Best Free Elementor Addons 2021 (Free ONLY)

Lana Krupnik
12 min readOct 21, 2020

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Are you just starting your way in web development? It’s time to figure out the plugins that will make your life easier and help you efficiently build beautiful, functional, and secure sites. For example, today (10/20/2020), there are already 57,798 plugins in the WordPress library. Which to choose?

Iwant to help you. These 25+ FREE plugins are definitely useful and valuable. You don’t need to install them all at once! Here I wrote just a brief description and how to use them. I also attached links to the main materials. Choose what is right for you!

Best Free Elementor Addons for Header and Footer

Let’s start from the bottom! These free Elementor addons will help you build the header, footer, and more.

Elementor — Header, Footer & Blocks Template

It is 700,000+ times downloaded module for creating blocks, headers, and footers. With its help, you can create beautiful and straightforward elements for website pages. Elementor — Header, Footer & Blocks Template comes with 9 built-in Elementor widgets to create header and footer layouts.

Pros:

  • Easy to use
  • Handy templates
  • Helpful Support Service

Cons:

  • When creating new items, sometimes errors occur

JetSticky For Elementor

JetSticky is the Elementor add-on aimed to keep the sections and columns in sight when the page is scrolled up or down. It is an excellent option to create sticky headers and blocks you need always to be seen.

Pros:

  • Working exactly as promised

Cons:

  • Last updated 1 year ago

Sticky Header Effects for Elementor

This add-on allows changing the background color and height when the visitor starts scrolling down the page. Sticky Header Effects for Elementor is aimed to create a transparent menu that can become any color, semi-transparent or solid, once the visitor begins to scroll. With its help, you can change the color and thickness of the bottom border upon scrolling, adjust the logo height after scrolling, add a blur effect, and many else.

Pros:

  • Lightweight and easy to setup add-on
  • Easy way to create sticky headers

Cons:

  • According to reviews, sometimes errors occur
  • Support does not respond from time to time

Elements kit Elementor addons

This is a large set of addons for Elementor Page Builder. Within its free version, ElementsKit includes 40+ Elementor widgets to create any sites with ease, including Header and footer builder aimed to provide the introductory content in the header and group of content or links at the footer, create header and footer template with a logo and menus, etc.

Pros:

  • Huge plugins’ library
  • Header and footer templates
  • Quick Support Service

Cons:

  • One of the latest updates simply crashed the number of websites, yet it was fixed

Head, Footer and Post Injections

With Header and Footer plugin, you don’t need to install separate add-ons to add GA, Facebook Pixel, Alexa verification code, etc. but to insert the code those services give you in a centralized point to manage them all. This plugin is theme-independent, which means you can change the theme without losing the injected code.

Pros:

  • Performs as advertised
  • No need to have the good technical knowledge to use it

Cons:

  • Never found any. This plugin is simple and does its job

Boostify Header Footer Builder for Elementor

The simple yet powerful plugin including 7 free inbuilt Elementor widgets. Boostify Header Footer Builder for Elementor helps to build a sticky header, mega menu, vertical menu button and includes WooCommerce.

Pros:

  • Work with all themes
  • Helpful Support

Cons:

  • No problems were detected

Best Free Elementor Addons for Layouts

These plugins will help you build wow-layouts and grids from any content on your website without special effort.

JetGridBuilder — Grid Builder for Elementor

This is the latest Elementor plugin by Crocoblock which helps to build layouts on the website. It consists of two widgets: Post Grid Builder and Terms Grid Builder. Using JetGridBuilder, you will be able to flexibly and even unlimitedly form a grid gallery with ad banners/blog posts/photo portfolio/whatever.

Pros:

  • Truly flexible since you don’t need to respect the row height, posts can be placed in any order, the number of columns is not limited, size can be changed manually, etc.
  • Intuitive interface
  • Great Support Service
  • Nice video tutorials! Check this one from WPTuts, for example

Cons:

  • Weren’t defined yet

Layouts for Elementor

This is an add-on that provides 30 ready-made landing layouts for Elementor. Layouts for Elementor includes 30…yes, you got it, layouts :) which you can import directly in the templates’ library or pages to form a website grid.

Pros:

  • Category wise filter to quickly choose the appropriate template
  • Simple to use

Cons:

  • Lack of flexibility

Livemesh Addons for Elementor

This is a big pack of different freemium plugins for every purpose. The free version of Livemesh Addons for Elementor consists of 13+ widgets, including the Blog Post Grids that displays portfolio/blog entries in a nice responsive grid.

