WordPress Plugin: The guide of the best free WordPress plugins

WordPress plugins, also called extensions, allow you to easily add functionality to your WordPress blog or site. But how do you make sense of the tens of thousands of WordPress plugins available?

We have selected the best free WordPress plugins, classified by categories. Easily find the WordPress plugin for you!

The best WordPress plugins for comments

• Disqus :

Disqus is a comment for websites service. Disqus used to make the comments more visually enjoyable and interactive. It also allows you to get rid of spam comments. Note also a very interesting feature: you can administer up comments by email by sending command responses to notifications ("Delete", "Approve" or "Spam"). Time-saving!

• Akismet :

Akismet is a service offered by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com. This service analyzes the comments posted on your site, identifies comments that are similar to spam and isolates. This allows you to save time in managing your blog comments. Akismet is free for personal use and paying for professional use ($ 5 per month for a commercial site).

The best WordPress plugins to optimize your SEO

• Yoast SEO :

Yoast SEO plugin is the reference to optimize the SEO of your site. This plugin allows you to fill the various tags considered by search engines (title, meta description, etc.) for each page and section of your WordPress site. An overview of how the page or article will appear in search results is proposed. Yoast SEO also allows you to check whether you have optimized your page or article for a given keyword, indicating where you should make changes. It also allows you to generate XML sitemaps used to signify the existence of pages and articles to indexing for search engines.

Yoast SEO allows you to do many other things (optimizing your RSS feed, changing your robots.txt and .htaccess files, setting the open graph to share your articles on Facebook etc.). The simplest way to realize all the possibilities of the plugin is to install and browse all the features!

Bonus: If you want to optimize the SEO of your website or blog WordPress, I recommend reading this excellent guide written by the team of Yoast.

• Google Sitemap XML :

This plugin allows you to generate XML sitemaps to help search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) to better index all the pages and articles from your website or blog. With such a sitemap, it is easier for robots of search engines to see the whole structure of your site and thus well indexed. Note also that it allows to notify the search engines every time you add content to your site.

The cream of WordPress plugins to improve the performance of your site

• WP Super Cache :

This plugin generates static HTML files from the pages and articles from your website or WordPress blog. Once generated, these files are then to be sent by your hosting server to be displayed in browsers of your visitors, instead of being dynamically generated at each visit using the processing PHP scripts.

• W3 Total Cache :

W3 Total Cache is another reference cache plugin. More complete it possible in particular to enable GZIP compression, the minification code and scripts, or browser cache. This plugin will allow you to greatly improve the speed of your site, even if the configuration can be long.

Top WordPress plugins for sharing your articles

• Floating Social Bar :

One of the most effective ways to promote the sharing of your articles on social networks is to provide this opportunity to your visitors through a shared floating side bar. It follows your visitor as he progresses in reading your article, being always visible. This plugin, proposed by the team of WPBeginner, installs such sharing bar on your website or blog with a few clicks. It is also optimized to limit the impact on the loading speed of your site that this type of sharing bar may occur in some cases.

• Simple Share Buttons Adder :

Another way to encourage the sharing of your pages and articles is to include a bar sharing within your pages and articles, the beginning and the end of an article, for example. That's what this plugin will allow you to do. You can easily select the networks for which sharing is possible and choose icons Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. that you like.

The best WordPress plugins for listing your subscriber list / newsletter

• MailChimp for WordPress :

No need to present MailChimp, one of the reference tools for sending emails and newsletters. This plugin allows you to create a registration form to your MailChimp list of subscribers that you can easily place at various locations of your site via a "shortcode". Another interesting possibility: you can add a check box to your feedback form so that your visitors can be automatically registered to your newsletter when posting a comment. Very effective to boost the conversion rate to your newsletter!

• WP Subscribe :

Created by the team MyThemeShop, WP Subscribe allows you to easily create a registration form to your subscriber list, you use MailChimp, AWeber or FeedBurner. You can customize the text to display as well as the visual appearance by customizing the CSS, then place the form in the widget of your choice.

Top WordPress plugins to create forms

• Contact Form 7 :

Having a contact form on your website or WordPress blog is essential. Whether to allow your visitors to contact you, request a quote, or order a product or service, you must provide them with the forms. Contact Form 7 allows you to create easily. You can customize your forms: number and type of fields (text, drop-down list, radio buttons ...), visual appearance, display text, etc. Then of course, place them where you like with shortcodes.

