[en] Highlights: • A tight-binding study of defective zigzag graphene nanoribbons (ZGNRs)-based devices. • Combined effect of structural defects and strain on spin-charge transport of ZGNRs. • The scattering and trapping of electron waves in various defects on strained ZGNRs. In this paper, we investigate the influence of point structural defects on the transport properties of zigzag graphene nanoribbons (ZGNRs) under uniaxial strain field, using the numerical studies based on the ab-initio calculation, the standard tight-binding model and Green's functions. The calculation results show that the direction of applied strain and defect type significantly affect the conductance properties of ZGNRs. The conductance of the defective nanoribbons generally decreases and some dips corresponding to complete electron backscattering is appeared. This behavior is originated from the different coupling between the conducting electronic states influenced by the wave function modification around the Fermi energy which depends on the defect type. We show that the presence of defects leads to a significant increase in local current. Furthermore, we have investigated the strain-tunable spin transport of defective ZGNRs in the presence of the exchange magnetic field and Rashba spin-orbit coupling (RSOC).