Pros:

  • Rapid Support Service
  • Handy all-in-one kit, helpful even within its free version

Cons:

  • Lack of customization options

Best Free Elementor Addons for Website Security

Security first! Protect your website from spam and malicious harm.

All In One WP Security & Firewall

It’s the free plugin that protects passwords and other personal users’ information. All In One WP Security & Firewall allows creating copies of important data about the site and storing it securely.

Pros:

  • Simple setup
  • Quick Support Service
  • Creates website copy

Cons:

  • Some say it’s buggy but 4.8/5 stars says it’s not…really

BulletProof Security

Another great security plugin for Elementor. BulletProof Security includes many advanced features like JTC-Lite anti-spam, site security protection by .htaccess files (Firewalls), MScan malicious code scanner, idle exit (ISL), cookie expiration after login (ACE), and many else. Despite it having a LOT of options, it’s not as overwhelming as it seemed at first.

Pros:

  • Excellent security
  • Top-notch customer service

Cons:

  • All features available only within the premium version

Akismet Anti-Spam

Probably the most popular (5M+ downloads) plugin for the site’s spam protection. Akismet checks comments and contact forms for spam and filters them out.

Before switching on the plugin, you need to set up an account on the official website and get an API key. The plugin is free for personal use, or you can pay whatever price you want on the site. For commercial use, the plugin costs $10/mo.

Pros:

  • Helps to avoid spam
  • Removes unnecessary content making the site speed higher

Cons:

  • Not free for commercial use

Antispam Bee

Another free add-on that blocks spam comments and trackbacks without captchas and without sending personal information to third party services. Antispam Bee has a bunch of options for configuring the antispam filter, including the ability to independently configure the parameters that should be monitored, set notifications when spam is found, etc.

Pros:

  • It’s free, without any additional costs
  • 100% GDPR compliant
  • Simply does its job

Cons:

  • It’s not compatible with some plugins for comments

WordPress Zero Spam

I hate captchas, probably your customers too. To avoid this way of spam protection, I do recommend to use WordPress Zero Spam. This Elementor add-on uses the combination of AI and proven spam detection techniques with a database of known malicious IPs from around the world to detect and protect websites from unwanted visitors.

Pros:

  • Enables to stop using captcha

Cons:

  • Unfortunately, I heard the reviews that in some cases this plugin allows a lot of spam to pass.

Best Free Elementor Addons for Website Optimization

Make Google love you. 💘 You’ll need awesome content, speedy website loading, keywords, responsive design, and 9999 other things to handle, including the special plugins.

Yoast SEO

5M+ downloads and a 5-stars rate make this plugin not only the most popular but also the highest quality SEO product. According to my observations, around 95% of the website owners use Yoast SEO for optimization.

The paid version has broad functionality but costs 89 euros per year for a single site. The free version is useful too. It can set tags, descriptions, and keywords and also analyzes errors to optimize content and site.

Pros:

  • Bulk content editor
  • A wide range of opportunities for SEO promotion
  • Setting up robots.txt
  • XML map creation

Cons:

  • All features are not available for free

All in One SEO Pack

Another great plugin for website optimization. All in One SEO Pack is simple enough for beginner SEO yet has advanced features and an API for developers. Adjusting technical settings of pages and the site, setting priorities, managing the micro-markup on the site, blocking unwanted bots, and many more features are available.

Pros:

  • A large number of SEO settings
  • Compatible with other plugins
  • Integration with e-commerce sites
  • Helps to automate processes

Cons:

  • Bugs happen. Better to never update the service immediately after a new version is released

W3 Total Cache

You will need this add-on to configure caching. The pages of the website will be saved in the cache thus speeding up the loading of these pages. W3 Total Cache has many other advanced features too, but as far as I don’t use it in that way, you better read the description yourself. :)

Pros:

  • Reduced page load time
  • Google usually places speedy websites upon the search results

Cons:

  • It can be even faster, but just for $8,55/mo
  • Hard to uninstall it completely

Smush — Lazy Load Images, Optimize & Compress Images

It’s the cool plugin to increase page load speed by compressing and resizing images on the website without a visible drop in quality. Smush images in your library one at a time or bulk smush up to 50 images at a time. Also, it fits most themes, page builders, and media library plugins.

