10+ Best Free WordPress Plugins for Blogs (Must-Have)

For the last two decades, WordPress has been ruling the web development industry. Although it started as a simple blogging platform, it’s possible to create different types of websites with it today.

Still, it is the number one choice for creating blogging sites among millions of users. Because over time, numerous plugins have been added to this platform, which has eased blogging and content creation superbly.

This article will introduce you to some of the best free WordPress plugins for blogs. Since blogging is mandatory for the organic growth of any website, you can consider them as the must-have plugins.

Here’s a comparison table for the plugins listed in the blog post on the Tableberg website:

1. Ultimate Blocks

Ultimate Blocks is a powerful Gutenberg block plugin. It adds 25+ exciting custom blocks to the default block library by which you can create captivating textual and visual content on your web posts and pages.

Each block comes with tons of settings and stylization options. Still, there are many users who love to use page builder plugins for sophisticated web page design. But slow page loading makes them suffer a lot.

Because page builder plugins tend to be heavier. In contrast, block plugins like Ultimate Blocks are extremely lightweight. As a result, you never have to suffer the minimum bounce rate for page speed-related issues.

Ultimate Blocks is constantly working to develop newer blocks to meet the growing demands of modern bloggers and advanced users.

Take a look at the blocks of the plugin:

Advanced Heading
Advanced Video
Button (Improved)
Call to Action
Click to Tweet
Content Filter
Content Toggle
Countdown
Counter
Coupon PRO
Divider
Expand
How To
Icon
Image Slider
Post Grid
Progress Bar
Review
Social Share
Star Rating
Styled Box
Styled List
Tabbed Content
Table of Contents
Testimonial
Timeline PRO

Top features of the Ultimate Blocks plugin:

• Schema markups in two blocks (Review and Content Toggle)
• Advanced customization options (color, fonts, spacing, dimension, etc.)
• Works with WooCommerce, Dokan, MemberPress, etc.
• In-depth documentation of each block
• Priority support for premium users
• Free version is enough for any basic and medium-level website
• Each block is perfectly responsive for all device types
• An intuitive interface to enable/disable any block for the site speed

2. Rank Math

Rank Math is a powerful SEO plugin designed to optimize your website’s content for search engine optimization. It provides numerous features to enhance your blogging and content marketing efforts.

One of its core features is advanced on-page SEO capabilities. It scans your content and provides valuable recommendations on how to optimize it with keyword usage, URLs, meta tags, headings, alt-tags, etc.

You can easily submit your site’s XML sitemaps. Rank Math automatically generates and updates sitemaps. The built-in 404 monitor tracks broken links on your site and sends you notifications so you can fix them.

It has a Webmaster Management Tool by which you can create accounts and submit sitemaps to Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, Pinterest, and more. The comprehensive Schema Markup lets you specify your content type.

Top features of the Rank Math plugin:

• Intuitive interface and easy setup process
• Includes a generative Content AI tool
• Redirection manager to manage and redirect URLs
• One-click import SEO settings from other SEO plugins
• Provides internal linking suggestions
• Role manager to allow multiple people to work as a team
• Social media integration for optimized content sharing
• Integration with popular page builders and WooCommerce plugins

3. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a renowned caching plugin. It improves the site’s speed and performance, reduces the server load, ensures top-notch user experience, and helps rank a site top on the search engine result pages.

If your site is designed with page builder plugins like Elementor, Divi, or Bakery Builder, it tends to be heavier. Besides, if it’s an eCommerce or robust agency site, that is also likely to be heavy.

WP Roeckt can fix all these issues. It stores the static version of your site in the server’s memory and on users’ devices, eliminating the need to generate posts and pages dynamically every time.

Its comprehensive database optimization capabilities can help you clean up the unnecessary files in the database, post/page revisions, spam comments, and transient options in one click.

Other top features of the WP Rocket plugin:

• Clear and preload all cache with one click
• Enable caching separately for mobile and logged-in users
• Minify CSS and JavaScript files
• Advanced rules let you specify URLs that will never be cached
• One-click to remove unnecessary files from the database
• Simple to integrate CDN and many essential addons
• Enable/disable the lazy loading options

4. Independent Analytics

The main goal of blogging is to get organic traffic to your website. Once you start receiving a steady traffic flow, you can take the necessary steps to convert them into customers. This is why it’s important to regularly traffic your traffic. Because it can help you measure the progress and potenail of your website.

Independent Analytics is a wonderful and beginner-friendly plugin that makes web traffic tracking and studying as simple as drinking water. The original Google Analytics is a bit complicated and overwhelms newbie users. But with this plugin, you can analyze your web traffic like a pro from the very first day.

Independent Analytics has a free version that’s enough for any basic and primary-level websites. The Pro version becomes essential when you need support for running promotional campaigns.

Top features of the Independent Analytics plugin:

• A comprehensive and intuitive dashboard
• Check post and page performance individually 
• Filters to measure the traffic performance acutely
• Monitor traffic location
• Check devices used by visitors
• Complies with the GDPR policies
• Real-time analytics
• Observer campaign performance

5. Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is an all-in-one lead generation plugin to grow your email list and improve conversion rates. You can create beautiful and highly customizable opt-in forms with the plugin.

You can create a wide variety of opt-in forms like pop-ups, slide-ins, ribbons, and more. You can set conditions so these forms are triggered based on user behaviors, like scrolling, exit intent, time delay, etc.

Thrive Leads allows you to display forms on specific pages based on tags and categories. To ensure conversion, you can run A/B tests to compare the performance of different opt-in forms in real-time.

