WordPress plugins are one of the essential components in the WordPress architecture , helping you get great functionality through pre-developed ready-made tools. Instead of hiring a developer to develop the required functionality on your site, you can rely on a ready-made add-on (Plugin) and install and activate it in a few minutes.
For example: Do you want to convert your WordPress site into an online store? Just install the WooCoomerce add-on, in which you will find a complete system that manages products, payment and shipping processes in a secure software environment that is developed and updated by Automattic.
What distinguishes the WordPress system most is that it has a large base of open source WordPress plugins that website owners can easily rely on on their sites without the need to write programming code. Professional developers release add-ons in the WordPress add-on store, which relies on security and trust standards to accept add-ons, and then the add-on becomes available to any website owner.
Mostly, developers launch the add-on in a free version available to any website owner who can download and activate the add-on on his site with certain features, and the developer launches higher features in the add-on in a paid version for a monthly subscription or so, which is an excellent marketing strategy .
But for website owners, at this stage we will recommend some reliable WordPress plugins that you can use in the free version to get some basic functions that help your site succeed.
You will find that some other sites recommend the best 20 add-ons and the best 30 add-ons, but in this explanation we recommend to you the 9 most important add-ons you need based on our previous experiences, the reason for choosing those nine add-ons and also some alternatives to them so that we give you the best option.
First: Free WordPress plugins to protect the site
At the beginning of the list, we recommend to you the most important necessary additions that help secure your site and protect its content through some basic procedures as follows:
1- Wordfence Security
After you launch your site to users, the next and most important step is to secure it from malicious files and prevent hackers from accessing it, as well as checking it periodically. Some security add-ons perform this task, and one of the most famous free add-ons to do this role is the Wordfence add-on .
The add-on provides a firewall that prevents malicious files from accessing your site. It also provides a scanner to ensure the effectiveness of security measures and prevent potential attack campaigns from entering your site .
The add-on contains a paid version with higher features, but the free version of the add-on is sufficient to ensure the most important protection measures. The addition has been installed and activated by 4 million sites at the present time to help them block suspicious activities, monitor the site from malicious attacks or hacking attempts, as well as protect against code injection.
If there are some potential threats or risks on your site, the plugin will send you a notification via email and what is the recommended action to protect against this risk.
Even if your site is a personal blog in which you publish your opinions or a fixed site that contains general information about your business, and you think that it does not contain sensitive information, there are many unexpected risks that may happen to your site, whether from some amateurs or from some hackers who They work collectively to randomly target a large number of websites.
There is also the Sucuri add-on , which provides valuable features to protect the site more in the paid version, which amounts to scanning your site every 30 minutes. However, the free version of Sucuri comes with limited features compared to Wordfence.
Therefore, we advise you to install and activate Wordfence on your site as one of the necessary additions that you need in the beginning, regardless of your site, and you can review the rest of the procedures for protecting your site later.
2- Jetpack
The second most important WordPress plugin that you need for your site is the Jetpack plugin , which comes with many interconnected features that help your site succeed. The add-on provides you with several features, some of which are about visitor statistics on your site, the other is to protect and secure the site, and some other features to improve the appearance of your content.
The plugin includes features related to securing your site, such as protecting your site from a brute force attack , monitoring your site’s online stay, scanning your site for any malware, and backing up your site. The addition also provides some marketing features, such as the appearance of site statistics in the control panel, the ability to show related posts, as well as adding a sitemap to your site, and several other features. Through a panel, you can control these features to show what you want.
The plugin is reliable as it has been developed and updated by the Automattic team (the team behind the development of WordPress) since 2011, and you get all of these features completely free of charge, and this is what distinguishes the plugin most, which has made it used by more than 5 million website owners.
Also, if you are building your website for free on WordPress.com , you will get this add-on integrated into the system, because the WordPress team considers the add-on to be one of the cores of the system that provides the most important features that website owners need.
