Put simply, cross channel marketing is servicing all levels of the client funnel. That means starting with getting your name out there from the top of the funnel where people are discovering you. Growth marketing success strategies should have a plan from the top all the way down to satisfied customers who are referring you.

This multi-faceted approach requires a variety of different strategies and content. One area people when coming up with a growth marketing strategy is using quality presentations to your advantage. Dovetailing nicely with the previously mentioned cross channel marketing, presentations can help your marketing campaign in more than one way.

1. Thought Leadership in the Company

There are multiple ways that customers can feel a connection to a brand. Two common ways to accomplish this is through loyalty to a product itself or through visibility of company leadership.

When leaders become synonymous with the brand, product, or service they represent, it has the potential to benefit growth marketing agencies. After all, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates can easily be matched up to their brands by most members of the population. Therefore, any activity and interest they generate through their personal brand is going to have an effect on their associated businesses.

Businesses of all sizes can use this same concept to raise their executives in the public eye to create a consumer connection to their associated ventures. Presentations are a good way to get your people exposure and position them as thought leaders. These leaders can build connections with people and give them another way to find your business and gain their loyalty.

Building Thought Leadership

For example, a company can enact a growth marketing success strategy involving SEO strategies and link building directly to their home page, product, or service. If the company also has a strong thought leader regularly putting out blog and video content, this creates an alternative traffic pathway. Customers can build a connection through either the company’s product quality or through interest in the individual thought leader.

Presenting at a variety of events builds up a thought leader’s credentials and authority. Some people might want to start with online presentations before moving up to in-person events. Even starting small can begin to build a reputation as an engaging speaker and give the necessary experience to work up to bigger venues.

Once thought leadership is established, new resources can potentially become available. For example, some leaders might be invited to regularly contribute to publications such as Forbes. These opportunities for attention to both the thought leader and their corresponding business endeavors can yield great results in your growth marketing strategy.

2. Growth Marketing Successes in Quality Video Content

Having a diverse array of content types can be extremely valuable. If you only create written content, you might be missing out on strategies from video content. For example, better videos tend to convert better on email marketing and ads.

So where do presentations fit into all of this? Whether you take part in online or in-person presentations, you have a convenient opportunity to essentially “double dip” on your time. If you give online presentations, simply record the event. By doing so, you have footage that you can parse for dynamic marketing selections. If you are giving a presentation in person, request a colleague record it or check to see if the event organizer has standard recording practices you might be able to access.

Maximizing Video Quality

If you’re wanting to use presentation footage for your marketing efforts, a little extra attention to detail is recommended. For online presentations, check the lighting in the room to make sure your face isn’t shadowed or washed out. Also, record against a neutral backdrop or with supporting visual aids related to your topic. You can give an engaging speech, but the impact might be lost if your grocery list is stuck on the wall behind you.

The same overall concepts apply for video content created from in person presentations. You might have less control over your environment than with a video presentation. However, you can still control your personal appearance and the quality of your footage. There is a stark difference between jostled, grainy video taken on an outdated phone and crisp footage from a quality device.

The bottom line is to prepare for the dual purpose ahead of your presentations and not make the opportunity for video content an afterthought. By planning ahead, you can get better quality video and therefore better results when you use it in your growth marketing strategy.

3. Increased Sales

Getting your business name more visibility and searchability is more so a metric of growth marketing than an end goal. Sure, it’s great if you’re ranking higher on Google searches, but that doesn’t fulfill the end game of growth marketing. Putting it bluntly, the main goal is almost always an increase in sales.

The longer you can capture a viewer’s attention, the more likely it will result in a sale. In a recent survey, more than 70% of participants noted they prefer to learn about products or services via video. As noted above, presentations are great opportunities to obtain quality video footage. It’s valuable not only for thought leadership branding, but also for just visually displaying your product or service. By having presentation videos on your site, you are potentially increasing your odds of conversion rate advancements.

For in-person presentations, you have the opportunity to form direct relationships. These potential relationships might include individuals interested in engaging your business or being a valuable partner. While it might seem outdated in today’s digitized world, sometimes the in-person interactions form the strongest and most beneficial connections. By neglecting this traditional marketing strategy, you and your quarterly sales figures could be missing out.

Presentations for Success

For both small business owners and growth marketing agencies, growth marketing success depends on a variety of factors. A major one, however, is whether or not you are using your resources to the best of your ability. If you aren’t using presentations in your strategy, you might find it’s a resource that would noticeably increase the effectiveness of your growth marketing efforts.

The post How Doing Great Presentations Affects Growth Marketing Success appeared first on Relevance.

This is happening whether businesses like it or not.

The single best response I can figure out is for businesses to hone in on what they do best, use the digital terrain to separate themselves from the pack, and trust that when they offer the marketplace something of real value, the marketplace will return the favor. Growth marketing is a key way to differentiate yourself and stay ahead of the competition.

In my experience, content is the key element to a successful growth marketing strategy. There are several trends with content to be aware of as you plan your growth strategy.

1. Aligning content strategies is vital.

I used to say that one key to growth marketing success is to kill as many birds with one stone as possible. I’ve said it so often that I finally decided that I don’t want to be known for killing birds so I changed it to “feeding as many birds as you can with one scone.”

