10 Must-Have FREE WordPress Plugins Every Blogger Should Have in 2021

Here’s a list of 10 must-have Free WordPress plugins every blogger should have in 2021 to ensure a high-quality blog that delivers results.

Learning which plugins work and which don’t may take a lot of trial and error. Too many plugins will slow down your site and may even cause it to crash.

This is why I’ve compiled this list to help guide you so that you can learn from my experience.

The following Free WordPress plugins are plugins I’ve used for years after a lot of trial and error.

Many of these free WordPress plugins are endorsed by Digital Marketing heroes such as Neil Patel and Hubspot.

FREE WordPress Plugins Every Blogger Should Have in 2021

1. EWWW Image Optimizer

Images are one of your greatest features on a blog. They increase clickability, readability and can also enhance the value of the information you are providing.

The issue is images take up a lot of data especially when those images are not optimized for your website.

The EWWW Image Optimiser is a free WordPress plugin that ensures a level of compression across all your images. This ensures they are optimized for your website and will not slow it down or even worse – cause it to crash.

2. GA Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a must-have for any website owner regardless of whether you are blogging or not. You need to be able to understand how the content of your website is performing. This is important because naturally, you want to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

GA Google Analytics ensures you can easily connect your Google Analytics account directly to your blog without worrying about inserting any code.

3. GDPR Cookie Consent

This is a Free WordPress plugin that ensures your website has a GDPR Cookie compliance bar.

This is important to ensure that you are legally compliant with certain areas of the world whereby this is deemed necessary.

This plugin makes this legal compliance easy and effortless. It also gives your website a degree of credibility, which is important for your users.

4. Insert Headers and Footers

Every now and again, especially as you become a more advanced user, it will become likely that you will need to insert some code somewhere into your website.

Now you can do this pretty easily without this plugin, however, I really like this plugin because it gives me much more confidence that I am inserting the code into the right place.

It’s a better user experience and very easy to navigate through.

5. Sumo

Sumo, formerly known as Sumo-me is one of the best apps out there. There is a paid version but the Free version is terrific for getting you started.

It is the king of creating CTAs (Call to Actions) on your website. Perfect for generating leads, email sign-ups, or growing a mailing list.

As well as this Sumo offers incredible social media functionality for your website.

Unlike all the other plugins, this plugin requires you to create an account on the Sumo website.

From there you use the dashboard to create everything you need.

The WordPress plugin allows seamless integration between what you create on the dashboard and what you see on your website.

6. Yoast SEO

While there are excellent paid options for SEO optimization plugins for WordPress such as SEOpressor there are many free SEO plugins for people who are beginners and are not ready to go too deep with the world of SEO just yet.

Yoast SEO is one of the greatest Free WordPress plugins ever to be created. It pushes you to ensure each article to optimized for both readability and search engine optimization.

Its user-friendly interface is a game-changer for anyone aiming to rank on Google search.

A fantastic, easy-to-use, and must-have plugin.

7. Wp-Insert

Occasionally you are going to want your readers to click on banners. Whether these banners are for Google Adsense or for affiliate products or your own products and services, you’re going to want to get WP-Insert.

WP-Insert allows you to easily integrate banners within areas of your text and customize the positioning to ensure it works well with your overall design.

8. Contact Form 7

Make it easy for people to get in touch with you and download this plugin.

This plugin creates a contact page for your website and bypasses the effort of someone copying your email address and going to their email and creating a new message.

This is a fast, reliable and effective plugin for a service you will most likely need anyway.

9. Broken Link Checker

As you grow in content, you’re going to link to more and more links. In time you will have hundreds if not thousands of links on your blog.

Occasionally these will become broken.

This is a problem because it affects how Google reads your website. This will have a negative impact causing you to rank lower in the people’s searches.

The Broken Link Checker plugin will ensure that these links are automatically highlighted for you to deal with and remove or replace them.

10. wp super cache

Page load speed plays a huge role in how Google perceives your website. This effects your Google search ranking.

Simply by installing this plugin you greatly enhance the speed of your load time and therefore enhance the user experience.

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All these plugins have paid versions of them so you can get more out of them through better tools and higher levels of optimization.

However, the free versions they provide pack a lot of value. If used correctly they will help you create a better user experience for your visitors. This will ensure you get more from your website.

I hope you enjoyed this article detailing the FREE WordPress plugins every blogger should have in 2021.

Please check out my Beginners Guide for Effective Blogging it’s a four-part series that will give you an edge if you are new to the world of blogging.

What free WordPress plugins would you recommend?