Go for these.
19. Elementor
Elementor is the most popular and best page builder plugin.
It gives your WordPress site the outstanding look you desire.
The plugin also allows you to create your pages, sections, post, etc with ease.
It has over 40+ free widgets you can explore while building your site.
When you talk about a convenient page builder plugin, Elementor fits well into this category as you don’t have to struggle with codes while you build your site.
The elementor pro grants you access to more professional widgets, options, and tools that help you design faster and better.
However, if you are unsure about the elementor then try themify builder. We built our site with themify builder.
Performance settings of Themify Builder.
20. MailChimp
When it comes to rendering newsletter services, the MailChimp for WordPress plugin serves you right.
The plugin allows you to build and create a good-looking newsletter via the newsletter templates available.
It also allows you to create good-looking and mobile-friendly opt-in forms.
The plugin can be integrated into other plugins such as WooCommerce, etc.
Do you want a newsletter plugin? kindly use MailChimp for WordPress.
Don’t forget to check our list of newsletter plugins.
21. Sitekit
The site kit plugin allows you to connect your google analytics with your WordPress site.
With just a few clicks, you will be able to view your site stats directly on your WordPress dashboard.
The plugin has a user-friendly interface and is very easy to set up.
Looking for the best traffic analytic plugin, the site kit gives the ideal solution to that.
These are some of the best WordPress plugins for your website.
Conclusion
So, these are the best WordPress plugins for your website and I strongly advise that before you install a plugin on your WordPress site,
ensure you check out for customer reviews to avoid installing a bug that can cause damage to your site.
However, the plugins I have listed above are very safe extensions to install.
Have any recommendations or suggestions? Kindly use the comment section.
20th August 2021 @ 1:44 pm
Thank you for sharing such a wonderful collection of WordPress plugins.
I want to recommend one more useful plugin– Blog Designer Pro. It is a step ahead WordPress plugin that allows you to modify blog and single page layouts and design. It has unique 50+ high-impact blog templates to make your blog page more attractive.