True, it’s not rocket science, but the concept does hold the key to growth marketing ROI. To get started, look at each one of your marketing and communication strategies and see how it affects your content strategy.

If you look at Dave McClure’s Pirate Funnel and how it applies to growth marketing, you will see how it’s important to have content alignment across your funnel with awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral. All of these strategies are heavily influenced by content creation and distribution strategies so they must be aligned.

Considering the RACI Matrix

Before you spend time executing your plan, take a step back. Chart out how these areas affect each other. You could even download a RACI matrix and walk through the tasks your team is doing. This will help you see how it affects other areas of your company and other strategies.

The above visual is an example of how you can create a matrix with the tasks on the left side and the people/areas it affects on the top. To move faster than everybody else with your marketing, you need to have a system set up to maximize the ROI of your content efforts.

One piece of content could be put on the blog and left there to die. Or you can run it through a matrix of some sort. It could be sent to potential recruits to engage them to stay top of mind. It could be used as a sales asset if sent to the right person in sales.

I’ve studied a lot of the fastest-growing companies with effective strategies. They all do some variation of this content alignment. Content is consistently aligned with other aspects of their business and is used in multiple ways to maximize their ROI.

2. Niches matter more than ever.

SEO experts have published a wide array of content related to how the Google algorithm is getting increasingly intelligent such that details matter. Search results are moving toward displaying the best answer/resource and not just the resource with the highest domain authority.

Relevancy is becoming key. No matter what profession you are in, educate yourself on the content strategies that work in that specific niche.

For example, I come from a family of attorneys. When they asked me about niche marketing, the first thing I sent them was the book Law Firm SEO. I pointed them to this resource because I wanted them to understand the tactics used in their niche. They agreed it was a helpful read.

To be honest, in the past I might have sent them my own book or something from Joe Pulizzi or Ann Handley. I still might likely do that on occasion. However, there’s so much content out there these days that you have to hone in a bit more on your area.

I’ve designed content strategies for small startups and some of the largest brands in the world and I can tell you one thing without hesitation. If you produce content exactly like everybody else, you will not take the lead in growth marketing.

The reason why I also recommended the above book to my family of attorneys is that I want them to understand the content tactics that are being used in their industry. To me, that’s Step One toward arriving at a successful content growth strategy. Best practices for marketing in your specific industry are something to always keep in mind, of course, but then take the next step and aggressively highlight how you and/or your company do things differently.

Testing Organic Growth Strategies

For example, we recently A/B tested some organic growth strategies with Calendar, an online scheduling and calendar app. We were aware of what others in the calendaring and scheduling industry were doing, so we made a checklist:

• Do they have a user-friendly guide on their site?
• Do they have a group of linked blog posts?
• Is the underlying technology up to snuff?

We immediately noticed a specific gap. Yes, they were doing PR. However, they weren’t doing it in alignment with desired search terms or areas where they were seeking organic growth. Instead of going for things such as a calendar app in their PR strategy, they were going for article features on Calendar founders or just general PR to get the brand name out there.

These days, the Google algorithm is too smart to just look at best practices that experts say to follow. Instead, it wants to see you naturally own your industry. When content is too sporadic and all over the place, it’s hard for Google to know exactly where they should position you.

Redesigning Your Site

Another way we’ve seen niche marketing really matter is whenever a site is redesigned.

I recommend that as soon as you redesign a site, you have a targeted PR campaign for six months afterward. When you change everything around, Google tries to figure out where you should land. If you don’t help them understand the niche where you should be the best resource, it’s going to put you where the algorithm deems you “safe.”

I was at Content Marketing World last year and a woman I met had hired one of the best website companies. She was mad that her organic growth took a hit and started to think that she had been ripped off. However, her underlying assumption was that if she had an amazing website, that would be enough to increase organic growth.

Maybe, in the long run, that might be true.

However, we’ve conducted enough testing to know that if she would have followed up the relaunch with a six-month campaign, the keywords she had previously owned would have immediately ranked. She could easily have hit the ground running to gain more ground now that her site was amazing. Just that one simple tweak would have helped put her on a quicker path to industry leadership.

3. Have a system in place to collect data, then make your strategic decisions based on that data.

There are certain metrics that you must start tracking to make informed decisions on your growth strategies. Start tracking these common marketing data points ASAP. They include common marketing data such as unique visitors, time on site, social metrics, qualified leads, conversion rates, and opportunities. After that, grow from there once you have a reliable system in place.

Data collection will only get better as technology is advancing at an extremely fast pace. Once you have these systems down, you can use them to project advanced strategies.

For example, there are a lot of great SEO and marketing tools out there. These tools can tell you how difficult specific keywords are or how many links it will take to begin gaining credibility. Recently, I was using a newer version of MarketMuse. It not only showed me how difficult it is to rank for a certain keyword, but it also showed how specifically difficult it would be for me compared to others.

The MarketMuse tool took into consideration industry data, which is common. However, the extra element was taking into consideration how my company already had a certain amount of authority. This affected the data and allowed us to make a more informed decision on going after something more difficult. In this case, we were uniquely positioned to achieve it.

