The WordPress ecosystem is supported by hundreds of thousands of theme developers and plugin developers. There’s a free plugin for anything and everything. However, you can also significantly enhance your WordPress site through the use of free third-party tools, plugins or not. Here is a list of free tools you can use for your WordPress site, whether you’re writing a blog or running an online business.

Free Email Solutions

Zoho – Free Business Email for 25 Mailboxes

If you plan on using SMTP to send WordPress emails, you can also use a Zoho mailbox. They make you authenticate with a phone number to ensure that you don’t create multiple business accounts.

SendGrid – 100 Emails per Day

The website changes a lot where sometimes, they don’t openly promote or make the free version available. But rest assured, it’s there. If at any time you can’t find the free version, just sign up for a trial. SendGrid doesn’t require a credit card and after your free trial, you’ll be downgraded to their free plan. SendGrid is also the easiest to set up. For a complete guide, see our article on Setting Up SendGrid for WordPress.

Mailgun – 10,000 Emails per Month

There’s always a free tier with Mailgun. You have to add a credit card, however. So make sure you never go over their limit. If you feel that you will exceed their free limits on a monthly basis, switch over to an SMTP solution (above).

Postmark – 100 Emails per Month

They say their free tier which includes 100 emails per month is for testing purposes only but you can send real emails, although 100 emails per month is very little.

Postmark DMARC – Unlimited websites

Free DMARC monitoring and implementation to make sure you prevent undelivered email and email spoofing by spammers.

Free Email Marketing

Mailchimp – 2,000 Subscribers and 12,000 Emails per Month

Drip – 100 Subscribers and Unlimited Emails

MailJet – 200 Emails per Day

SendPulse – 2,500 Subscribers and 15,000 Emails per Month

Benchmark – 2,000 Subscribers and 14,000 Emails per Month

Sendinblue – 300 Emails per Day

Zoho Campaigns – 2,000 Subscribers and 12,000 Emails per Month

Mailerlite – 1,000 Subscribers and Unlimited Emails

Vertical Response – 300 Subscribers and 4,000 Emails per Month

Campayn – 500 Subscribers and 12,500 Emails per Month

Free CDN or Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Cloudflare – Free CDN, SSL, and Limited DDoS Protection

Everyone knows Cloudflare and they’ve had a free plan for the longest time. Sign up for free on Cloudflare.com and download their WordPress plugin to make setup super easy and quick.

Incapsula – Free CDN and DDoS Protection but no SSL

Photon by Jetpack – Free CDN

You’ll have to use Jetpack in order to activate the Photon module. Though it’s 100% free, if you don’t like using Jetpack, this may not be the best option for you.

AWS Cloudfront – Free-Trial CDN and SSL

If you don’t have an Amazon Web Services account yet or you just signed up for one within the last 12 months, you can use 50 GB per month of AWS Cloudfront for free. It takes some technical knowledge to set up and you can find pricing beyond the free tier here.

Google Cloud CDN – Free-Trial CDN and SSL

Similarly to AWS, Google Cloud Platform gives a $300 credit for new accounts that can be used towards their Cloud CDN product.

Microsoft Azure CDN – Free-Trial CDN and SSL

Microsoft is not as generous as AWS or Google Cloud Platform, as they give a free period of only 30 days and very limited credit. However, if you decide to sign up, you can use those credits for Azure CDN.

Free Storage or Cloud Storage

Dropbox – 2 GB Free

Most plugins that use a third-party storage service to store files or data feature an out-of-the-box integration with Dropbox, which makes it very convenient, as Dropbox offers 2 GB in free storage; enough to store multiple versions of backups for most websites.

Google Drive – 15 GB Free

Though Dropbox is more popular and most use Google Drive only for Docs or Sheets, you can get 15 GB of storage with Drive; more than 7 times the storage that Dropbox offers for free.

Box – 10 GB Free

Another Dropbox alternative and direct competitor. Though you won’t find a lot of out-of-the-box integrations with plugins, Box gives you 10 GB free.

OneDrive – 5 GB Free

Formally known as SkyDrive, OneDrive is owned by Microsoft. They only give you 5 GB of storage for free but if you ever want to upgrade to a paid plan, they offer more value at $1.99 per month for 50 GB.

Free Live Chat for WordPress

My Live Chat – 1 Agent

Tawk – Unlimited Agents

Pure Chat – Unlimited Agents

Free Uptime Monitoring

Pingdom – 2 Websites Free

Free for one website and free for a second website if you tweet about them. 1 minute monitoring intervals.

UptimeRobot – 50 Websites Free

5 minute monitoring intervals.

StatusCake – 10 Websites Free

StatusCake offers a free status page with 5 minute monitoring intervals.

InternetSeer – 1 Website Free

60 minute monitoring intervals.

Helpdesk

Freshdesk – Unlimited Agents

Zoho Desk – 3 Agents

Integrations and API

Automate.io – 5 Automations at 5 Minute Run Intervals

Zapier – 5 Automations at 15 Minute Run Intervals

Integromat – 1,000 Operations at 15 Minute Run Intervals

Free CRM

Zoho CRM – 3 Users

Hubspot – 1 User

Agile CRM – 10 Users

Bitrix24 – 12 Users

Capsule – 2 Users

Raynet – 2 Users

Really Simple Systems – 2 Users

As always, let us know if you’d like to see other sections covered or if anything needs to be corrected.