Doesn’t your theme support the sidebar menu or footer? Are you concerned about the look of your website? Don’t worry at all! Top free WordPress plugins will solve all of these problems by customizing your website. WordPress plugins are developed by third party and most of these are compatible with WordPress software.

Most of us are not the web designer and do not know coding. Therefore, the WordPress plugins will solve this issue by coding automatically on behalf of us. It’s an amazing part to show your artistic sense and present your website to the entire world like a professional developer.

But keep in mind that too much plugins may slow down your hosting server to respond. Hence, choose the plugins wisely and install only those which are essential for your purpose.

You can do anything with the help of WordPress plugins. Let’s check them one by one based on their actions and performances. It’ll help to optimize the number of plugins in your dashboard.

1. “Elementor” – To build website pages, customize themes, design and layout

2. “Elementor – Header, Footer & Blocks” – To create custom header, footer and blocks

3. “Recent Posts Widget with Thumbnail” – To show your recent posts with title and thumbnail

4. “Shortcodes Ultimate” – To create user-friendly blog post editor for creating nice looking posts

5. “Yoast SEO” – For SEO analysis of your blog posts to appear in the top results of search engines

6. “WPforms” – To create customer contact form for communication purpose

7. “Smush” – To reduce image file sizes, improve performance and boost your SEO

8. “Ad Inserter” – To insert ads on your website to make money

9. “Sassy Social Share” – To add social share button in your blog post

10. “Accordion” – To create accordion grid and FAQ

Let’s start to check the top free WordPress plugins here.

Go to “Plugins” on the left side-menu of your admin dashboard and click on “Add New”.

You can also find and install the plugins directly from WordPress Plugin Directory

 

Plugin-1: “Elementor” – To build website pages, customize themes, design and layout

“Elementor” is the most advanced front-end drag & drop page builder WordPress plugin. It can create high-end, pixel perfect websites for any theme, any page & any design at record speeds. This is a multipurpose plugin that may be helpful for your website.

Search “Elementor” in the right side top corner search box. Click on “Install Now” and hit the “Activate” button.

 

This plugin is now activated and ready to use.

Go to “Pages” and open the page you want to customize. Click on “Edit With Elementor” and your screen will appear like below:

 

If you don’t know how to create pages, visit “Create Navigation Menus” in the link below:

Related Topic: Customize Your Blogging Website (In-Depth)

Click on the “+” sign to add new blocks in the page as per your choice. Now, drag & drop any text format, image or video formats or anything else you want to include in your website theme design & layout.

Finally, click the “Update” button in the left side bottom menu to save the changes you made.

This is awesome! Similarly, you can customize any page of your navigation menu in the same way any time.

 

Plugin-2: “Elementor – Header, Footer & Blocks” – To create custom header, footer and blocks

“Elementor – Header, Footer & Blocks” is the powerful plugin that allows creating a custom header, footer and display them on selected locations. You can also create custom Elementor blocks and place them anywhere on the website with a shortcode.

Search “header footer” in the right side top corner search box. Click on “Install Now” and hit the “Activate” button.

 

Go to “Appearance” on the left side-bar of your admin dashboard and click on “Header Footer Builder”.

 

Now you can customize the header or footer by drag & drop method what you did in the previous section with “Elementor” plugin.

 

Plugin-3: “Recent Posts Widget with Thumbnail” – To show your recent posts with Title and Thumbnail

Your website will look nice if you can show the recent post title & thumbnail. It may be positioned in the right sidebar of your website or anywhere.

 

Search “recent post with thumbnail” in the right side top corner search box. Click on “Install Now” and hit the “Activate” button.

 

You can custom thumbnail size and number of snippet words that will appear with your post title.

 

Plugin-4: “Shortcodes Ultimate” – To create user-friendly blog post editor for creating nice looking posts

WordPress will provide you the default editor where lot of post editing functions are not available. You can use “Shortcodes Ultimate” to get a lot of editing features which can create a nice blog post.

Search “ultimate shortcode” in the right side top corner search box. Click on “Install Now” and hit the “Activate” button.

 

Also install “TinyMCE Advanced” to appear the editing menu-bar in your new post.

 

Once you install and activate both the plugins, you can see the below editor with lot of editing functions. Now you are ready to create your new post.

 

Plugin-5: “Yoast SEO” – For SEO analysis of your blog posts to appear in the top results of search engines

“Yoast SEO” is very useful plugin for SEO and on-page content analysis that help your blog post to rank in search engine like Google.

 

After activation, go to “Add New Post” under “Post” tab in the left side-menu.

At the bottom of editing section, you can see “Yoast SEO” analysis section. It’ll help you a lot to create your post SEO friendly. Put the focus key-phrase of your blog article and meta description.

You can see the SEO score, readability, social media sharing etc.

 

Plugin-6: “WPforms” – To create customer contact form for communication purpose

You can create simple customer contact form by “WPforms” plugin. It can be placed in your “Contact” page or homepage or at the end of your blog post for direct communication with your readers.

 

Plugin-7: “Smush” – To reduce image file sizes, improve performance and boost your SEO

The big image sizes may slow down your website considerably. “Smush” plugin reduces image file sizes, improve the website performance and boost your SEO ranking.

 

Plugin-8: “Ad Inserter” – To insert ads on your website to make money

Most of us don’t have a coding knowledge. Hence, it’s better to use a plugin to manage your ads for monetization purpose.

“Ad Inserter” plugin may be a choice to manage ads in a simple way. I’m using this plugin without any issue.

 

After you install and activate the plugin, go to “Settings” on the left side-bar of your admin dashboard and click on “Ad Inserter”.

Here you can see enough blocks just to paste the ads codes. Now, select the pages or blog posts where the ads will be displayed. Also select the option where to put the ads exactly from the drop down menus under “Insertion”.

You have to set each block for each ad. Finally, click on “Save Settings” button just below the ad code screen.

 

That’s it! Check your website to see the ads displaying on the screen.

You can use this plugin for any type of ads like Google AdSense, affiliate links etc.

Related Topics

How to make money from Google AdSense

Top 10 Affiliate Programs to Make Money Online in India

 

Plugin-9: “Sassy Social Share” – To add social share button in your blog post

This WordPress plugin is fully responsive. You can set floating as well as sticky social sharing buttons of your choice.

You can also opt out if you want to show these buttons at the top and bottom of your blog posts.

 

After selection, click the “Save changes” button to save the changes you made.

 

Plugin-10: “Accordion” – To create accordion grid and FAQ

This WordPress plugin will help you to create FAQ page with accordion grids.

 

You can also use this accordion inside your blog post. This will present your article a nice look and easy to read for your readers.

Search the plugin in the search box and install it.

 

You can get the shortcode to paste in your blog page and the grids will appear to display.

 

Lot of options are available to customise the plugin as per your choice.

Conclusion

There are hundreds of free plugins available in WordPress. The above top free WordPress plugins will help greatly to customize your website. However, it’s your choice to select the right plugins that are essential to build and maintain your website.

Try to minimize the number of plugins to maintain the performance of your site since too many installed plugins may slow down your hosting server.

Also you need to consider the responsive and ads friendly plugin, as described above. This will attract more organic traffic in your blogging website and hence more money from your blogs.

If you have any suggestion, please let’s know.

Put your comments here. How many top free WordPress plugins are you using in your blogging website?