This is a good example of what I’ve hit on in previous tips. You can do things just like everyone else and use tools to look at general search traffic or how hard it is to get a keyword ranking. However, when you think more about your specific niche or how your company is uniquely positioned to own certain things, it can help you grow quicker in that area.

4. Your content strategy should reflect your growth.

One insightful test you can run to see where your content strategy stacks up is to ask a neutral third party to take a look at your company online.

Ask them what they think your revenue looks like, where it seems as though you stack up in the industry, what you are best at, etc. Make sure you give them the freedom to be completely transparent with their answers. If the report comes back and it doesn’t line up with where you are — or better — then you may have a problem.

For example, a friend of mine recently invited me to invest in a company called Tradefull. My initial assessment was, well…this company’s digital presence didn’t reflect what my friend was saying. However, after speaking to the owner/operator, I was ridiculously impressed with the numbers, progress, team, and pretty much everything else about the company.

I provide this example simply to point out that the online presence created a natural trust barrier. You don’t want this for your company, particularly if the online impression is not necessarily accurate. The more you remove these barriers, the more you can go full steam on the growth path you want. Today, Tradefull is on a path to reflecting that success with its content strategy.

It’s important to note that this is the most common thing I see with successful growth companies. Sometimes the digital landscape doesn’t represent the actual landscape.

Years ago, you could get away with this sort of thing, at least for a while. However, nowadays, technology has allowed your competitors to catch up. Differentiating yourself and staying ahead is vitally important. This means that your digital narrative should be realistically aligned with the actual narrative.

Concluding Thoughts

Overall, consider looking at it like this: You are putting in the hard work to help grow a company. As a result, at least a small percentage of that time should be making sure the story that people see aligns with that hard work. Perception of your brand can ultimately become reality.

Have a process in place at your board or leadership meeting to measure the perception of market share similar to how you would calculate your market share in sales. The test above can be helpful but also make sure you set actionable goals. Survey how competitors have a presence at conferences, conduct media monitoring, and track how much you are mentioned in industry conversations compared to competitors. You’ll find that you are now positioned to set goals to gain more market share of that conversation.

As you look at growth strategies for your company, take into consideration the ideas presented above as you decide where the budget should go. The tips above can help you not only get on a quicker growth path but also can help you get buy-in from leadership and other key players within your company.

Aligning content strategies can benefit other departments, niche ownership can excite leadership bent on industry domination, and looking at the data of your current competitive advantage can all lead to a better growth path. The result will be an accurate perception of your brand but also a catalyst to your company’s growth.

The post Growth Marketing Tips That Are Affecting Content Strategies appeared first on Relevance.

One of the things that makes WordPress so powerful is its huge library of third-party plugins. While there are certainly lots of premium plugins out there, you can also find tons of great, free options from generous developers.

In fact, if you browse the official free plugins directly at WordPress.org, you’ll find over 58,000 free WordPress plugins.

But that presents another problem – with tens of thousands of options to choose from, how do you choose the best free WordPress plugins for your site?

To help you filter your many options, we did the work for you and curated those thousands of plugins down to just 30 options, including many popular WordPress plugins as well as some hidden gems that are worth a look.

To make it easier for you to find the plugins you’re interested in, we’ll divide our list into three broad categories:

• Marketing, monetization, and design plugins
• Security and performance plugins
• Admin/management and customization plugins

Let’s dig in so that you can find the perfect plugin for your WordPress blog or website.

Best Free WordPress Plugins for Marketing, Monetization, and Design

WordPress Plugin Ecosystem in 2026: WordPress powers 42.8% of all websites globally and holds 60.4% CMS market share (Hostinger). There are now over 70,000 plugins available, with new submissions nearly doubling in 2025. WooCommerce alone holds 33% of the ecommerce market, used by 8.8% of all websites worldwide (DemandSage).

The free plugins in this first section help you improve your marketing efforts, monetize your site, and gain access to new design capabilities to help with those goals.

LearnPress

LearnPress is our first choice when it comes to the most famous LMS plugins for WordPress. It’s a perfect solution for creating and selling online courses. In addition, you can download LearnPress for free and it works well with any WordPress theme. LearnPress has an amazing collection of add-ons like co-instructors, certificates, content drip, WooCommerce, front-end editor, and more.

Key Features:

– Supports multiple payment gateways: 2Checkout, Authorize.net, and Stripe.
– BuddyPress and bbPress integrations
– Works with WooCommerce and Paid Membership Pro
– Course review, prerequisite courses, wishlist, and random quiz is available too

Pricing: Free and Premium add-ons bundle costs  $249.99
Best For:  Creating education websites, eLearning websites, and online-course websites with no coding knowledge required.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a popular CRM that can help you with marketing, sales, and customer service. With its free WordPress integration plugin, you can access all of those marketing tools without leaving your WordPress dashboard.

The core of HubSpot is its free CRM, which lets you manage all of your customers and track their activity on your site. To help you connect with more customers in the first place, the HubSpot plugin comes packed with useful features like a drag-and-drop form maker and live chat. 