Top features of the Thrive Leads plugin:

• Various opt-in forms: in-line forms, 2-step opt-ins, screen-filling overlays, content upgrades, scroll mats, floating ribbons, etc.
• Integrates with popular email marketing services
• Supports unlimited lead collection
• Forms are responsive for all device types
• Robust customizations in all opt-in forms
• An intuitive user interface
• Advanced trigger settings

6. TableBerg

TableBerg is an easy-to-create table builder plugin. Tables are widely used on web posts and pages to present research data, statistics, comparisons, features, benefits, etc., in a highly readable way.

You’ll find numerous table builder plugins online, but most depend on shortcodes. But TableBerg doesn’t depend on shortcodes. It adds a usable block to the Gutenberg block library, like the default table block.

You can add images, buttons, bullet lists, and many other content to the table cells. This is a promising plugin that is still working to add many other features and functionalities for advanced-level usages.

Top features of the TableBerg plugin:

• Show/hide the header and footer
• Increase the table width as required
• Set breakpoints for mobile screen sizes
• Specify colors for the header, footer, odd rows, and even rows
• Configure the global font color and link color
• Customize the inner and outer border size
• Extremely lightweight that loads in the blink of the eyes

7. Fluent Forms

Fluent Forms is another form builder plugin. You may not confused thinking why to use this plugin since we talked about Thrive leads just above. Actually both of them has different roles.

Whereas Thrive Leads is mostly for lead generation, Fluent Forms is used for contact forms, surveys, event registrations, etc. You can create multi-step forms, file upload forms, and more.

It offers a drag-and-drop form-building interface, customizable templates, and advanced form fields. It offers integration with many third-party tools and services for enhanced functionalities.

Top features of the Fluent Forms plugin:

• Drag-and-drop form builder
• 100+ ready-to-use form templates
• Conditional logic to show/hide forms for specific users
• Integrate the payment-receiving option
• Spam protection and address autocomplete
• Supports global stylizations
• 45+ third-party integrations are available

8. BlogVault

Backup is an important part of the safety of any website. Due to server crashes, plugin conflicts, or personal misconfigurations, your entire site may crash, causing you lose all the of your website.

Anyone who has faced it ever in his life can tell how frustrating it is. BlogVault is a reliable backup plugin. You can schedule automatic backups of your entire site, including posts, pages, media files, and the database.

You can manage multiple websites from the same dashboard and migrate websites to another hosting or domain with just a few clicks.

Top features of the BlogVault plugin:

• Offers free cloud storage and a staging environment
• Compatible with 5,000+ web hosts
• Zero downtime is guaranteed during migration
• 90 days archive to recover the site
• Incremental auto backups never overloads your site
• Allows site migration to a new domain, host, DNS, or server

9. Wordfence

Once your site starts performing well, it may become a victim of hacking attempts. Because hackers always target successful websites. This is why site security has become so crucial for web owners.

Wordfence can greatly enhance the protection and security of your site. It has the real-time threat detection technology. It instantly notifies you if there is hacking, malware, or malicious attacks on your site.

It includes application-level firewall protection that monitors all the incoming traffic. The plugin instantly blocks suspicious traffic and malicious IP addresses.

Top features of the Wordfence plugin:

• Detailed security reports and traffic monitoring
• Two-factor authentication for login security
• Login page CAPTCHA stops bots from logging in
• Automatically repairs many damaged files if possible
• Alerts can be delivered via email, SMS or Slack
• Malware scanner checks core files, bad URLs, SEP spam, code injections, malicious redirects, etc.

10. EWWW Image Optimizer

Images can enhance the visual appeal, engage users, and convey information more accurately. Plus, images can make web content easily memorable to users. But when you use too many images, your site tends to be heavy.

EWWW Image Optimizer is a popular image optimization plugin. It can automatically reduce the size of image files without compromising their quality. After the plugin is installed, it starts optimizing both the existing and new images.

The plugin supports a wide range of image formats, including JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, etc. You can run bulk optimization as well, meaning you optimize multiple images at once to save your valuable time and effort.

Top features of the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin:

• Offers both lossy and lossless compression
• Keeps a 30-day back of the original files besides the compressed ones
• Set maximum dimensions for your images
• Page caching improves the loading speed
• Provides priority support to premium users
• The premium version allows you to integrate CDN

11. Jetpack

We can call Jetpack an all-in-one plugin because it covers a wide range of features. One of its standout features is its comprehensive web security. With advanced security scanning and threat detection, you can rest assured that your site is protected from malicious attacks and unauthorized access.

From automated social media posting to advanced SEO tools, the plugin helps optimize your content for maximum visibility on SERPs. You’ll get detailed analytics and insights to track your web performance and make data-driven decisions.

Furthermore, by using its content delivery network (CDN), you can make your web pages lightening fast. The plugin makes your site responsive and looks great on all devices.

Other top features of the Jetpack plugin:

• Automated backups and easy-to-recover web files
• Marketing tools for social media posting and SEO optimization
• Detailed analytics to check website performance
• Spam filtering options to prevent malicious comments
• Easy integration with the WooCommerce plugins
• Multilingual support for reaching a global audience

Explore the best WordPress coupon plugins for bloggers and affiliate marketers.

Conclusion: Make Up Your Mind

Incorporating the right plugins will not only improve your site’s functionalities but will give you peace of mind. Because your site will run properly while it’s secured from many potential malicious and security threats.

You’ll be able to check your site performance with real-time analytics and implement rectification if anything wrong happens. You may not need to install all of them at once. You can start with the first three plugins initially.

Once your site starts scaling up, you can install more plugins one by one as required. Let us know your feedback through the comment box below. Thanks for being with us.