WordPress powers nearly a third of the worlds internet websites, and for a good reason! It is an extremely powerful and flexible content management system that allows businesses and brands to build great looking websites extremely easily.
In this article, we will go over our 3 favourite WordPress plugins. We chose to avoid the extremely obvious choices such as Elementor or Contact Form 7. These are fantastic plug ins, but there is a huge number of plugins that go under the radar that we think you should check out.
Number 3: Site Kit By Google
Months ago we used loads of different analytics plugins in WordPress. Each of them did a couple of things right, but also hid a lot of the things we needed behind pay walls and expensive licences.
Google came out of nowhere and released their Site Kit; the one stop solution for all our analytical needs.
Site Kit includes all of our needed services including analytics, Google Ads and Page Insight, allowing us to see all of the needed analytical information in one neat format. There is no paid subscriptions, no dodgy coding and includes everything we might need. Definitely a strong recommendation for all WordPress websites!
Number 2: Smush
Smush is a fantastic tool to help speed up your website. It includes tools such as image compression and optimisation, Content Delivery Network optimisation and a ton more. We use the free version of Smush which allows for easy and quick image compression for our websites, keeping the file sizes small but fast loading speeds.
A paid option is available which offers better compression and a bunch of other features but we think the free version does the job and is a perfect tool for all our websites.
Number 1: WebARX
We have used plenty of security plugins from some of the biggest and most used ones right up to some smaller not so commonly used plugins. WebARX turned out to be the nice in-between. It offers the same tools and powerful security as Wordfence, but it doesn’t hide most of the most important features behind subscriptions or paid add ons.
WebARX has been great at stopping attacks onto our websites and blacklisting IPs which have been flagged as dangerous, keeping all of our websites secure and running smoothly.
Conclusion
What do you think of this list of free plugins we recommend for WordPress in 2021? Have you heard or used these before? Let us know!