A plugin is a piece of software that adds a little extra functionality to your website.
That's it. There are plugins for just about anything you would ever want to do on a website and some that you probably should not do.
I'll talk about what I think are the vital plugins that I install on every site I build for myself or for a client and some others that you may or may not need.
The ones I use on every site. The very first one is
Yoast SEO
It's been installed on about 5 million sites so it's pretty much the leader in SEO plugins. The only magic about Yoast SEO or any other SEO plugin is that it just prompts you to be mindful of the things that you should be doing to improve your search engine rankings.Basics like image alt tags, internal and external links, and your meta description help you get found by search engines.
Another vital plugin is
Jetpack
Now Jetpack is included with each new WordPress install. It's made by the developers of WordPress and it can be very helpful. It can help with security, performance, social media integration, and a lot more.
Really simple SSL
This is a very simple lightweight plugin. It only does one thing and what it does is it helps set up SSL on your site. SSL assures the viewer that your site is authentic and safe and it's pretty much standard on most websites these days.
You can get a free SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt, so there's no cost to making your site safer and more secure.
Image compression plugins make your images load faster and improve your page speed so there are a couple that I've used and I like both of them. One of them is called
WP Smush
you've probably heard of WP Smush.You can bulk smush up to 50 images at once.There are free and paid versions. Imagify is like Smush in that it heavily compresses your images to speed up your pages.It has an additional feature in addition to compression. It also converts images to webp format which makes them quicker loading.
Gravity Forms
This is again a premium plugin and it allows you to create web forms; pretty much anything you want to do and there's an infinite number of add-ons for Gravity Forms.
Use it on each website that I build and I have done anything from a simple contact form to a multi-page application form in gravity forms.
It's pretty much drag and drop and it's simple to build any sort of form you need.
Whatever your email marketing provider is, you need a plug-in that integrates that with your website so that you can collect email addresses on your site. It'll hook right in to your email provider and automatically add new members to your list.
Site speed is critical today and is a google ranking factor as well. Caching plugins speed up your site.
WP Rocket
A premium plug-in is also an excellent solution. Their very easy to understand controls. it's the easiest one to work with that I've ever used and I've used a lot of them. It does a lot. It compresses and minimizes your JavaScript and CSS, it minimizes it,compresses images and lots of different things.
There are free caching plugins though and there are about three of them that you hear a lot about.Those are WP Fastest Cache, WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.
They can all make your site a lot faster if you don't have the budget to spend on a premium plugin. You can test your site on sites like GTMetrics.com or Pingdom.com or Google Page Speed Insights.
Updrafts Plus
Backups are critical you may never know when something breaks your site.Anything unanticipated and Updraft has you covered.
You can schedule your backups for daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on how often you make changes to your site.
It makes it easy to restore with one click if something goes wrong.
Social Warfare
Now for social media integrations I have used many many social media plugins and my very favorite is Social Warfare. It's freemium.You can add floating social share buttons to all your posts or pages and you can choose and customize where they appear.I use the paid version but the free version is also very useful.
It does a great job. There are some plugins that I use very regularly but not on every site. If you need an events calendar there are a couple that I recommend.
The Events Calendar
The Events Calendar is probably the leading plugin and it's free with the premium option. It's the best known events calendar solution for WordPress and it's easy to use and looks good on mobile. Modern Events Calendar Lite I've used on one site and it's really easy and fun to use. It gives you event categories, which The Events Calendar does as well,
multiple display options, and it's just very easy to use and customize.
This one you may not need very often.
This one you may not need very often.
WP Table Builder
But when you need a table you really need a table WP Table Builder will help you build a nice responsive table that works well.
Smash Balloon Instagram Feed
Any of Smash Balloon's plugins are excellent.
It's not free but it's the best Instagram plugin I have ever used. It gives me an Instagram feed that goes along the bottom of my site and just does a great job.
Inline Related Post
Related posts appear anywhere in your post. It helps to keep people on your site for longer and it automatically generates a related post. At least one or however many you choose
So try that. The last one I want to talk about is
Better Click to Tweet
You've seen this on a variety of sites. You're reading along and there's a quote from the article and it says "click here to tweet" and when you click, a dialog box pops up. You can easily click "tweet" from there or you can add your own thoughts or hashtags or whatever you want to add. It does encourage people to tweet from your website which is again that's always great if you're getting links to your website and people are tweeting it on social media
Enjoy playing with plugins!