Key Features:

• Manage everything without leaving your WordPress dashboard.
• Full CRM (customer relationship management) tool to keep track of your customers.
• Drag-and-drop form builder to grow your email list and connect with customers.
• Popup builder.
• Live chat and chatbots.
• Built-in analytics (all connected to customer profiles in your CRM).
• Email marketing tool for newsletters and email marketing automation campaigns, including a drag-and-drop email builder.

Pricing: Free. There are optional paid add-ons for certain features.

Best For: Boosting your site’s marketing and sales efforts and keeping track of all your customers.

Elementor

If you’ve ever felt limited by the design capabilities of the default WordPress editor, the Elementor page builder plugin might just be for you. It gives you a visual, drag-and-drop editor where you can build beautiful designs without needing any technical PHP or CSS knowledge. You can add content using simple widgets and then style them using Elementor’s built-in options.

You can use Elementor to build landing pages, create more style blog posts, improve your core pages, and more.

Key Features:

• Visual, drag-and-drop design interface.
• Start from pre-built templates or a blank canvas.
• Create your design by dragging in widgets and organizing them with sections/columns.
• Style everything using built-in options – no code required.
• Works with blog posts, pages, or any other post type.

Pricing: Free. Premium version from $49.

Best For: Creating more unique designs without needing to have any technical knowledge.

Rank Math SEO

Every WordPress website needs an SEO plugin to improve rankings in Google. While Yoast SEO and All-In-One SEO are the established names here, Rank Math SEO is a newer option that’s shooting up in popularity thanks to its generous free feature list.

Rank Math SEO does everything those other SEO plugins do, but it also gives you free features that other plugins charge for such as multiple keyword optimization, schema markup, internal link suggestions, and more.

Key Features:

• Full WordPress SEO plugin.
• Set SEO title/description and social media graph information.
• Content analysis to help you improve SEO and readability.
• Optimize for multiple focus keywords.
• Built-in LSI keyword tool.
• Structured data/schema markup support.
• XML sitemaps support to replace the native WordPress feature.
• Modular approach so that you can disable features you don’t want.

Pricing: Free. There’s also a premium version from $69.

Best For: Improving WordPress SEO and ranking your website in search engines like Google.

WPForms Lite

Every WordPress website needs forms. And when it comes to dedicated WordPress form plugins, WPForms is one of the best free options. The free version makes it easy to create simple contact forms and comes with some pre-built templates to get you started.

You can then easily embed your forms anywhere on your site using a shortcode or block.

Key Features:

• Design your forms using a drag-and-drop editor.
• Pre-built form templates.
• Easily embed forms using a shortcode or dedicated block.
• Built-in spam protection.

Pricing: Free. Or upgrade to Pro for more advanced forms from $79.

Best For: Creating a contact form for your WordPress website.

TablePress

Tables can be a really useful design element for presenting information to your visitors. You can use them to compare products/services, share data, and more. When it comes to free WordPress table plugins, TablePress is the king with its 800,000+ active installs and perfect 5-star rating on over 4,000 reviews at WordPress.org.

Key Features:

• Manage tables from an Excel-like editor.
• Import table data from Excel, CSV, Google Sheets, and more.
• Automatically sync table data with externally-hosted sources, like Google Sheets.
• Create responsive tables.

Pricing: Free.

Best For: Creating any type of table on WordPress.

Ad Inserter

Ad Inserter is a useful plugin if you display any type of advertising on your site as it makes it easy to manage and insert all of your ads from one convenient interface. It supports ad services such as Google AdSense or Media.net, as well as custom ads (or any other HTML for that matter).

You can easily inject your ads in your content at various spots, in your sidebar, or directly in your theme template files. All in all, it’s just generally a useful plugin for working with ads on WordPress.

Key Features:

• Manage any type of advertisement, including Google AdSense or your own custom banner ads.
• Automatically insert ads at various locations on your site.
• Rotate ads to display different ads at the same location.
• Track ad impressions.
• Desktop and mobile device detection to display optimized ads for each.
• Whitelist/blacklist ads on certain content.

Pricing: Free. There’s also a paid version from €20.

Best For: Inserting and managing ads on your WordPress website.

Shared Counts

Adding social media share buttons to your site is a great way to encourage your visitors to share your content on social media. You can also add share counts alongside the social sharing buttons to showcase how popular your content is, which is a great way to boost social proof on your WordPress site.

Shared Counts is a lightweight free plugin that lets you accomplish both things without slowing down your site. 

Key Features:

• Lightweight and performance-friendly design to avoid slowing down your site.
• Add social share buttons for popular networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Email, and Pinterest.
• Show total and individual share counts.
• Automatically add share buttons or manually place them with a shortcode.
• Dedicated share image for Pinterest (separate free add-on).

Pricing: Free.

Best For: Adding performance-optimized social media share buttons and share counts to your site.

Jetpack

Jetpack is a popular free plugin that adds a range of functionality to your WordPress site. It includes a variety of features including site stats, related posts, a built-in content delivery network (CDN), automatic sharing for new posts to social media, sidebar widgets, brute force protection, and lots more.

All of the features are modular so you can pick and choose exactly which features you want to use on your site.

