My Top 10 FREE WordPress Plugins

Sep 13, 2018 | Josh's Blog | 20 comments

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!

  1. Testimonial Rotator – A great, lightweight plugin that displays scrolling testimonials on your site.
  2. 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.
  3. Login Logo – A handy little plugin allowing you to put a custom logo in the WordPress login screen.
  4. Sticky Menu (or anything) on Scroll – A sleek plugin allowing you to make any element on a page sticky when scrolling down.
  5. Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode – My go to plugin for creating a Coming Soon Page or Maintenance Page to cover up a website.
  6. Recent Posts Widget Extended – A very versatile plugin allowing you to customize post types in sidebars and widget areas.
  7. Facebook Like Box – The most compatible and user-friendly Facebook Like Box plugin I’ve found in the WordPress market.
  8. Mailchimp for WP – The plugin mentioned in this post which allows you to seamlessly integrate your Mailchimp sign up.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.