So you finally decided to take that leap and give in to the voice inside your head telling you to put up your own WordPress site. Well, you made the right decision. Running your own website gives you the freedom to play with the design, media, content, and plugins. Before we unveil our list of the ten best WordPress plugins, let us first discuss a little about plugins.

Plug-what?

Plugins – these allow you to maximize the functionality of your WordPress site. There are thousands of plugins out there and it can be a bit overwhelming for you and your site if you install all of them at once, so we came up with a list of plugins that you can use while you’re still learning the ropes:

1. Akismet

Right at the top of the list is the Akismet plugin because it filters out unwanted comments. No site visits mean that there are also no comments and that’s why you may find it unnecessary to install it during your site’s early stages. However, once your site gets a minimum of thirty comments daily plus a bunch of suspicious links, you’ll be thanking your lucky stars that you installed this plugin for protection.

2. SEO by Yoast

This plugin enables you to optimize your blog or your website. If you don’t know much about SEO then this plugin is definitely the help you need. Just try to fix the issues suggested by the plugin and your site will be SEO friendly in no time.

3. Wordfence

If you have Akismet to help you filter out unwanted comments, you need Wordfence to filter out suspicious IPs from visiting your blog. It has a Live Traffic section that shows you users, people, and crawl bots who visit your site in real time. It’s the perfect plugin for people who want to protect their site from threats.

4. Backwpup

This plugin aids in creating backups for your site, which is very important should there be site hackers or issues with the server. Even if your site is completely safe and secure, having a backup of the most recent version of your website is never a bad idea. This is the best plugin for that purpose.

5. MailPoet

For your site to have more frequent visitors, you will need to send out newsletters and MailPoet is the perfect plugin for that. With this plugin, you will learn how to make custom newsletters, and you can set the dates for when these newsletters should be sent out automatically. It also enables you to see the statistics of your newsletters: from clicks to unsubscribes!

6. Simple Share Buttons Adder

Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of this plugin because it is an extremely important. This plugin allows you to add buttons that site visitors can click on if they want to share links to different social media platforms. It has a list of approximately thirteen networks, meaning it has a large audience that you, as a site owner, should make the most out of. You can customize the look of each button so it complements the look of your website.

7. TinyMCE Advanced

This plugin adds a bunch of features that you can play around with to make the layout of your site entries even more interesting and appealing to the visitors. All the buttons shown in the plugin can be enabled, disabled and even arranged in any format as you like. This plugin makes text editing easier as it provides options to justify the text, insert tables between the text, a grand list of font family and font size. This is definitely a great plugin to work with.

8. WP Super Cache

If you want to boost the speed of your site, this plugin is for you. How so? Well basically, what it does is it allows you to deal with cache issues that may be causing the awfully long loading time of your site.

9. Jetpack

The Jetpack is one of the first three plugins that you need to install in your site because it contains mini plugins that you can use! It’s kind of like the movie Inception, but the plugin version. It gives a lot of useful information like visitor statistics, speeding up the loading time of images on the site, and the like.

10. OptinMonster

If you want to convert random site visitors into subscribers of your newsletter, then you definitely need to install this plugin. OptinMonster is an excellent tool for those who are into email marketing and is tagged as the best WordPress lead generation plugin. It enables you to design popups and forms that can easily convert visitors into subscribers. Its features include split testing, exit-intent technology, analytics, and page-level targeting which allows you to design a form that pops up when it senses that the visitor is about to move on to another website.

These ten plugins are just the basics. As you master the ins and outs of WordPress, you will want to install more complicated plugins for a more specific purpose but for now, these will do. While you’re still trying to familiarize yourself with how these plugins work, it’s highly recommended that you go for free plugins so you don’t spend on something that you don’t know how to use. You also have the freedom to explore what each plugin does by installing them.