Do you remember when you installed WordPress for the first time, and wondered what plugins to install? Well, you are not alone. According to Word Press’s official website, there are 43,348 plugins available at the moment, and the number will surely continue to grow. Therefore, it is no wonder that sometimes it could be a bit difficult to sort the good from bad.

WordPress is probably the most widely used content management system in the world, and you certainly need some plugins if you want to customize it for your specific needs. Here you have some of the best plugins that will help you with security, user experience and revenue. However, remember that having too many plugins could potentially make your website unstable and unusable, so choose wisely and try to balance features with performance.

W3 Total Cache

Speaking about website speed, Total Cache is designed specifically to boost the page load time for WordPress sites. The app is recommended by web hosts such as Go Daddy, Synthesis, DreamHost and many more. It aims to improve your visitor’s experience by reducing download times and increasing server performance, which in turn, will help your site rank higher in search engines. Total Cache is especially helpful to people or companies with larger websites, because it improves server performance during high traffic periods.

Jetpack/BruteProtect

There seems to be more misbehavior happening on the web more than ever these days, and a lot of it is directed toward sites running WordPress. If bots attempt to do a brute-force attack on your website, they could easily overwhelm your server, making your site inaccessible. BruteProtect was created to combat such attacks; in fact, it blocked over 35 million attacks in July of 2014 alone. Two years ago, Automattic purchased BruteProtect and integrated it into Jetpack. Additional Jetpack features include spam-free comments, content tools and visitor engagement tools, just to name a few.

AdSanity

Ease-of-use is one of the main attributes of this ad management plugin – if you know how to add a post, then you will know how to add ads with AdSanity. You can display ads in posts, sidebars or pages with it, and more notably, you can create time-based ads, that run for a certain amount of time and you can create infinite ads that keep running until you decide to remove them. In addition, if you want to know more about the efficiency of your advertisement, the app also has stats and graphs for ad views and clicks.

Tickera

One of the best aspects of WordPress is that you could use it to build a website for virtually anything. You could set up an auction website, a podcasting one, and even an event website. However, when it comes to selling tickets on your event website, more often than not, you are forced to use third-party software that demands part of the ticket revenue as a commission. That is why you can get Tickera, a wp event ticketing plugin that allows you to sell your tickets and keep all of the revenue for yourself. It works seamlessly, so you do not have to worry about coding or editing, but if you want extra functionality, you can opt for add-ons.

Akismet

Spam is still a serious problem; spam comments can drain your server resources, and waste your valuable time if you try to moderate them. So if you feel the need to replace the standard WordPress commenting system, with something that will help you prevent spam comments, you should select Akismet. The plugin is actually a web-based service that checks comments against their own system. You get to review any comment that is marked as spam, so you can un-mark some comments in case there was a mix-up.

Conclusion

As we mentioned in the introduction, you have to think about the balance. The plugins we listed here are all effective in their own way, but this does not mean that you should download them all as soon as you finish reading this. First, you need to consider what features you really need, and after reviewing them, click away and start improving your site.