Key Features:

• Performance-friendly related posts to engage your visitors and keep them on your site.
• Sync your site with WordPress.com and its many features (this is why Jetpack requires a WordPress.com account).
• Automatically share new posts to social media.
• Uptime monitoring.
• Built-in content delivery network (CDN).
• Built-in basic contact forms.
• Mobile app for iOS and Android to control your WordPress site on the go.

Pricing: Free.

Best For: Adding a range of modular features to your WordPress site and syncing your site with WordPress.com.

MonsterInsights

Google Analytics is a popular web analytics tool that helps you understand where your website’s visitors come from and what they do on your site. While you can manually add the Google Analytics tracking code to your site and view your site’s data in Google Analytics, that can be a little complicated for many WordPress users to set up.

MonsterInsights makes it a lot easier to add the tracking code and it also lets you view your data inside your WordPress dashboard in a much more useful and user-friendly layout. For advanced users, the premium version can also help you set up detailed tracking for button clicks, downloads, custom dimensions, and more.

Key Features:

• Add the Google Analytics tracking code to WordPress.
• View Google Analytics data in your WordPress dashboard.
• View real-time stats.
• Get email summaries of important stats.

Pricing: Free. Premium version from $199.

Best For: Adding Google Analytics to WordPress and viewing stats inside your WordPress dashboard.

PixelYourSite

The MonsterInsights plugin from above helps you integrate Google Analytics into your WordPress site. But as you go through your marketing efforts, you’ll probably want to add tracking services for other sites such as Facebook, Pinterest, and more.

That’s where PixelYourSite comes in – it helps you add and manage tracking pixels for a ton of different services including Facebook, Pinterest, Bing, and more.

Key Features:

• Supports popular tracking services including Facebook Pixel.
• Automatically track important events like the pages users visit.
• Create your own events to track custom information.
• Dedicated eCommerce integrations for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads to track conversion events.
• Integrates with popular cookie consent plugins for GDPR support.

Pricing: Free. Individual paid add-ons or purchase a bundle of add-ons from $150.

Best For: Adding and configuring tracking pixels for Facebook, Pinterest, and other services.

myStickymenu

myStickymenu is a flexible free plugin that helps you create any type of notification bar at the top of your website. You can use it for announcements, promotions, CTAs, and more. You can also animate and trigger it at different times. And with the premium version, you can even create multiple bars and target them to different pages.

Key Features:

• Create flexible notification bars.
• Include any content in your notification bar.
• Customize colors and fonts.
• Trigger and animate your bar to display at different times.

Pricing: Free. Premium version starts at just $19.

Best For: Creating any type of notification bar on your WordPress site.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin. You can use it to add a full-featured eCommerce store to your site or you can use it more as a payment processor for services, membership sites (most membership plugins integrate with WooCommerce), online course content, paid bookings, and more.

Key Features:

• Full eCommerce solution.
• Integrates with dozens of payment gateways, including big names like PayPal and Stripe.
• Comes from Automattic, the same team behind WordPress.com.
• Huge library of official and third-party extensions to add new features to your store.

Pricing: Free.

Best For: Creating an online store with WordPress or otherwise processing payments on your WordPress site.

Pretty Links

Pretty Links is a really useful free plugin for affiliate marketers or anyone else who needs to insert unique tracking links in WordPress. It can help you manage all of your affiliate links from one spot and manually or automatically insert them in your content. True to the name, it also lets you cloak your links to create “pretty links” like yoursite.com/go/offer.

Key Features:

• Manage all of your affiliate links from your WordPress dashboard.
• Insert affiliate links in the WordPress editor.
• Cloak affiliate links.
• View click stats for each link.

Pricing: Free. Pro version adds automatic link insertion and other features for $99.

Best For: Managing, inserting, and cloaking affiliate links (or other URLs).

GenerateBlocks

If you use the native WordPress block editor (AKA Gutenberg), GenerateBlocks is a really useful addition. GenerateBlocks adds just four new blocks to the editor, which doesn’t seem like a lot at first glance. However, these four foundational blocks, combined with the native blocks, give you pretty much everything you need to build great-looking designs with the WordPress block editor.

Key Features:

• Performance-optimized code that won’t slow down your site.
• Adds four new blocks – container, grid, headline, and buttons.
• Each block has flexible layout/style options.
• Works with any WordPress theme.

Pricing: Free. Pro version from $39 per year.

Best For: Improving the designs that you’re able to create using the native WordPress block editor.

Members

Members is a lightweight WordPress membership plugin that helps you manage user roles and permissions on your site if you allow public user registration. You can use it to group users into different roles, restrict content, add custom login forms, create a private site, and more.

Key Features:

• Create custom WordPress roles to group users together.
• Control what each role can do using permissions.
• Restrict access to content based on a user’s role.
• Make your whole site private so that only members can access it.
• Integrate with other popular plugins like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, GiveWP, and more.

Pricing: Free.

Best For: Improving membership and user roles for WordPress sites that allow public registration.

Best Free WordPress Plugins for Security and Performance

Security and performance aren’t exciting, but they are essential areas to focus on if you want your WordPress site to be successful. These free plugins help you lock down your site’s security and make it load faster for visitors.

UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is a free WordPress backup plugin that lets you backup your site manually or automatically on a schedule that you can set. Every WordPress website needs to have regular backups, so UpdraftPlus is a must-have if your web host isn’t already handling backups for you.

In addition to its automatic scheduling, another key advantage of UpdraftPlus is that it lets you automatically offload your backups to various cloud storage providers such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, and more. By storing your backups outside your server, you make your backup process a lot more secure.

Key Features:

• Backup your site manually or automatically on a schedule.
• Create full backups or backup just your database or files.
• Automatically offload backups to cloud storage including Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, and more.

Pricing: Free. There are also paid extensions that add new features, or you can get a bundle of all extensions for $70.

Best For: Securely backing up your WordPress site to an offsite location.

Wordfence

Because WordPress is used by so many websites, it’s a juicy target for hackers and other malicious actors. Hackers will scan the web for vulnerable WordPress sites, so your site might be targeted even if it isn’t a traditional “high-value” target.

The Wordfence security plugin provides a single comprehensive solution to protect your site with a web application firewall (WAF), malware scanning, and lots of other security hardening tweaks.

Key Features:

• Web application firewall (WAF) to proactively protect your site from threats.
• Malware and security vulnerability scanning.
• Login page hardening.
• File integrity monitoring.
• General WordPress security hardening best practices.

Pricing: Free, but the firewall/malware rules are delayed by 30 days in the free version. For protection against brand new zero-day threats, you can upgrade to the Pro version from $99.

Best For: Securing your WordPress site with one comprehensive solution.

WP Fastest Cache

Caching is one of the best things you can do to speed up your WordPress site. So if you aren’t already using a web host that offers a built-in caching solution, you should use a WordPress caching plugin. And when it comes to free WordPress caching plugins, WP Fastest Cache is one of the best with its near-perfect 4.9-star rating on over 3,400 reviews.

In addition to page caching, it can also help you with other WordPress performance best practices including code optimization, Gzip compression, browser caching, and more.

WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache are also other good free options – there are lots of great solutions when it comes to free WordPress caching plugins.

Key Features:

• Page caching.
• Set up cache clearing rules and/or manually clear cache.
• Gzip compression.
• Browser caching.
• Disable emojis.
• Code minification.

Pricing: Free. Premium version from ~$50.

Best For: Speeding up your WordPress site with page caching and other WordPress performance best practices.

Smush

On average, images account for about 50% of the filesize of an average website. So if you can find a way to reduce the size of your images, you can make a big improvement to your site’s page load times.

The Smush plugin helps you optimize your images on autopilot by compressing them with lossless compression as you upload them and also giving you the option to resize the images to a set of max dimensions.

Key Features:

• Automatically compress images with lossless compression (you need the premium version for lossy compression, though).
• Automatically resize image dimensions when you upload images.
• Lazy load images in all browsers (Safari doesn’t currently support WordPress’s native lazy loading).
• No monthly limits – the only limit is 5 MB for images.
• Bulk optimize existing images.

Pricing: Free. If you want lossy compression, the premium version costs $5 per month.

Best For: Optimizing your site’s images to improve the performance of your website.

Optimole

Another WordPress image optimization plugin, Optimole has a slightly different approach from Smush. Optimole uses on-the-fly optimization to serve adaptive images to users via its built-in CDN (content delivery network).

With adaptive images, you can dynamically resize your images based on each visitor’s device so that every user sees an image that’s optimized for the resolution of their device. The only downside is that its free plan will only work for small sites.

Key Features:

• Automatically compress and resize images.
• Serve adaptive images.
• Built-in CDN powered by Amazon CloudFront.
• WebP conversion.

Pricing: Free for up to 5,000 monthly visits. Paid plans from ~$19 per month.

Best For: Serving adaptive images via a global CDN to speed up your site.

Limit Login Attempts Reloaded

Brute force attacks are one of the most common ways WordPress sites get hacked. In a brute force attack, malicious actors guess huge numbers of username/password combinations until they find one that works.

One of the best ways to protect yourself from brute force attacks is to limit login attempts on your site (much like banks and other security-conscious organizations do). If a user enters an incorrect password more than X number of times, you can block them for a certain amount of time.

Note – Wordfence also includes this feature, so if you’re using the Wordfence plugin you don’t need to install this plugin.

Key Features:

• Temporarily block users who enter a certain number of incorrect passwords.
• Full control over how you configure the blocking rules.
• Whitelist certain IP addresses so that you don’t accidentally block yourself.
• XML-RPC protection.

Pricing: Free. There’s also a cloud-hosted version for $4.99/month.

Best For: Securing the WordPress login page and protecting your site from brute force attacks.

Two Factor Authentication

If you really want to lock down the login page for mission-critical WordPress sites, you can consider two-factor authentication (2FA), which is what most banks use nowadays.

With 2FA, people will need to enter both their username/password and a unique code from a smartphone app or email. The Two Factor Authentication plugin makes this super easy to set up on WordPress.

Note – Wordfence also includes this feature, so if you’re using the Wordfence plugin you don’t need to install this plugin.

