It doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg to create a website. These are the best free WordPress plugins to help you make an awesome site on the cheap!
Approximate read time: 11.5 minutes
Are you in the process of building a new WordPress website and looking for ways to boost its functionality without straining your budget? Well, you're in luck!
There are literally thousands of plugins to help you build the site of your dreams. Not only do they let you add all kinds of features to your website, but they also handle the hard development and time-consuming coding for you.
There are also many free WordPress plugins, so you don't even have to spend a dime to save yourself time and effort!
So whether you're a newbie in creating websites or a seasoned pro, read on for our round-up of the best free WordPress plugins.
1. Formidable Forms - Best free form builder plugin
Ratings: 4.8 stars (1,230 + reviews) | 400,000+ active installations
Formidable Lite is the best free online form builder for WordPress. This plugin lets you create all sorts of web forms without any fuss. Plus, it works with any WordPress theme, too!
From simple newsletter signups to all-important payment forms, you can make them in just a few clicks with Formidable. And its user-friendly drag and drop form builder means it's simple enough for first-timers. But don't worry. It's also powerful enough for experienced developers.
Formidable goes beyond just building forms, though. Yes, the free version, too! Formidable Lite also allows you to send automated emails, collect Stripe payments, personalize your forms, and more.
What can the free version of Formidable Forms do for you?
- Accept Stripe payments for your online products
- Create forms right from the WordPress dashboard
- Autoresponders / automatically send email on form submission
- Save form entries so you always have a backup
- Export form submissions to CSV for viewing and tracking in Excel
- Customize form styling and layouts to make your forms fit your style
And that's only with the free plugin! As you can imagine, Formidable's premium WordPress form maker offers even more advanced features and integrations. Go pro to connect your WordPress forms to your email marketing services or CRM, add calculated fields, and create online surveys or viral quizzes.
Check out Formidable's premium features, or click above to pick up a plan and try it risk-free with our 14-day money-back guarantee!
2. Elementor - Best free WordPress page builder plugin
Ratings: 4.6 stars (6,895+ reviews) | 10+ million active installations
If you aren't already using Elementor, this page builder is about to become your new best friend. With the free version of this WordPress plugin, you can design your pages exactly how you want. And you don't need to be a tech wizard to do it!
Elementor is all about drag and drop, so you can add text, images, buttons, and more to your website without breaking a sweat. You also get loads of cool templates to kickstart your creativity.
This free plugin (aka Elementor Core) gives you the power to customize your site's layout, fonts, colors, and pretty much everything else. You'll also love the live preview feature — it's like painting a picture and seeing it change in real time.
Whether you're a pro or a newbie, Elementor's got your back when it comes to building a website that looks fantastic and works like a charm. All without ever needing to write a single line of code!
What can the free version of Elementor do for you?
- Create a webpage in 1 click using the template library
- Pre-built blocks and sections to add to your page layout
- Counters and progress bars
- Show social media icons on your website
- Maintenance mode or "in construction"
If that's not enough for you, upgrading to Elementor Pro gives you access to over 60 additional widgets, a built-in popup builder, advanced marketing tools, and all sorts of integrations.
3. All in One SEO (AIOSEO) - Best free SEO plugin
Ratings: 4.7 stars (4,365+ reviews) | 3+ million active installations
Want to get your WordPress website ranking on Google? Then you definitely want a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Plugin.
You've probably heard of Yoast SEO, the most popular SEO plugin. But AIOSEO offers a better user experience, a simpler setup, improved WooCommerce compatibility, and more features.
Even the free plugin gives you the best tools to boost your website's search engine visibility.
This plugin makes it easy to optimize page titles, meta descriptions, and other important SEO elements to help your content get noticed. And AIOSEO generates a sitemap for search engines too, so they'll have no problem crawling and indexing your site.
What can the free AISEO plugin do for you?
- Focus keyword optimization
- On-page SEO score
- Headline analyzer
- Sitemaps
- Social media linking
Really want to increase your organic traffic? The premium version of AIOSEO is packed with even more features to help you optimize your site, including WooCommerce support.
Speaking of WooCommerce...
4. WooCommerce - Best free eCommerce plugin for WordPress
Ratings: 4.5 stars (4,380+ reviews) | 7+ million active installations
WooCommerce is the go-to for turning a WordPress website into a thriving online store.