But you may think that you still need all of these features in one plugin, and perhaps you are looking for these features in other individual plugins that perform better, especially since WordPress has thousands of open source plugins?
The answer is that this depends on the needs of your site and the features that you want to include in it, as well as on the other add-ons that you will rely on to meet these features, whether they are free or paid. Therefore, this solution (installing the Jetpack add-on) saves you the trouble of searching and trying several different add-ons, but rather you get All these solutions in one free add-on.
3- UpdraftPlus
Conducting periodic backups is one of the most important procedures that you take periodically in order to preserve your site’s data from loss, so that you keep backup copies of your site’s files and databases in a safe place (preferably a cloud service), to be able to restore the last backup copy in case Your site fails.
The UpdraftPlus add-on performs this task efficiently by being able to perform a manual backup or an automatic backup in which you upload the backup to any external service provider (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Google Cloud…) so that a scheduled command is done for the period you specify ( Every day, for example) save a complete backup of your site.
In the same way, you can restore the backup copy with one click, whether restoring or downloading the database only, or add-ons only, or website designs only, or uploaded files only, or restoring the entire copy. All of these features are in the free version of the add-on that you can rely on.
Second: Free WordPress plugins for website performance
We complete the list with some other additions that help your site’s performance, enhance its visibility to users, and better control its design components, as follows:
4- W3 Total Cache
Also, one of the additions that you will undoubtedly need is adding W3 total cache or one of its counterparts because of its important role in clearing your site’s cache, which helps increase the speed of the site and gives users a better user experience.
The add-on stores a copy of your site in temporary memory when the visitor comes to it, then when the visitor returns to browsing again, it uses the previously stored temporary copy, which consumes less time to load the site and thus the user enjoys a faster browsing experience. There are several plugins that do this job, but W3 Total Cache is the most popular one since 2009 and has over a million active installations so far.
You can easily install and activate the add-on, then from within the add-on settings you will be able to make cache settings, enable lazy loading, CDN settings , as well as browser caching settings, databases, and pages.
Site speed is what helps improve the user experience on your site the most , and this procedure of using cache is common and preferred for website owners, and therefore we advise you to rely on this add-on to take advantage of this feature.
5- Yoast SEO
Once you launch your website, the first thing you care about is improving the SEO of the website’s content and pages, in order to obtain targeted visits from search results. The Yoast SEO plugin helps you automate many SEO tasks.
The add-on performs several technical tasks for SEO, such as adding a site map, the ability to add a meta description to the site pages, adding the site logo to social media platforms, redirection operations, and identifying orphan content that did not receive mentions previously.
The add-on also has advanced algorithms that recommend making some internal links, and recommending keywords. After writing the content of the page and the article, there are signals that tell you how compatible your content is with SEO, whether in using the keyword in the titles, during the content, and in the description of the images, as well as placing Internal and external signals and word count of content.
The signal also gives some recommendations related to the readability of the content, such as the length of paragraphs, enhancing the visual element, consistency of subtitles, use of keywords, and distribution of content words.
Of course, Yoast relies on software algorithms to produce these recommendations, which may not be accurate at times, especially with Arabic content, and the human element remains more accurate in producing better content, especially when you are writing for the visitor and not writing for the machine. However, the tool helps you discover some recommendations that may be overlooked. Sometimes, or forget about it during the book.
Therefore, the tool provides you with integrated solutions that help you improve your site’s SEO.
6- Akismet
Once your website or blog is installed and the comments feature is available , you will find hundreds of annoying comments ( spam ) coming to you from everywhere from random posting programs that some advertisers use to promote their products or services in an annoying manner. This has a negative impact on the user’s experience when he sees dozens of annoying promotional comments, as well as affecting your site’s ranking in search engines as Google’s spiders discover the presence of many unreliable links or broken links on your site’s pages.
Also, manually deleting these promotional comments will be a burdensome burden for the website owner on a daily basis, and therefore we advise you to start by relying on the Akismet add-on , as it is one of the add-on packages developed by Automattic and relied on by more than 5 million users so far.
