Unlocking the Power of WordPress Plugins
With over 39% of all websites powered by WordPress, it’s no wonder that the platform has become a hub for third-party plugins that extend its functionality. But with so many options available, finding the right plugins can be overwhelming. In this guide, we’ll cut through the noise and explore the best free and freemium WordPress plugins for contact forms, antispam, and SEO.
What Are WordPress Plugins?
WordPress plugins are PHP scripts that enhance existing features or provide new ones for your website. These open-source, free, and volunteer-developed plugins create a vibrant market that offers a wide range of choices. However, this also means that missing functionality can be inconvenient. For example, most sites need a contact form, but WordPress doesn’t provide one.
The Best WordPress Plugins
Choosing the best WordPress plugin can be difficult due to the sheer number of options available. The WordPress plugin repository can be hard to navigate, and it’s easy to fall for marketing tricks. Many free plugins are not really free, and you may find essential features that need to be unlocked by purchasing extensions.
Contact Form Plugins: Contact Form 7 vs. WPForms Lite
Most sites require a contact form, and the two most popular plugins illustrate the difference between commercial freemium and actual free, open-source software.
- Contact Form 7: This plugin has been around almost as long as WordPress itself and has many active installations. It enables you to create multiple forms, customize them using simple markup, and easily integrate antispam tools.
- WPForms Lite: This plugin offers a drag-and-drop contact form builder, prebuilt form templates, and a huge number of features and integrations. However, its aggressive and annoying ads built into every area of the plugin can be overwhelming.
Antispam Plugins: Antispam Bee
If you have comments enabled in WordPress, you’ll soon be a victim of comment spam. Antispam Bee is a free and open-source plugin that blocks spam comments and trackbacks without captchas. It enables you to view statistics on the dashboard, trust approved commentators, and validate commenters’ IP addresses.
SEO Plugins: The SEO Framework vs. Yoast SEO
Search engine optimization is crucial if you want your site to get visitors. The two best SEO plugins for WordPress are The SEO Framework and Yoast SEO.
- The SEO Framework: This plugin has no advertising or spam and offers visual traffic light indicators, social media integration, and automatically generated structured data markup.
- Yoast SEO: This plugin analyzes your posts and makes suggestions to improve its search rank. However, it can distract you from writing great content, and its relentless attempts to sell you the premium upgrade can be annoying.
Finding the Right Balance
The right balance between a genuinely useful free plugin and a freemium plugin that is mainly an ad for a paid extension is hard to strike. Companies and developers deserve to get paid for great products, but it’s easy to get sucked into sneaky marketing and end up using something that is bloated and annoying due to excessive advertising.