With this free eCommerce plugin, you can effortlessly add products, set prices, manage inventory, and provide secure payment options. Plus, it's incredibly user-friendly so it won't take you long to showcase and sell your products or services.
But the benefits of this free plugin don't stop there. You can customize the look and feel of your online shop, add discounts, and set up shipping options too.
So, if you're dreaming of building your own online empire or just want to dip your toes into eCommerce, WooCommerce is the way to go.
What can WooCommerce's free eCommerce plugin do for you?
- Add and manage products
- Set prices and taxes
- Take online payments
- Manage shipping options
- Track inventory
While the core plugin is free, WooCommerce also has an extensive library of premium plugins — or paid extensions, as they call them — that lets you scale easily as your online business grows.
5. Akismet - Best free anti-spam plugin
Ratings: 4.7 stars (1,020+ reviews) | 6+ million active installations
We don't know about you, but we can't stand spam. Not the mystery meat, not the junk messages! 😆
Well, this plugin won't do much to help with the canned food version of Spam, but it will keep your site free from spam comments and form entries.
Akismet is your shield against the pesky spam comments that love to crash your comment section. This free WordPress plugin automatically filters out waste and lets the real, valuable messages in.
You won't have to waste your precious time sifting through a mountain of spam. It automatically detects and blocks spam submissions, ensuring your site stays squeaky clean.
It's user-friendly, effective, and a true time-saver! So, if you want to keep your website's comment section and contact forms spam-free, you'll want to check out Akismet.
What can Akismet do for you?
- Basic anti-spam protection for comments and forms
- Save time by not having to remove spam messages manually
- Keep your site's interactions secure
- Improve site loading times by keeping your server from filling up with junk
☝️ We should mention that the free version of Akismet is for personal websites only. So, if you're running a commercial or business site, you'll need to upgrade to the premium version of Akismet.
6. Uncanny Automator - Best free automation plugin
Ratings: 4.9 stars (130+ reviews) | 40,000+ active installations
Never heard of Uncanny? It's only the most powerful automation plugin on WordPress! 🦾
Uncanny Automator is the easiest way to connect your plugins, sites, and apps so you can trigger time-saving automations.
With more than 350 automation triggers and actions available in the free version of Uncanny, there is a whole lot you can do with this plugin. From taking care of repetitive tasks for you to automating workflows, it's truly a must-have for any small business site.
What can Uncanny Automator's free plugin do for you?
- Send automated emails on purchase
- Trigger an action when a user views a page
- Automatically create a post
- Create Slack notifications
- Add contacts to mailing lists in ActiveCampaign, Brevo, Mailchimp, and more
Want to automate even more? The Uncanny Pro plugin makes your website even more efficient and your life easier. Additional features include social sharing to Facebook, AI integrations, and the ability to schedule automations.
We use it on our sites and love how simple it is to set up. Plus, it's saved us literally hundreds of hours!
7. WP Mail SMTP - Best free SMTP plugin
Ratings: 4.8 stars (4,550+ reviews) | 3+ million active installations
Do you want to send emails from your WordPress website? Well then, this is the best plugin you never knew you needed!
WP Mail SMTP ensures your email delivery is as reliable as your favorite morning brew. It solves the common problem of emails from your website ending up in the spam folder.
With WP Mail SMTP, you can easily configure your site's email settings to use a reputable email service. And that means transactional emails like order confirmations and password resets are more likely to make it into the inbox.
So, whether you're running a blog, an online store, or a business site, this free SMTP plugin ensures your email communication is smooth, professional, and spam-free.
What can WP Mail SMTP do for you?
- Easy transactional email configuration
- Send emails through reputable providers like Gmail, SendGrid, or SMTP.com
- Hassle-free setup to improve your site's email deliverability
8. Easy Digital Downloads - Best free WordPress plugin for digital products
Ratings: 4.7 stars (540+ reviews) | 50,000+ active installations
Easy Digital Downloads makes it simple to sell digital products on your WordPress website. It's a straightforward, intuitive plugin perfect for selling ebooks, audio files, photos, courses, or any other kind of digital product.
Setting up a store on your site is easy with EDD. You can manage products, track sales, and use built-in features to maintain customer records. Plus, it's user-friendly for both beginners and eCommerce experts.