Key Features:

• Supports standard TOTP + HOTP protocols, which lets you use most smartphone apps including Google Authenticator, Authy, and more.
• Enable two-factor authentication on a per-role basis (for example, you can only require it for admins and editors).
• Create trusted devices for certain time periods.
• Integrates with other plugins including WooCommerce.

Pricing: Free. Premium version from £19.

Best For: Securing the WordPress login with two-factor authentication.

Autoptimize

Autoptimize is a popular free WordPress plugin for optimizing your site’s code, mainly with file minification and combination. You can use it to shrink your site’s file size, reduce HTTP requests by combining files, and get rid of those pesky Google PageSpeed Insights warnings like “Defer render-blocking JavaScript” and “Inline critical CSS”.

Key Features:

• Minify your code to shrink its file size without changing functionality.
• Combine CSS and JavaScript to reduce HTTP requests.
• Defer or Async JavaScript to eliminate render-blocking JavaScript.
• Inline critical CSS.

Pricing: Free.

Best For: Optimizing your WordPress site’s code (JavaScript and CSS).

Asset CleanUp

Asset CleanUp is a more advanced WordPress performance plugin that lets you conditionally load certain scripts on different parts of your sites. By only loading JavaScript and CSS on the specific pages where it’s needed, you can reduce HTTP requests on your site and speed it up.

This one is a bit advanced, so if you don’t know what HTTP requests are or why they’re important, you might want to skip it. But for experienced WordPress users, this is a really great free plugin to help you get even more performance out of your site.

Key Features:

• Reduce HTTP requests to improve WordPress performance.
• Enable/disable scripts on a page-by-page level.
• Globally enable/disable scripts across your entire site. 

Pricing: Free. Pro version from $47.

Best For: Reducing HTTP requests and improving performance by conditionally loading CSS and JavaScript only where it’s needed.

Sucuri

Sucuri is another lightweight WordPress security plugin that provides an alternative to Wordfence for basic WordPress security hardening. The free Sucuri plugin doesn’t include a firewall like Wordfence, but you can pay for the premium Sucuri service which adds a real-time firewall at the DNS level.

Key Features:

• File integrity monitoring.
• Activity auditing.
• Basic security hardening like blocking certain PHP files and disabling plugin and theme editing.
• Remote malware scanning via Sucuri SiteCheck.

Pricing: Free. You can also optionally pay for the Sucuri firewall service.

Best For: Implementing basic WordPress security hardening on your site.

Best Free WordPress Plugins for Admin/Management

This last group of plugins is mainly focused on helping you improve your site’s technical and backend areas. These plugins will help you work with custom content, add code snippets, filter spam comments, and more.

Code Snippets

At some point, you’re probably going to want to add some custom PHP code snippets to your site. While you can add these custom code snippets to your WordPress site via your theme’s functions.php file, it gets a little complicated because you need to use a child theme and you’ll lose your snippets if you ever change themes.

The free Code Snippets plugin provides a better way to manage code snippets, letting you add each code block separately and conditionally enable it on different parts of your site.

Key Features:

• Manage code snippets from a dedicated interface.
• Easily enable/disable code snippets.
• Run code snippets sitewide or only on the frontend or backend.
• Change themes without losing your code snippets.

Pricing: Free.

Best For: Managing your WordPress site’s code snippets.

Insert Headers and Footers

The free Insert Headers and Footers plugin is similar to the Code Snippets. However, while Code Snippets is focused on helping you add PHP code snippets, Insert Headers and Footers is specifically focused on injecting code snippets into your site’s header or footer area, which is especially useful for adding tracking scripts or integrating third-party SaaS tools.

Key Features:

• Add scripts to your site’s header, body, or footer.
• Manage scripts from a unified interface.

Pricing: Free.

Best For: Adding tracking codes or JavaScript integration snippets to your site’s header or footer area.

Akismet

Because WordPress is the most popular way to make a website, it’s also a very attractive target for spammers looking to flood your comments section with links to their sites. Even low-traffic sites can attract a lot of spam comments, so it can be frustrating to try to moderate everything manually.

Akismet takes the load off your shoulders by automatically flagging spam comments so that you don’t have to deal with them.

Key Features:

• Automatically check all comments for spam.
• Manually unspam comments if needed.
• Track the number of approved comments for each user.
• Comes from Automattic, the same team behind WordPress.com.

Pricing: Free.

Best For: Protecting the WordPress comments section from spam.

Advanced Custom Fields

Advanced Custom Fields (or ACF for short) is a popular free plugin with advanced users and developers because it helps you work with custom fields on your WordPress site. 

If you’re not familiar with custom fields, they basically give you a way to store additional information about content on your site, such as adding a location field to your blog posts so that you can tag the location of the topics you’re blogging about.

Key Features:

• Add custom fields to any post type.
• Include a variety of different field types including text, numbers, datepickers, file uploads, and more.
• Conditional logic to show/hide fields.
• Embed fields using shortcodes or simple PHP functions.

Pricing: Free. Pro version from $49.

Best For: Working with custom fields on your WordPress website.

WP Mail SMTP

WP Mail SMTP solves a very specific problem to help improve the reliability of your WordPress site’s transactional emails (these are automated emails for things like password resets, notifications, etc.).

