Have you ever had the feeling that other marketers are killing it with their WordPress sites, while you’re always a tiny bit behind the curve?
If so, you’ve come to the right place. Although these 22 marketing plugins for WordPress aren’t top-secret, they’ve certainly been giving time-strapped marketers an advantage for quite some time now.
We’ve vetted the plethora of WordPress marketing plugins out there and condensed them into a handy list of the top free ones for 2018. If you’re looking to solve a specific problem, we’ve got you covered, too – just skip to the section that interests you the most.
SEO and Search Engine Marketing Plugins
Search-engine marketing is full of nuances and technicalities. Rather than memorizing all of these (and painstakingly checking your contractors’ content against a hundred best practices), why not employ a plugin to do the job for you?
Best for: Checking your content, in real time, for potential search engine optimizations. This plugin grades your content based on its SEO-friendliness and provides detailed steps you can take to improve it.
Active Installs: Over 5 million
Best for: Link management, tracking visitor activity on your site. This plugin creates branded short links (rather than using a service like bit.ly) and provides insights into how users are finding your site and interacting with its links.
Active Installs: Over 200,000
Best for: Planning SEO strategy and optimizing content, using in tandem with other SEO plugins. This tool offers various “assistants” that help with specific aspects of SEO.
Active Installs: Over 30,000
Best for: Marketers who are running big websites and don’t want to manually check every link to verify it works. This tool automatically scans your whole site for broken links, usually within an hour, and displays them all in a dashboard.
Active Installs: Over 600,000
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
Best for: Tracking Google Analytics data within WordPress. This tool integrates Google Analytics with WordPress so you can check Analytics data in one place.
Active Installs: Over 2 million.
Social Media Marketing Plugins
The more shareable your website’s content is, the less work you’ll have to do when it comes to social media promotion. Here are some plugins to help boost the shareability of your digital marketing content.
Best for: Marketers who prioritize Twitter as a social platform. Click to Tweet is exactly what it sounds like: a plugin that makes it easy for your readers to share your content by Tweeting a quote from your piece in one simple click – without any hassle.
Active Installs: Over 20,000
Social Media Share Buttons and Social Sharing Icons
Best for: Creating social share buttons on your site, blog, or landing pages. This plugin allows you to create and customize buttons for over 200 social platforms.
Active Installs: Over 100,000
Best for: Customizing your social share buttons. This plugin displays sharing icons with share counters for multiple social platforms, and doesn’t depend on external code (meaning it runs quickly).
Active Installs: Over 80,000
Best for: Protecting your blog’s comment section from spam. This plugin detects spam in comments and contact forms and prevents it from damaging or slowing down your site.
Active Installs: Over 5 million
Best for: Creating floating share buttons with counters. It’s the oldest WordPress plugin for this functionality, and one of the most popular.
Active Installs: Over 500,000
Lead Capture Plugins
Keeping your campaigns organized across multiple channels is every marketer’s headache, and it’s imperative to make sure no leads are falling through the cracks. These WordPress plugins for lead capture help to connect the dots between your website, email lists and your CRM.
Best for: Marketers looking for more customizable landing pages for their email campaigns. Easily build your email list with more beautiful lead capture pages.
Active Installs: Over 10,000
Best for: Capturing leads from your website so you can convert them into customers. It’s the perfect plugin for marketers who want to generate tangible value from their website by turning site traffic into a list of leads.
Active Installs: 6,000+
Best for: Creating forms that pop up at the right moment, turning site visitors into subscribers. This plugin is great for marketers with good site traffic, but who aren’t seeing the amount of leads or conversions they’d like.
Active Installs: Over 700,000
Best for: Marketers of e-commerce websites. Sumo helps build your mailing list, create popups and discount offers, and see the results of your e-commerce marketing campaigns.
Active Installs: Over 100,000
Best for: Building forms. This drag-and-drop creator makes it possible to create any number of forms and fields on your site.
Active Installs: Over 1 million
Best for: Creating secure contact forms. This plugin integrates with Akimet and other plugins to create secure forms for your site.
Active Installs: Over 5 million
Content Plugins
Though WordPress plugins can’t quite replace a real writer or editor (yet), there are several WP plugins that can make the content production process a whole lot easier.
Best for: Distraction-free blog post writing. Use this plugin to clear your headspace when you draft a blog.
Active Installs: Over 1,000
Best for: Creating landing pages or other pages quickly and intuitively. This plugin lets you see what your pages look like as you make them, saving the not-so-tech-savvy a ton of time.
Active Installs: Over 1 million
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Best for: Keeping readers reading by displaying similar posts at the end of a blog post or article. Customize the way the “related posts” grid appears and more with this plugin.
Active Installs: Over 200,000
Best for: Deciding between two page titles. This handy little plugin helps you optimize your content titles for SEO by showing which of two has the best potential, right now, to rank.
Active Installs: Over 1,000
Technical and Site Performance Plugins
You may not think of site performance as part of marketing’s role — but it’s a fact that even your hottest leads won’t stick around on a slow-loading site. Here are the technical plugins you’ll need to improve the user experience.
Best for: Creating XML sitemaps. This plugin helps you create sitemaps that enable search engines to crawl your site — a must-have for search engine marketers.
Active Installs: Over 2 million
Best for: Managing 301 and other redirects. You won’t have to mess with complicated code to create and manage redirects, and this plugin is even configurable to automatically create redirects.
Active Installs: Over 1 million