22 Top Rated Free WordPress Plugins to Start a Website

Building a new website? WordPress already has great features for building amazing websites, but with these plugins you can have total faith in your new site. From tools for SEO to security and content creation, this list includes the top 22 plugins you should consider adding to your site.

Yoast SEO

Get even better SEO on your WordPress site with this plugin. Yoast creates more optimized content by helping you choose focus keywords and employ them throughout your articles. The plugin also features Page Analysis, which checks for small details we sometimes forget such as keyword-tagging images and meta descriptions.

Duplicate Post

This is just what it sounds like- you can actually clone any of your posts or pages. This is useful when you create a page template you want to reuse- just create a new draft of the same page each time you need it. You can choose which page roles have access to cloning pages.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments and lets you review those that seem like spam. You can choose to clear comments that you determine to be spam, and the plugin will keep a status history so you can track changes. The tool will also scan any comment URLS for broken links or spam.

Contact Form 7

Previous users say this one is a necessity and is very easy to install and use. It is a simple plugin that allows you to manage and customize multiple contact forms. There are many plugins like this out there but choose this one for simplicity and efficiency.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. It serves this lighter html file as opposed to processing the more weighted WordPress PHP scripts. This plugin will help your server cope with a front page appearance on social networking sites.

Wordfence Security

Wordfence will check your site for infection, secure your site, and make it faster. The plugin can protect your site from being hacked, block attacks, and help recover from previous hacks. Wordfence uses data from every site it protects to make the plugin better and more effective every day.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce gives you the ability to integrate ecommerce on your site in a seamless manner. It was built to work perfectly with WordPress sites and is used by 30% of online stores. If you want to sell, ship, and receive payments on your website- look no further.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin helps search engines better index your content by creating an XML sitemap for engines to examine your site more efficiently. It will notify all major search engines when you post about your indexed content and will not slow down your site. Win-win!

Disable Comments

This can be used to disable comments on an entire network or just on certain post types. Good for avoiding spam issues on content where comments are unnecessary anyways.

iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security)

Without some sort of protection, your WordPress site is vulnerable to attacks. You will have access to over 30 ways to secure and protect your website when you install this plugin. It fixes common holes in your security and allows for easy activation on whichever features you want to use.

UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration

Updraft schedules backups and makes restoration simple, if needed. This way if somehow you have a server crash or a security breach, you have a reliable backup for your site and all related files.

Duplicator

With this plugin you can basically take an entire site and move it to a different location. This is another way to create backups of your site if necessary.

Advanced Custom Fields

If you want more flexible data, use this plugin and discover powerful, professional, and intuitive fields. You can chose from multiple input types and create new fields visually and simply. This plugin saves time and streamlines the process of creating templates, which is extremely important when you’re building a new site.

Google Analytics Dashboard for WP

When you start your website, you’ll definitely want to employ Google Analytics to track all aspects of your site and its functionality. With this plugin, your analytics stats are more easily accessible as they are integrated as you use WordPress. Right there on your dashboard screen, you’ll have a real-time user count and traffic sources, information about sessions and page views, and more.

Redirection

Redirection helps you tidy up and loose ends your site may have. In particular, it keeps track of 404 errors and 301 redirections and keeps a full log for all redirected URLs.

WP-Optimize

This plugin helps you optimize your site by cleaning it up without much manual labor. You have the option to remove spam comments, trashed comments, akismet metadata from comments, trackbacks and pingbacks. You can enable or disable trackbacks, comments, and automatic optimization. Check out the plugin’s details for a full list of its abilities.

Shortcodes Ultimate

Install more than 50 short codes which help easily create tabs, buttons, boxes, different sliders, responsive videos and much more.

Fast Secure Contact Form

Easily add, remove, and reorder fields and create contact forms that allow users to send an email to your site admin. Includes multiple forms, confirmation emails, and post-message redirect.

BackWPup Free — WordPress Backup Plugin

Schedule complete automatic backups of your site and decide where and which content will be stored. You can restore the backed-up installation with a simple .zip file if you need to (better safe than sorry.) There are a lot of extra features that could be useful in the pro form of this plugin, but the free version is pretty great as is.

MailChimp for WordPress

With this plugin, you can easily connect your MailChimp and WordPress accounts. This way, you can add sign-up methods to your website and get more subscribers to your MailChimp lists. The sign-up forms are visually appealing, user friendly, and mobile optimized.

Ninja Forms

The Ninja Forms framework provides a drag-and-drop method for easily creating forms and managing submissions. There is no limitation to the number of forms, fields, emails, actions or submissions you can manage with this tool.

WP Smush

Say “goodbye” to bulky data that slows down your site. With WP Smush, lighten the load with image file size reductions, performance improvements, and SEO boosting. The faster your site loads, the more likeable it is to search engines.

If you’re building a new website or making updates to your existing site, consider some of these plugins to make your job easier and more effective. Please let us know in the comments if there are any plugins you find useful that aren’t listed here- we’d love to hear your suggestions!