• Fast Secure Contact Form :

An alternative to Contact Form 7 is Fast Secure Contact Form. It has quite comparable features. Thus, you can easily create forms, customize them as you think, and then place them on your website or blog via shortcodes.

The best WordPress plugins for social networks

• Tweet This :

Share your content on Twitter is often essential to gain visibility. But what is even better is when your readers themselves share your content on Twitter: immediate visibility of your articles to all their followers. Instead of offering only to your visitors tweeter your items via a sharing bar Tweet This allows you to go further by offering you the opportunity to prepare quotes or phrases in your articles, ready to share on Twitter. Thus, in one click, your visitors can send Tweets containing quotes or phrases you have chosen, and a link to your article. This is easily done via the use of shortcode. Try it!

• Revive Old Post :

Want to give a boost to the visibility of your old articles? You want out of your forgetfulness nuggets published it a few weeks or months? Try Revive Old Post! This plugin allows you to automate the publication on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) of your old articles. In terms of features, we can see the possibility to choose the time between each publication, the publication times and the number of items to share.

Top WordPress plugins for backups

• UpdraftPlus :

As you probably know, it is important to make regular backups of your website or blog. This plugin allows you to do this easily and automatically. You can perform backups at any given time (eg before updating the WordPress version of your site), but also recurrent (daily, weekly, etc.). Of course, do not settle for storing backups on the server hosting your site, you must also make a copy elsewhere for more security. UpdraftPlus allows you to place a copy of your backups to other media, including many cloud services such as Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive. Synchronization with Dropbox is very easy, literally a few clicks.

• BackUpWordPress :

BackUpWordPress is a good alternative to UpdraftPlus to perform backups. It is particularly easy to set up and allows you to program several recurring backups at different intervals (eg daily backup of your database and a weekly full backup of your site).

Top WordPress plugins for analytics and statistics

• Google Analytics by Yoast :

No need to present Google Analytics, Webanalyse the reference solution. This plugin, proposed by Yoast SEO team, you can enable tracking Google Analytics on your website or blog. The installation of the tracking code is done in a few clicks using the Google Analytics API. During the plugin configuration, you can choose to enable the monitoring of demographics and areas of interest of your visitors and tracking downloads and outbound links.

• Google Analytics Dashboard for WP :

This plugin also allows you to enable the tracking Google Analytics on your site. But it also allows you to add to your WordPress dashboard dashboard (dashboard) with your Google Analytics statistics. So you will have access from the WordPress interface to detailed information on your site or blog: number of visits from your visitors, the most viewed pages etc. Convenient to keep an eye on the statistics of your site!

The best WordPress plugins to optimize your images

• EWWW Image Optimizer :

If you are not careful, the use of non-optimized images on your site or blog will quickly slow loading and scare your visitors. To avoid this, make sure to use images in the right format (jpg, png depending on the image) and the right size. In addition to this, you can optimize your images. That's what this plugin allows you to do. EWWW Image Optimizer automatically optimizes your pictures when you upload them to your site or blog by using optimization techniques without loss. It also offers the possibility to optimize the images already on your site, as well as automatically convert your images in the format that will make the lightest possible picture. You can also, if you wish, apply optimization techniques with losses, to go even further in reducing the weight of your images.

• WP Smush.it :

Smush.it is a tool that uses images of optimization techniques without losses, ie without altering their appearance or visual quality. This plugin uses the Smush.it API to allow you to use this service directly from your WordPress interface. How does it work? Very simply! Each picture you add to an article or page will automatically put through the mill of Smush.it to optimize it.

The cream of WordPress plugins to improve research

• Relevanssi :

Relevanssi can replace the standard WordPress search through better search engine. Thus, you will provide more relevant search results to your visitors. Among the many features include a ranking of search results by relevance and the ability to make exact search terms by using quotation marks.

• Swiftype :

Swiftype is another option to improve the search engine on your WordPress installation. Searches are performed on Swiftype servers to not load your hosting server. Note also the presence of a completely automatic feature.

Wow, you came to the end of this guide to the best free WordPress plugins! :)

What do you think of this selection? Have you found useful plugins for your WordPress installation that you did not know? Your favorite plugin he missing? Feel free to respond in the comments! (and share the guide on social networks if you enjoyed ;))