In this short article we recommend 5 free essential plugins to get you started with WordPress. We’ve personally used these plugins on our projects and can personally recommend them as extremely useful for anyone starting with WordPress. All of these have free versions but you can also upgrade to their premium tiers for more advanced features.

Yoast SEO – an essential SEO plugin for WordPress

Yoast is a great WordPress SEO plugin not only because it allows your site to be better visible on search engines but also because it teaches you as you post. Using it’s in-article recommendations you learn both about your meta tags, meta descriptions but also about the language you are using. Yoast analyses your text and gives you recommendations regarding the amount of words you use, the length of your sentences and also the relevance of your content.

Fullwidth Page Templates – An essential layout plugin for WordPress

FW Page Teamplates is a great WordPress Plugin that allows you to set your page’s dimensions. This allows you to remove any extra padding or margins, remove the sidebar and even the header or footer. This is useful in case you want to build a landing page that’s different from your main site layout.

LuckyWP Table of Contents – An essential content WordPress plugin

Good articles usually come with tables of contents, especially if they are instructive. It has been proven over and over that readers love lists. It structures the content and makes it easy for users to already get an idea of what your article is about. This is where LuckyWP Table of Contents WordPress Plugin is of great use.

Smart Slider – An essential design plugin for WordPress

Smart Slider Is a very powerful design WordPress plugin, which allows you to craft beautiful sliders. They can be boxed sliders, image sliders, video sliders or even whole pages. As it’s such a powerful plugin, to get the full features you would need to upgrade to the pro-version, which is a one-time off payment. However, you can also simply use the free version.

HummingBird – An essential optimisation plugin for WordPress

HummingBird is a a site optimisation WordPress Plugin which minimises all the resources that make up your site to allow it to load up faster. This includes style-sheets compression, page caching, assets optimisation and browser caching. It’s addon, Smush also adds image optimisation and resizing. HummingBird has a great free version, but you can upgrade to even more features with the pro version.

There you have it, our recommended 5 free essential WordPress plugins. Let us know in the comments what you think about them. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need any consultation on using and implementing them.