Must-Have Plugins for WordPress Sites

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Chapters

• 0:49 Essential WordPress Plugins for Website Optimization
• 12:13 Top WordPress Plugins for Website Optimization
• 18:25 E-Commerce Made Easy Podcast Recap

Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 0:49

Running a WordPress website is a bit like owning a high-performance car. Now, if you don't know this about me, I actually love cars. I've loved cars as a little kid too, which is why I use this analogy. It's powerful, versatile and it gets the job done, but to really keep it running smoothly, you need the right tools added into it. That's where plugins come in. Think of them as the upgrades and accessories that you can add to your car or website we're talking about here to go from good to great and highly functional. So in today's episode, we're diving to the must-have plugins that every WordPress website owner should know about. Whether you're just getting started or looking to refine and optimize your site, these plugins will help you boost performance, enhance security and create an amazing user experience. By the end of this episode, you'll have a clear understanding of which plugins are essential, why they matter and how to make sure your website's running at its best. We're going to give you several options in each category so you can pick the best plugin that is right for you.

Carrie Saunders: 1:55

Welcome to the eComcommerce made easy podcast. I'm your host, k Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine month old, my main goal To help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry and even more than that in web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech into easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place. So sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together. Welcome back to the show.

Carrie Saunders: 2:28

Today, we're talking about some highly popular and essential plugins for WordPress, and I'm going to be talking about them highly popular and essential plugins for WordPress, and I'm going to be talking about them in different categories, because I feel like these categories are very essential that you should have at least should have a great plugin for one of these categories. Now I'm going to give you a couple options, because not one piece of software fits all. I don't feel like. I've always felt this over 20 some years. One piece of software isn't right for everybody, just like one plugin for WordPress isn't right for everybody, but we do need to have these essential components come covered. So the first one you're probably going to guess that if you've been listening to the podcast for a while is security.

Carrie Saunders: 3:08

I want to make sure you have a security plugin in your WordPress site. Now. What we typically do is we typically use a specific security plugin, and I'll tell you about that. But the reason behind this, though, is, with over 40% of the websites 40% out there on the Internet being powered by WordPress is a prime target for hackers. Security is an optional for WordPress, and I've talked about this before on the podcast, but it is super essential, highly essential.

Carrie Saunders: 3:41

I have found that WordPress sites get hacked because they're not having a security plugin, because they aren't keeping things up to date. We have podcast episodes on that too. We'll link to those in the show notes, but it's highly important because when you have a popular software, it's not the software itself that's the problem. It's just a large target because there are so many of that out there, so there's a lot more opportunity for websites to make mistakes and not be secure. Don't have the plugins updated or don't have a security plugin in place to help prevent hackers too. So our top recommendations are WordFence, security and SecuriSecurity. That's a bit hard to pronounce. We'll put a link. We'll put the words in the show notes so it's easy for you to find.

Carrie Saunders: 4:30

We personally tend to use WordFence security for all of our clients. It's the first plugin we install when we are creating a new WordPress website. What it does is it helps alert you, the owner, when your plugins are out of date, which is one thing that's really important to know is we want to make sure we're updating our plugins and or WordPress itself to alert you when this needs to happen. It also will block repeated attacks to your website. So if it is detecting that an IP address which is basically that if you're not familiar with what an IP address is, it's basically like the address of a computer. In simple terms, if they see a specific computer hitting your website over and over and over and over and over again, they are going to block that and shut them down temporarily and then let them back in later so that they can't brute force that's called brute force hacking into your website. So it's a great first measure. They also provide this plugin free as well as paid. We have customers typically using the free version, but you know, if you're much popular, much bigger website, you may want to consider the paid version of this.

Carrie Saunders: 5:39

And then the other one I mentioned was security security S-U-C-U-R-I security. You can see the way, that's a little hard for me to say that one is also good. We have um a few clients using that one and they actually use. Some of them use it on their e-commerce website as well, and we've had no problems working with that company, um, whenever updates didn't need to be made that they were alerting their our mutual client with um. It's not something we're as experienced about, so I can't speak personally to that one as much, but it is definitely one of the top ones and one you could consider if you don't want to use WordFence.

