10 Essential WordPress Plugins for Beginners

After we posted Why WordPress is the Ultimate Choice for your Website and A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a WordPress Website a few months ago, we decided it's time to create a follow-up article to help beginners get the most out of their websites.

Creating a WordPress website is not really that hard to do; you just need to use the right tools and apply the right skills for it to work. For those who are not familiar with WordPress plugins, these are software add-ons installed that enable users to extend or add more features and functionality to their WordPress websites even without any coding background.

The good thing with WordPress is that it has tons of useful free and paid tools that you will surely be spoiled for choice. Just go to the plugins directory from your WordPress account and you'll discover thousands of plugins for just about any purpose.

Today we'll share with you 10 of the proven effective plugins for your WordPress site. If you have other plugins not featured on this article, you can share them in the comments below.

1. Jetpack

A powerful plugin available only to WordPress users, Jetpack has solid features that allow one to easily customise site design, get an instant responsive theme, create and publish content, monitor visitor engagement, boost site performance and keep spams and other security threats away.

2. Akismet

Akismet helps you monitor comments through its Akismet Web services and filters them for any spams. It lets you review prior to publishing them on the comments section. URLs are revealed in the comments to check if it contains any misleading or concealed links.

3. Editorial Calendar

Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed when you're swamped with deadlines for your blog content? We swear by how effortless it is to schedule multiple content from different content contributors. A single click on its main dashboard gives you an overview of your blog posts and the dates on when each one are scheduled to be published. Drag and drop different posts as you wish and edit drafts without leaving the calendar.

4.WP Super Cache

Want your website to load faster and improve user experience? We recommend that you add WP Super Cache to your list of plugins. This plugin can help optimize any WordPress sites and make it load faster by using less resources.

5. Ultimate NoFollow

To easily have control over links that you want to tag as rel=nofollow, the Ultimate NoFollow plugin will help you do just that. Whenever you insert links to posts, it has a nofollow checkbox ready. Additionally, you can add or delete nofollow tags on all links on the comments section.

6. Yoast SEO

Proudly developed by Joost de Valk and the Yoast team, this nifty tool has all the features to improve your site's SEO performance in search engines. It forces you to write content around focus keywords and integrate them on different parts of the content like the title, subheadings, alt tag, body and meta descriptions.

7. WordFence Security

Wordfence is a free and open source plugin that scans the source code of the WordPress website if it's infected or not. It blocks known attackers in real-time, provides login-security and scans the site for Heartbleed vulnerabilities and botnets.

8. UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration

UpdraftPlus is one of the most downloaded backup plugin on WordPress.org with more than half a million active users. It helps to simplifies the backup and restoration of files and databases into cloud servers like Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon, Rackspace Cloud, etc. It can also duplicate or migrate sites with add-ons and transfer it to another location.

9. Google Analytics by Yoast

Are you using Google Analytics to keep track of your blog's page visitor engagement? Now you can with this WordPress plugin from Yoast. It uses the universal Google Analytics tracking code to generate reports about your audience and your site's performance in search pages.

10. Disqus

Pronounced as "discussed", Disqus is an ideal commenting plugin to help manage comments and discussions on a website. It increases exposure for your blog's comments and extents the discussion to larger discussion community. This plugin integrates easily using the Disqus API that syncs with the default WordPress comments.

Are there other plugins we miss?

The list is by no means exhaustive but we hope that you found this article useful in finding the right plugins for your website that you can start with. If you feel that there are other plugins that deserves to be added to the list, then make sure to share them in the comments below and we will try our best to include them on our next update. You may also want to read another related article about the top social media plugins you should use for your website.