Pros:

  • A quick analysis of the images’ quality on the site
  • Bulk image optimization
  • Absolutely free

Cons:

  • In some cases, however, the quality of images deteriorates markedly after compression

EWWW Image Optimizer

Alternate plugin for compressing images and speeding up the website pages loading. Flawlessly preserves image quality when compressing. We can say that EWWW Image Optimizer is free, but to be precise, the price is $0.002 for the image compression key. There’s also a full premium version from $5 to $15 per month.

Pros:

  • Add-on flawlessly does what it should
  • Significantly improves website speed

Cons:

  • A bit confusing interface

Broken Link Checker

Its name speaks for itself: Broken Link Checker will help you… to check broken links and redirects. Broken links appear if the website admin incorrectly indicates the link address or simply puts an extra sign. This add-on is most useful when customizing the site yourself.

Pros:

  • Quick broken links check
  • Sends a report to your mail
  • Link editor
  • No need to keep the plugin enabled all the time

Cons:

  • Better make a backup before switching on the plugin as it bugs sometimes

Best Free Elementor Addons for E-Commerce and More

Honestly, it appeared not that easy to describe sooo many add-ons. That’s why I’ll just put all other plugins under this section. 😁

WooCommerce

It is the world’s most famous open-source eCommerce add-on with a free and flexible core. WooCommerce is probably the best solution if you’re launching an online store of any kind. With its help, you will create and manage an online store with ready-made templates and options for design blocks, install payment systems, integrate with analytics services, set up delivery options, etc. You can set up dozens of additional features, the cost of each is individual.

Pros:

  • Safe payments
  • Ready-made templates with products, baskets, and application forms
  • Automated tax reports

Cons:

  • Only the paid version opens up all the opportunities. Free version has only several templates and a minimal package for customization

Marketing Toolkit by OptinMonster — Popups, Email Optin Forms & Newsletter Subscribers

This is an Elementor plugin to create pop-ups for getting new customers and conversions. Marketing Toolkit by OptinMonster helps you create pop-ups, manage subscriptions and grow your business.

Pros:

  • A ready-made solution for attracting users and customers.
  • Online form builder
  • 100% compatible with WooCommerce
  • Large selection of templates

Cons:

  • Free version is limited while all features are available for $9/mo

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is the most popular contact form used among 99% of WP sites (I guess). This addon allows you to customize and manage multiple contact forms flexibly with simple markup.

Pros:

  • Fully compatible with Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, etc.
  • It’s simple
  • It’s free

Cons:

  • It looks outdated

Popup Maker — Popup Forms, Opt-ins & More

With the help of Popup Maker, you will create any type of popup or content overlay for your site. In this popup, you can offer something to your customer, or redirect the visitor to the page you need, for example, a promotional page or fresh news.

Pros:

  • Easy any type of pop-ups creation
  • Multiple available ways to set up how the popup will appear
  • Integrates with most of the popular form plugins

Cons:

  • It’s freemium, so many cool features are available for $87/year

Customer Reviews for WooCommerce

Customer Reviews for WooCommerce plugin encourages the customers to leave product reviews thus scaling up conversions. With its help, you can set up automatic email review reminders for customers who recently purchased a product from your shop.

Add-on also provides you with the aggregated review form, the option to get a discount for the review, trust badges, Google Shopping integration, and to download reviews.

Pros:

  • Does its job well while the automation side is a doddle

Cons:

  • Reviews are collected on the developers’ site, not your domain

WP Customer Reviews

This Elementor addon allows you to set up a specific page on your site to receive reviews for your business/service OR about a product from your customers. WP Customer Reviews aims to form popularity ratings.

Pros:

  • Doesn’t affect the loading speed of the website pages
  • Simple interface
  • Enables to moderate the reviews

Cons:

  • No Support Service

How to Find Out What Addons are Installed on the Site?

Perhaps you noticed a cool element on someone’s site but didn’t know how to repeat it? It is likely a WP plugin too. To find out for sure, you can look at the Page Source.

Or you can use free plugins for detection like WordPress Plugin Checker.

Instead of Conclusion

Big thanks to all of you who read till the end! Sorry if this piece appears a bit inconsistent — I don’t really write much often, but I wanted to share WP products I trust and advise using. I’m sure there are dozens of other useful and FREE plugins for Elementor, so I’d really appreciate your contribution!

Looking forward to your feedback, guys. Don’t be too harsh :)

xx

Lana

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