We know bloggers and small sites love Wordpress, heck even some larger sites use Wordpress. So we wanted to give a short list of our recommended plugins.
Image Optimization
Smush Image Compression and Optimization
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/ This is a great plugin for anyone with a lot of photos on a Wordpress site. It allows image compression over your enter site for free, and best of all it's got over 1 MILLION installs on Wordpress sites.
Page Speed
WP Super Cache
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/ WP Super Cache will make static copy's of pages that does not have dynamic elements. This allows Wordpress to give users the page content faster.
SSL/HTTPS
SSL Insecure Content Fixer
https://wordpress.org/plugins/ssl-insecure-content-fixer/ Wordpress is not great at making your site HTTPS ready by default, but this plugin can help with that by rewriting the page output before visitors can see it so that any old HTTP links and embedded media and template files now load over HTTPS.
SMTP Mailer
https://wordpress.org/plugins/smtp-mailer/ SMTP Mailer allows you to use a custom mail server to send emails to users or admins on events. This is far better then using the built in PHP mail (we do disable PHP mail on the older PHP5 servers and may down the road on PHP7 because it can be used for spam sometimes).