The add-on has an advanced cloud algorithm that distinguishes between natural comments and annoying comments, then it blocks unwanted annoying comments so that they are automatically blocked before they are added to the comments. Therefore, this will not affect the performance of your site, and you will find statistics of the comments that were blocked in the add-on’s control panel within your site. .
The add-on starts with a free version that is sufficient for personal use, and you can get a paid version with higher features. There is also another free add-on that helps you with the same task with other features, which is the AntiSpam Bee add-on , which many website owners rely on at the present time.
Third: Free WordPress plugins for website design
7- Gutenberg Blocks
Do you build and design custom pages for your website using the Gutenberg plugin editor ?
Unlike WordPress previously relying on the classic editor , with the recent updates launched by WordPress, it has become a component editor that is more customizable in helping you design website pages by dragging and dropping without the need for mostly independent third-party plugins.
The component editor does not contain all the components that help you design your website pages in the desired way, and here comes the Gutenberg Blocks add-on , which has many plugins for reviews, tabbed content, scima, quotations, and other components.
Also with the same idea comes the Genesis plugin , which is open source and contains several components that help you build your site better.
There are some other website building add-ons that help you design your site elements by dragging and dropping, some of which are free and some of which are paid, such as seedProd, beaver, divi, Elementor, Visual composer and other add-ons, but they work in an editor separate from the basic editor and with independent features, which constitutes This is often a burden on your site’s performance, especially if your site’s content is large.
Therefore, to ensure a faster experience for your site, it is recommended to rely on plugins that are integrated into the component editor, such as (Gutenber blocks, genders) and similar plugins.
8- WPForms
Once you launch your site, you will find yourself needing to create forms for users, such as data filling forms, contact forms, subscriber registration forms, etc. The WP Forms plugin will help you create attractive forms and control their features with drag and drop without having to write code.
The add-on helps you customize the form fields and texts that are shown to the visitor. Then, after publishing the form, you will be provided with a short code for the form that you can insert on any page of your site (home page, contact page, services page, etc.), as well as the ability to add CAPTCHA to prevent random registrations.
Also, from within the add-on’s control panel, you can import or export a set of data that you have obtained. The add-on can be integrated with several other applications such as (GetResponse, Mailchimp, Zapie, AWeber) and you can preview users’ statistics.
9- WooCommerce
After you launch your WordPress website and want to convert it into an online store or sell products through it, the first add-on we recommend to you is the WooCommerce add-on , which is the most popular add-on for building online stores, relied upon by 28% of online store owners.
Through the free version of the add-on, you can classify products, add fixed and multi-type products, display tangible products, add digital products, customize shipping options, manage payment processes and receive money, as well as add options to increase the transaction value ( UPsell & Cross sell ) and integrate with many other applications.
Like other WooCommerce components, it is an open source tool that you can control and is updated periodically by the Automattic team , and more than 5 million websites rely on it so far. The addition also supports many additional extensions (some free and some paid), many of which we talked about in some articles under the WooCommerce category .
Whether you want to create an online store, or you have an existing website and want to add a store attached to it to sell products, the WooCommerce plugin is the first plugin we recommend to you. If you do not want to sell products on your site, there is no need to use the WooCommerce add-on.
Conclusion
Previously, we talked about the most important additions that website owners need as a building block for their successful websites. These additions help you secure and protect your site and improve its appearance and performance. There are thousands of other plugins, some of which we talked about under the WordPress plugins category , but we have recommended the most important plugins that you need.
We did not want to lengthen the list for you and recommend many add-ons , but we limited the discussion to really necessary add-ons and mentioned the reason for using each add-on separately. We advise you not to activate an add-on on your site until you are sure of the reliability of the add-on and how useful it is for your site, because in the end it is several software codes that create a burden on the site, and therefore you need to ensure the security of these codes as well as their usefulness for you.
