WordPress plugins are software applications that improve the functionality of your blog. Plugins that are required will be installed by our team when setting up your blog. Since this is your blog, it is up to you what other plugins you add to it. As a rule of thumb, the more plugins you add, the slower your blog may become. Below are some common plugins that our bloggers use.
Required
BoardingPack - our advertising plugin
WPMU Dev - we use this to push out critical updates for plugins
Any required theme related plugins
Recommended (these are plugins most bloggers use and find helpful)
Akismet - antispam
JetPack - security, performance, and growth tools
Smush - helps optimize your images
MailOptin / Fluent Forms / Contact Form 7 - any option you think would suit you best. Will display and help manage your newsletter and contact forms
Yoast - SEO tool
Other (helpful depending on the use case)
Thirty Affiliate / Pretty Links / Easy Affiliate - useful for affiliate link management
TablePress - embed tables into your posts. can be imported/exported with excel, CSV, HTML, JSON files
Review Schema - creates a Schema markup for your post (mostly used for reviews). Useful for Google to find valid reviews/ratings and will show a review snippet
Easy Table of Contents - if your posts are very long with distinct sections, this helps users jump to where they want to go
Classic Editor - most older bloggers use this, but since you're new I wouldn't recommend it and just go ahead and jump straight into the Gutenberg block editor
Responsive Lightbox & Gallery - create a lightbox gallery of all images within a post so users can scroll through them
Disallowed
See the full updated list on WP Engine