What is a Plugin?
WordPress has thousands and thousands of plugins available to help website developers accomplish various functions without the need to hire computer programmers. Theses plugins range in price from free to hundreds of dollars. So with thousands of choices, how does a person decide which plugins are pretty important and which ones are duds. The fact that WordPress is a free and open-source content management system makes it one of the leading choices for website developers. WordPress is based on PHP and MySQL making it easy to customize. The plugin and theme architecture of WordPress make WordPress versatile enough to be used in practically any website scenario.
What is a Theme?
Themes are basically customized styling for the website. For example: layouts, colors and menus can be set once and they will appear the same throughout the website. So there are plenty of free themes. I will save suggestions on themes for another article.
Plugins I Avoid Like the Plague
WordPress offers what they call an All-In-One solution plugin. It’s called Jetpack by WordPress.com. Jetpack will try to entice you by claiming to be the greatest thing since the invention of the web. This plugin in my opinion is a resource hog. It slows your site down with a bunch of features that are useless. Well they are not all useless, but nobody will use every possible function offered so why not just install a plugin for each feature you want. The next plugin that I don’t use is Akismet Anti-Spam. I know this sounds crazy because everyone hates spam, so let me explain. Akismet is used to block spam commenting. Allowing comments is a good technique to engage visitors, but you have to prevent the spam, which brings me to the first plugin that I am going to recommend.
Disqus Comment System
WordPress is just one of the many platforms supported by Disqus. It offers a comment moderating system. It can help you increase engagement when building a loyal audience. The nice thing about Disqus is that it allows your audience to comment by using their Facebook, Twitter or Google account credentials. There is no need for you to maintain a huge user database of logins and passwords. Just let them use their existing logins. What I really like about Disqus is ability to analyze my content based on which articles my audiences find engaging. You can read more about Disqus on their website Disqus.com or by visiting the worpress.org plugin page WordPress.org/Plugins/Disqus. Signing up for Disqus is free.
Orbisius Child Theme Creator
Just like any other computer program, WordPress gets updated. Occasionally this will mean that themes need to get updated. These updates will overwrite files that you may have tweaked or customized to improve the look or functionality of your website. By creating a child theme, you will prevent this from happening to you. Files that may be customized are duplicated into the child theme. And files that are necessary for the main workings of the theme are left alone and used by means of an Include command. All of this is handled for you by Orbisius. You can read more about Orbisius on their website Orbisius.com or by visiting the wordpress.org plugin page WordPress.org/Plugins/Child-Theme-Creator. Using Orbisius Child Theme Creator is free.
Google XML Sitemaps
Showing up on the results page of searches can result in free website traffic and who of us wouldn’t want that? This plugin creates the files that search engines use when crawling the internet indexing pages. Their description may word it best:
Use this plugin to greatly improve SEO to create special XML sitemaps which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your site.
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.
Supported over 9 years and rated as the best WordPress plugin, it will do exactly what it’s supposed to do – providing a complete XML sitemap for search engines. It will not break your site, slow it down or annoy you. Guaranteed!
Google XML Sitemaps meets all my criteria for a useful plugin. You can read more about Google XML Sitemaps on their website Arnebrachhold.de or by visiting the wordpress.org plugin page WordPress.org/Plugins/Google-Sitemap-Generator. Using Google XML Sitemaps is free.
WP Fastest Cache
Earlier I told you that WordPress is a content management system based on PHP and MySQL. Does that sound like computer geek talk? Web pages are technically a group of instructions that get sent to an audience via the internet. These instructions are interpreted by a web browser to display web pages. Well in the beginning, all pages had to be hard-coded, which means they would be displayed exactly the same for everyone. Nowadays, web pages are dynamic and can display customized content for individual users. An example might be when you see “Welcome” followed by your name. The server hosting a website doing this uses its CPU to actually build the page then send it to you.
Well if your impatient like me then you hate to wait on slow pages to load. WP Fastest Cache goes through the website storing prebuilt copies of the pages so they don’t have to be built on the fly. They are there waiting for you. Pages can load in as low as 20% of the original time. This is huge. I can’t stress this enough: your audience wants your web pages to load screaming fast and WP Fastest Cache will help you. You can read more about WP Fastest Cache on their website WPFastestCache.com or by visiting the wordpress.org plugin page WordPress.org/Plugins/WP-Fastest-Cache. Using WP Fastest Cache is free.
