The 10 Best Free WordPress Plugins [AUGUST 2021]

In this post I reveal what they are The 10 best ever plugins for WordPress. These are plugins that you should always install because they go to improve the performance of your site or add some functionality that you don't find in the basic installation.

WordPress is undeniably the best publishing platform to the world, but it is also capable of doing so many other things. I, for example, do ultra-professional e-commerce with it that has nothing to envy Magento.

10 BEST WORDPRESS PLUGINS

1. All in One Seo Pack: Recognized worldwide as the best SEO optimization plugin for your WordPress, it has few but powerful features that save you time and allows you to configure all your meta tags automatically, for each post or page. Indispensable!
2. Google XML Sitemap: if someone (as I happened to) thinks sitemaps are useless, my advice is to go to read this article directly on Google's Webmaster Center. Install it, activate it, and think no more about it!
3. Simple Lightbox: unless your theme already includes image management that can make you see it in a lightbox when you click on it, this is the ideal solution. Install, activate, and ... the end! Any image on your site that is linked to the original will be shown inside a nice lightbox as soon as any of your visitors click on it. Great that... you don't have to do anything, the lightbox will be applied to every image, even those already uploaded!
4. WP-Pools: Do you want to know what your readers think about your blog? Or do you want to explore new possibilities or look for new product or content ideas? Then post a survey! With WP-Polls it's easy! In just a few minutes you can ask your readers' opinions on any topic and with lots of options for them to respond.
5. Quick Cache: Wordpress is optimized, but it can get heavy if the features or plugins you install become many. Then your hosting...if it's not really top of the line, the risk is that you'll have very slow pages. If you fall into one of these cases or if your site is slow, install Quick Cache, activate it and then from its panel, set it to ON. The default settings are fine in 95% of cases, so don't touch anything else, and enjoy your Web site at double (or triple) the speed.
6. Google Analyticator: Google Analytics is the standard for visit statistics. Integrating it well is a must to understand what is happening on your website. This plugin interfaces directly to your account, and it then takes care of installing the tracking code within each page you upload. It also gives you the ability to see at a glance how your visits are going, right from the WordPress bulletin board.
7. AddThis (but also ShareThis): one of the best sources of traffic are social networks, to take full advantage of them, you need to give your readers the opportunity to share what you write. Install one of these two plugins and within minutes you can have everyone sharing everything, on different platforms.
8. Page Links To: to redirect your pages, elsewhere: to another page, a post, an external site... Activate it and at the bottom of each page you will find the redirect field. Simple and powerful, it solves many problems when you don't know--how to move traffic.
9. Pretty Link (Lite): has several very useful features, from link cloaking to URL shortening, as well as a tracking system and statistics of your links. So you can use it, for example, to cloak your affiliate links, shorten links that are too long (just like bit.ly does), know how far they clicked on each of your links, and much more... There is also a much more powerful PRO version.
10. Regenerate Thumbnails: it may happen, perhaps by changing themes, that previously resized images no longer fit or are compromised. So what to do...? Reload them all by hand? But no. WordPress leaves the original image archived, it's just a matter of resuming it and readjusting it to the new rules of your theme. This plugin does it all by itself. Install and activate it, then go to its menu and have it process all the images. It can take a few minutes but...it works!

Well, I hope these 10 plugins can solve some inconvenient situation for you or something you hadn't found a solution to. To install them you just need to go from inside your WordPress to the menu item Plugins -> Add New and look for the name exactly as I have given it to you in this post.

Update August 2021.
A platform is available that can turn any website built with WordPress into a dynamic mobile app in just a few clicks, which can be used by both Android and iOS devices.

I talk about it in this article "How to optimize WordPress and turn it into mobile app" In which I reviewed it fully.

It is called AppMySite, here a presentation by Appsumo.

Also in the same blog article of mine, you will find a review of Wp Compress, which allows you to optimize your blog's images so that it will run faster and perform better.

Do you have any other free plugins to suggest...? Tell me in a comment!