Carrie Saunders: 6:16

And then I also want to back up here and I forgot to say this in the beginning. I want to make sure we say this is I want you to be looking at the terms and conditions of any of these plugins. I suggest and I don't know when you're going to listen to this podcast episode it could be a year or two from now so I want to make sure, before you install any WordPress plugin, I want you to make sure it has been updated in the past few weeks. When I looked at this list before I created this podcast episode, I looked at all of them and they've been created within, or updated within the last few weeks. Now, why I say that is, if it's not been updated in the last few weeks, that might be a dead plugin, which means the developer is not updating it anymore, which can cause security issues. So I do want to caution you. I should have said this in the beginning, but we're still early in the podcast episode.

Carrie Saunders: 7:05

Make sure that you are checking to make sure that that plugin has been updated within a month. Typically, it would be the best month or less. Some of them that I checked when I was looking at this as I'm creating this list, had been updated in the past hour. One of them was a month, but that plugin I felt like was one that maybe not needed to be updated, you know, every several weeks. So that one seemed okay. But anyway, let's keep going on the onto this episode.

Carrie Saunders: 7:34

So, first off, with security WordFence security or security security are the two that we have found to be the most popular. All right, oh. And then make sure you're only choosing one of these security options, because we want to make sure they're not creating conflicts either. So that's just a little pro tip there is make sure that you're picking one, okay. And then the next set of plugins we need to pick one from is performance plugins. We talk a lot about on this podcast episode, making sure on this podcast show, making sure that we are having a high performing website, because that helps search engine optimization, it helps our user experience. It just really makes our website so much better. So some of them are. There's actually three I'm going to present to you that are potential options that you could use. The first one's WP Rocket. It's an all-in-one caching plugin that boosts load performance and load times. It is great for non-tech savvy users with its easy setup too.

Carrie Saunders: 8:35

And what a caching program is? If you're not familiar with that word, I want to make sure I spell that one out a little bit. For us is you can think of it as a video versus a photo from that video. So a photo from that video is a still image of a snapshot in time. That kind of is what a cache is. It's a snapshot in time of what your website is and looks like when it's all compiled together. I'm kind of using techie words here, but hopefully that makes sense. So it's like when you created it and you have that one picture. Here's what it is and then, as dynamic things adjust as you're adding more like blog posts or changing your words. It's going to re-update that picture of your website so that it doesn't have to build that picture on the fly Maybe that's a great way to say it. So that's what caching means it's creating a picture, a snapshot, so that's not building the dynamic parts, the things you change on the fly.

Carrie Saunders: 9:36

Another one you should consider is Smush. That's a bit funny word to look at and to say. It optimizes images without compromising the image quality, which is great. It also compresses large image files automatically to save storage, and really the saving storage isn't nearly as important as the saving the size for the delivery to the consumer too, because when you have a large file size, especially on mobile, you're going to get dinged for being very slow on your website because that image is slowing things down. Another one to consider is auto-optimize. It's kind of hard to say there's only one O in there, so it's hard to say auto-optimize, I guess would be the way you pronounce it.

Carrie Saunders: 10:17

It minifies CSS, javascript and HTML for faster page rendering. Now that's a mouthful of technical words right there, so let me break that down really quick. So minimizing files like that CSS is your style, so just think of it as style cascading style sheets, what it stands for. Just think of it as a style the fonts, the colors, things like that. Javascript is all the fancy stuff in the background. We won't dig into that too much and HTML is just the coding that's behind your website from the visual standpoint of it. So, that being said, those words really aren't that important. But what it does is it makes those files smaller so that the delivery to the consumer is faster. So, even though those are some highly technical words, let's just remember that they are just making your files smaller so that they get your users faster. So that's what that one does a lot. And then, obviously, we want to make sure we're checking this regularly. On speed, we talk about this a lot on the podcast, using tools like GTmetrix or Google Page Speed Insights. We have lots of links to those on our ecommercemeeteasypodcastcom website so that you know how to get to those and double check your speed.

Carrie Saunders: 11:34

Okay, so the next one is search engine optimization plugins. As you probably guess if you're a regular listener to the show we talked about. We talk about search engine optimization a lot and we want to make sure that our website's great and visible. And that's what search engine optimization can help us do so. For WordPress, there's several plugins you could choose from. One of the most popular ones is Yoast SEO. It's very user friendly. It's great for beginners. It offers real time feedback on your keyword usage, readability and your metadata, which is like the data that you're talking to with the search engines.