By default, the way that WordPress sends these emails results in them either not sending or ending up in recipients’ spam folders. WP Mail SMTP fixes this by helping you configure your WordPress site to use a dedicated email sending service such as SendGrid, Mailgun, the Gmail API, and more. 

For most sites, you’ll be fine with a free service and your transactional emails will be much more reliable.

Key Features:

• Configures WordPress to use a dedicated email sending service for transactional emails.
• Dedicated API integrations for popular providers like SendGrid, Mailgun, and Gmail.
• Generic SMTP option to work with any SMTP provider, including your host’s SMTP server (if your host offers one).
• Test email feature to make sure your emails are working.

Pricing: Free. Premium version from $99.

Best For: Improving the reliability of your WordPress site’s transactional emails with a dedicated email sending service.

Get Started With the Best Free WordPress Plugins Today

The plugins on this list prove that you don’t need to crack open your wallet to find great plugins to improve your WordPress site.

While you probably don’t want to install every single plugin on this list, you should consider each plugin and think about how it can make a meaningful improvement to your WordPress site, whether that’s improving your marketing efforts, boosting your site’s user experience, securing your site, speeding up your site, making it easier to manage your site, or anything else.

The post 30+ Best Free WordPress Plugins in 2026: A Curated List appeared first on Relevance.

This translates to leaks in your marketing funnel. Thankfully, you can fix it. Re-engagement emails help to revive cold, disengaged subscribers in multiple stages. Generally, brands send out a series of two to three re-engagement emails. Are you confident in your re-engagement email marketing approach?

Re-Engagement Email Marketing Skills

In this article, I share top tips by expert email developers and marketers to brush off your re-engagement email marketing skills. 

1. Segment Your Disengaged Readers

The first step to running a successful re-engagement email marketing campaign series is to understand why your subscribers stopped engaging in the first place. Identify why they joined your email. Was it for welcome freebies or were they considering multiple solutions? Many people also give fake email addresses while others give two ids, lowering your email marketing performance. 

Next, identify their current position in the marketing funnel along with their demographics, psychographics, and purchase intent. This will help you plan your time and efforts for running different campaigns as you won’t like to invest the same energy for all dormant leads. Past data of opt-outs and profiling can also provide valuable insights. Following this tip ensures that you focus on better quality leads right from the beginning.

2. Let Them Reconfigure Their Preferences

Reading emails often becomes overwhelming, which can lead to subscribers opening your messages less frequently. Giving an option to throttle down the email frequency works like a charm. Extend different mailing frequencies and allow subscribers to reconfigure it themselves. 

(Image Credits)

This is convenient for both of you since it improves your overall engagement rates and reduces your subscribers’ chances of getting frustrated. You can also enable them to receive specific types of emails as it helps you serve their purpose of connecting your brand.

Here’s a chart that shows industry benchmarks for the key email performance metrics. 

(Image Credits)

3. Offer Help For Common Issues 

If the above trick doesn’t work, you can try extending help on common problems your subscribers are facing. It could be a coding glitch that compromised your message’s rendering, a mishap in your automation workflows leading to irrelevant emails, or even issues with your copy. Address such concerns and reassure your readers that such issues won’t surface again.

You can also use your CRM to see if they made any recent purchases or logged a complaint before disengaging. In such cases, reaching out is a great way of winning back your enraged customers. 

4. Send Personalized Messages

When your dormant subscribers still refuse to engage, you should vamp up your personalization efforts. Including their first name, preferred products, and even sending them a message based on their purchase history will help build a bridge. I find that personalizing your win-back emails is extremely important to their success rate. Your cold leads are least likely to respond to generic messages from a brand they want to see less often.

You can get straight to the point and ask them the reason behind dismissing repeated re-engagement email requests. Combining this appeal with honesty will filter any irrelevant subscriber who isn’t likely to purchase from you. This type of re-engagement email marketing message often helps find out enraged subscribers since they can speak their mind directly. It also helps refine your future communication strategy.

5. Send Them Special Offers With Ladder Discounts

Now comes the real deal. Sending discount offers on your merchandise for breaking the ice. It’s a bit tricky as businesses admit that few people join their email lists and become inactive only for getting such discounts. It doesn’t seem harmful at first sight since you’re making a sale, but soon it starts digging into your bottomline.

It is best to offer ladder discounts as they incentivize bigger transactions. Thus, you can avoid such subscribers who are only around when you compromise your pricing heavily.

6. Ask For Final Reviews

Let’s face it, every subscriber won’t stay. Frankly speaking, almost half of the subscribers engaging at this moment will not be doing so next year. They are only going to dent your deliverability if they don’t unsubscribe. This damages your IP reputation and limits your outreach. 

Here’s an email example that lets the subscriber know that they are removing them from the list. 

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Discard dormant leads that aren’t going to engage by identifying the email addresses and asking them to opt-out. You should also ask whether they no longer wish to be engaged. You can use this data to improve your future list building activities.

Most of the marketers directly start with discounts but the previous stages are equally essential. Re-engagement email marketing helps you retain the repeat business as well as complement new client acquisition costs.

The post 6 Tips for Re-Engagement Email Marketing appeared first on Relevance.