What can Easy Digital Downloads do for you?
- Sell digital products like ebooks, music, or courses
- Track sales and customer interactions
- Safely and securely process payments
- Generate detailed sales reports
9. Imagify - Best free plugin for image optimization
Ratings: 4.3 stars (1,475+ reviews) | 900,000+ active installations
This free plugin is the perfect tool for optimizing images on your WordPress site. It automatically compresses uploaded images to keep your site running fast and performing well.
So if your website has a lot of images, like a portfolio, blog, or eCommerce store, you'll definitely want to look into Imagify.
What can Imagify do for you?
- Automatically optimize images to reduce file size
- Convert images to WebP format for faster loading
- Bulk image optimization
- Balance image quality and compression level
10. UpdraftPlus - Best free site backup plugin
Ratings: 4.8 stars (7,655+ reviews) | 3+ million active installations
UpdraftPlus is a lifesaver when it comes to backing up your WordPress site. It's like a safety net for your website's content and data. With just a few clicks, you can schedule backups, store them safely, and restore your site if anything goes wrong.
And while the free plugin lets you save your website and emails to Updraft's backup server, the premium version of UpdraftPlus has even more features including priority website retrieval.
What UpdraftPlus can do for you:
- Schedule regular backups of your website
- Backup website files and databases separately
- Store backups in the cloud (like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.)
- Quickly restore backups right from the WordPress dashboard
11. WordFence - Best free WordPress security plugin
Ratings: 4.7 stars (4,310+ reviews) | 5+ million active installations
Wordfence is one of the best WordPress security plugins around. And it just so happens to be free!
This powerful plugin offers a firewall to block malicious traffic, real-time threat defense, and a scanner to check core files, themes, and plugins for malware, bad URLs, backdoors, and code injections.
But that's not all! It also comes with login security features like two-factor authentication and login attempt limits.
What can Wordfence do for you?
- Protect your site with a powerful firewall
- Scan for malware and other security threats
- Two-factor authentication (2FA)
- Login attempt limits
- Real-time traffic monitoring and statistics
12. WP Fastest Cache - Best free cache plugin
Ratings: 4.9 stars (4,090+ reviews) | 1+ million active installations
WP Fastest Cache gives your WordPress site a serious speed boost. By combining files and shrinking sizes, it ensures your web pages load in a flash. And that's something that your users and Google will both love!
This plugin takes care of all the coding for you, too, so you won't even have to worry about editing that oh-so-important .htaccess file.
What can WP Fastest Cache can do for you?
- Speed up your website by caching pages and posts
- Minimize HTML and CSS files to reduce page load times
- Combine CSS and JavaScript files
- Set cache expiration times for specific pages
The free WordPress plugins you won't want to miss
Thankfully, you no longer need HTML expertise or a lot of money to make a website. That's because there are a bunch of great free WordPress plugins available to help you build an exceptional site on a budget.
Whether you're a WordPress rookie or have already made dozens of WP sites, it's easy to enhance your new website with these WordPress plugins — for free!
Here's a quick recap of the 12 must-have tools we talked about today:
- Formidable Forms: Build all types of forms right in WordPress
- Elementor: Make webpages by dragging and dropping
- All-in-One SEO (AIOSEO): Enhance your site's search engine visibility
- WooCommerce: Turn your site into a thriving online store
- Akismet: Keep spam comments at bay
- Uncanny Automator: Simplify automation for small business sites
- WP Mail SMTP: Ensure reliable email delivery
- Easy Digital Downloads: Sell digital products in a snap
- Imagify: Optimize images so pages load fast
- UpdraftPlus: Backup your website and rest easy
- WordFence: Protect your site from being hacked
- WP Fastest Cache: Speed up your WordPress site
With these plugins, you can make an amazing WordPress website without emptying your wallet. So, get started today and turn those digital dreams into a reality!
Did you know Formidable Forms is the best WordPress form builder? If you aren't already using it, get started with our free plugin or try our full-featured pro version risk-free for 14 days!
9 Best WordPress Events Plugins [Compared Side-by-Side!]
11 Best WordPress Quiz Plugins for Any Quiz Type
10 Best Contact Form Plugins for WordPress [Free & Paid!]
Leave a Reply