1. Wordfence
Wordfence is by far the best security plugin for wordpress. Wordfence is a free enterprise class security plugin that includes a firewall, anti-virus scanning, cellphone sign-in (two factor authentication), malicious URL scanning and live traffic including crawlers. Wordfence is the only WordPress security plugin that can verify and repair your core, theme and plugin files, even if you don’t have backups. The best part about this plugin is that it’s 100% free. Just wow.
2. Hammy
Hammy takes your regular content images (within posts and pages) and regenerates a number of smaller sized images. When a person visits your website, it then automatically provides them with the most appropriate image (or the smallest one possible). This makes for a better experience, especially on mobile.
3. Seo By Yoast
This plugin is written from the ground up by Joost de Valk and his team at Yoast to improve your site’s SEO on all needed aspects. While this WordPress SEO plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization, more on that below, it first and foremost helps you write better content. WordPress SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.
4. Google Site Map Xml
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
5. KK I Like It
Looking for an aesthetically pleasing way for users to like your content, then kk I like it is for you. This plugin allows users to like content and it also comes with a widget that displays the most popular content. The plugin also comes with skinable buttons just to give that extra little bit of customization.
6. Shareaholic
Shareaholic has proven time and time again to be an extremely useful and successful tool in getting your readers to actually discover and submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites. Shareaholic comes with many features such as related stories and an incredible amount of social networks to share to that most other social sharing plugins simply don’t have.
7. WP Super Cache
If W3 Total Cache is just a little too much, then check out WP Super Cache. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
8. Autoptimize
Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It concatenates all scripts and styles, minifies and compresses them, adds expires headers, caches them, and moves styles to the page head, and scripts to the footer. It also minifies the HTML code itself, making your page really lightweight. There are advanced options available to enable you to tailor Autoptimize to each and every site’s specific need.
9. AddThis Social Sign In
Looking for a simple way to register and sign up users, then check out AddThis Social Sign In. This plugin uses popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter to grab profile information for users and populate your user database. The plugin is free for a set amount of traffic but the paid version can get a little expensive, especially if you have a lot of users.
10. Copyright Proof
Worried about someone stealing your content or users posting someone else’s work, then take a look at copyright proof. A copyright notice with teeth! Prove ownership, protect your copyright, and copy protect. Obtain a digitally signed and time-stamped certificate of content of each wordpress post (for proof of copyright). Inserts combined certification. copyright, licensing, and attribution notice at end of post. At your option, your post’s url will be shown on digiprove.com (will be a hyperlink for Digiprove subscribers) to your post. Optional anti-theft feature to copy protect your content