My Top 10 FREE WordPress Plugins
Over the years, I’ve used hundreds of free WordPress plugins. Some have worked out great for many of my site builds and some have been a total waste of time and have conflicted with many other tools, themes and plugins I’ve used.
So here’s a list of my top 10 plugins that I use for the majority of my builds. I hope it helps contribute to your WordPress toolbox in your web design endeavors!
- Testimonial Rotator – A great, lightweight plugin that displays scrolling testimonials on your site.
- TinyMCEAdvanced – Taking the WordPress to the next level and alleviating the issue of HTML disappearing when toggling back and forth between the Visual and Text side in the editor.
- Login Logo – A handy little plugin allowing you to put a custom logo in the WordPress login screen.
- Sticky Menu (or anything) on Scroll – A sleek plugin allowing you to make any element on a page sticky when scrolling down.
- Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode – My go to plugin for creating a Coming Soon Page or Maintenance Page to cover up a website.
- Recent Posts Widget Extended – A very versatile plugin allowing you to customize post types in sidebars and widget areas.
- Facebook Like Box – The most compatible and user-friendly Facebook Like Box plugin I’ve found in the WordPress market.
- Mailchimp for WP – The plugin mentioned in this post which allows you to seamlessly integrate your Mailchimp sign up.
- Velvet Blues Update URL’s – My go to solution for changing URL’s sitewide when moving WordPress sites or updating URL’s to SSL. Featured plugin in my post on how to Manually Migrate WordPress sites.
- Events Calendar – The best free events plugin in the market. Light weight, customizable and very compatible with most themes and other plugins. Great selection of add-ons as well.
Thanks Josh. As always, always passing on useful stuff.
Thanks Rodrigo! No problem 🙂
Awesome list Josh. I’ve used most if not all of these quite a bit myself. Thanks for sharing!
Great to hear, Keegan! Always good to know the tools I use are recommended by others as well 🙂
Thanks, dear Josh. I am looking for a free LMS currently; any suggestion ?
I don’t know of a free LMS…and honestly, that sort of platform I would not trust or rely on a free one. I use LearnDash and really like it. Probably the most affordable out of most WP LMS’s.
Thanks for another great share Josh!
Do you know if the Tiny MCE plugin is going to play nice with Gutenberg?
ooo good question. Honestly I’m not sure. It’s a pretty popular plugin so I imagine they’ll make it compatible.
Great Stuffs Josh! Thanks for this post, gives me idea what to post on my blog next time. 🙂 I am planning to share my mostly used plugin too. You have a great list of plugins. Thanks for this.
Awesome, Nathan!
«Sticky Menu (or anything) on Scroll» is good but I just can use it for one single element in a page. Is anything wrong?
Not sure if it can be used on multiple elements if that’s what you mean. Worth trying it out! I typically just use it on the sidebar.
Thanks again and again for the info, Josh. I use a couple of these already, but I’m glad to learn of more to try.
Regards!
No problem, Susan!
Hi Josh can you help me with how to place the testimonial created in ” Testimonial Rotator ” on the home page as I am not able to see a module in divi builder so can you help me out with this. Thanks in advance
Hey Liza, yeah you won’t find it in the Divi modules since it’s a 3rd party plugin. You just take the testimonial shortcode and place that in a Divi text module to make it show up!
Hey Josh,
Could u please recommend a free plugin for book appointments with payments?
my client is a therapist and she wants able to collect payment with booking at the same time.
Thanks
I actually haven’t used any WP booking plugins but I know it’s been asked and recommended a lot in my Divi group if you want to check there!
Testimonial Rotator not available for a year now.
“This plugin has been closed as of February 25, 2021 and is not available for download. Reason: Security Issue.”
What is your new recommendation?
There are a plethora of free ones out there but my preferred one for Divi is now Divi Pixel.