Some say the best things in life are free and we tend to agree. Nothing tastes better than free coffee at the bank or businesses offering free water bottles (I also make sure to grab a free lollipop every now and then). But in cases like WordPress which has over 54,000 free WordPress plugins, not every plugin is top dog. So, we thought, why make you filter through thousands of free WordPress plugins, when we can curate a list of a few of the best?
So, let’s get started!
What Are the Best Free WordPress Plugins?
Best Free SEO Plugin - Yoast
There’s no I in Team Yoast. With over 25,000 five-star reviews, there’s a reason Yoast has carved their place in the plugin marketplace since 2008.
Want to rank higher in search engines? This plugin is a necessity. They consider themselves a versatile everyman application for SEO users of all kinds--from bakery owners to corporate giants.
Sure, there’s a Premium version, but Yoast SEO Free is packed with the most important features you’ll ever need.
Here at Hosting.com, we use Yoast for all of our blog posts and like good students, we double check our work before publishing it into the ether of the internet.
What we love about YoastSEO:
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It automates mundane processes like writing titles and meta descriptions.
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Offers advanced XML sitemaps so Google can better understand your site’s structure.
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SEO analysis.
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Readability analysis. Arguably Yoast’s best feature. Yoast uses an algorithm to determine how user-friendly your post reads. They offer several checkpoints to increase reading accessibility for humans and search engines.
Who it’s best for: Websites actively creating content.
Best Free Lazy Loader for Images - Smush
Lazy loading images evoke a picture of a tortoise waking up from a nap, but in fact, they’re part of what improves loading speeds. Neil Patel says people don’t have patience for slow websites with 40% abandoning a website taking longer than 3 seconds to load.
Technically, this is under the SEO umbrella as well, but every website owner can benefit from optimizing their images.
Images that are lazy loading mean they’re only loaded when users see them instead of loading all at once when the initial page loads.
Smush literally smushes your images down, compressing them into a smaller size, without sacrificing the quality (this is called lossless compression).
What we love about it:
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A user can compress or “bulk smush” up to 50 images in one click saving you the tedious task.
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The ability to resize images. Larger files mean longer loading times. You can set max width and height dimensions.
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No daily, monthly or annual limits for images up to 5MB in size.
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Faulty image detection to quickly locate images slowing down your site.
Who it’s best for: Websites with a large volume of images.
Best Free WordPress Optimizer - Hosting.com Optimized
Did you know that Hosting.com has our own in-house WordPress plugin?
That’s right. Hosting.com Optimized was designed specifically to enhance and secure your WordPress website. Our experts have tested the best settings and functionality configurations of third-party plugins.
What we love about it:
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Page caching capabilities. Storing full copies of webpages so that they can be accessed quicker by users and in turn speed up your site.
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The ability to compress the size of HTML pages to provide page load improvements.
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WordPress hardening rules to prevent browser access to specific files.
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Bot prevention for comment forms.
Who it’s best for: Any WordPress user wanting to optimize and secure their site with minimal manual effort.
Conclusion
These are obviously only three plugins out of thousands, but they are our favorite, and frankly, practical and efficient for your WordPress needs, whatever they may be.
If you have any questions about how Hosting.com can help your website, contact our sales team today! If you're looking for a host for your WordPress website check out our new Managed WordPress Hosting plans!