Carrie Saunders: 12:14

I find a lot of people like using this. It has a red light, red, red, yellow and green light indicator on how well you're doing on different things that it looks for like how you're using your keywords, how well your words are easy to read things like that. Your readability would be the better way to say that. It's something we use on our clients websites, so it's very popular. It would be one I would recommend. Now there's a couple other ones that are also getting very popular, especially rank math. This is a new one to me. It's a rising star in the search engine optimization world. It offers advanced features for free and it provides in-depth SEO analysis and integration with Google Analytics. So this one might be one you might want to consider In my research. Like I said, it's something that's coming up. It's a rising star in the search engine optimization world. It might outrank the popularity of the other one at some point in time, who knows? Because Yoast SEO is very popular, but it's one you can look at, see if it has more of the features in line of what you would need.

Carrie Saunders: 13:21

A third one would be all-in-one SEO pack. This is a reliable alternative to Yoast, based upon my research. It offers robust settings for site maps and schema markup. So what those are is the technical way to inform Google and major search engines a bit more information about your website and they will automatically do the things you don't need to know exactly what they're doing generally, so don't worry about that, but it might be something to consider if you feel like SEO is not giving you great site maps or schema markup. Again, if you need more information on what schema markup, I would need to have like a whole podcast episode on that one, so just drop us an email if you're curious of what that is. It's not something most business owners need to worry about what it technically is from.

Carrie Saunders: 14:14

And then the next section is about backups. We want to make sure that we have backups of our website One. I want you to go to your host after you get done listening to this podcast episode, see if they make backups of your website, all your files and your database. This is super important and a lot of Of our customers we find don't have backups, which we're shocked. You know we're hosting provider too. We make sure we have nightly backups for our customers and we keep weekly backups for several weeks. We want to make sure that we have that backup in case something does go wrong, in case the customer messes something up, in case they get hacked, things like that.

Carrie Saunders: 14:52

The backups are really important and what I encourage you to do is consider making your own backups too. It's just like another backup, one we want to make sure our host is doing it. And two, you might as well have your own backups too. Now, I haven't used either of these myself, because we have our own backup system, but here are the top two recommended ones that I found. Updraft Plus was one of them that I found out. It lets you back up to cloud services like Google Drive, dropbox and Amazon. It has a one-click restore functionality for emergencies too. Again, I'm not experienced in using this one, but it was one of the top ones recommended when I did some research. Blogvault is another one. It offers real-time backups and staging sites or test sites for testing changes, and it's ideal for e-commerce websites with frequent updates. So if you're using WooCommerce inside your WordPress, you might want to consider this one. And then the last area that we want to cover when we have plugins for our WordPress site is user experience, as we talk about a lot on this podcast. User experience greatly matters to your success of your website, so there's some top ones that are recommended. We only use one of these. We may use two of these of the three.

Carrie Saunders: 16:11

Elementor is super, super popular. It's a drag and drop page builder. It makes designing, studying web pages a breeze. I have seen some people on the internet having trouble with it, but it is very popular and I hear it's really great. We've actually personally not used it too much ourselves for our clients. We tend to be creating custom designs from scratch use. We use HTML and all the coding instead of the drag and drop. But this is great If you don't know HTML, you don't know coding and you want to be able to create a beautiful website for it.

Carrie Saunders: 16:45

And then WP forms is very popular. This one we've used before. It creates intuitive contact forms, surveys and payment forms. It's easy to use and integrate, and it integrates with many email marketing platforms, so it's a great option to use when you need forms on your website. And then Monster Insights is something we use pretty regularly on our customers website. It brings Google Analytics directly into your WordPress dashboard. So that's great because it helps you understand visitor behavior, to make informed decisions, and you don't have to go to another application to find it. You've got it right there in your WordPress website.

Carrie Saunders: 17:21

So we want to make sure that we're picking one of these, or you could probably, in this category, pick maybe two to work hand in hand. Definitely, you could use like. Actually, you could probably use all three. Elementor is really more for the design, wp Forms is more for like forms, and Monster Insights bring in Google Analytics. So you could, in this category, use all three if you chose to do so. All right.

Carrie Saunders: 17:43

So let's recap. So, first off, we want to pick a security plugin for our WordPress site Security is key when you have WordPress and then next, we want to pick a performance plugin. We want to make sure our images are optimized, our speed is nice and fast on the website, and then we want to have a search engine optimization plugin that helps us optimize our website for search engines. Make sure we understand when we're not quite creating a blog post or an article that's search engine optimized, so we can get some guidance on what to fix. We want to make sure we have backups, so make sure you have a backup plugin and check with your host. And then we want to have good user experience plugins to help that user experience be rich and fulfilled.

Carrie Saunders: 18:26

Okay, so that's all we have for this week's episode of the e-commerce made easy podcast. I hope this was super helpful. We would love to hear from you. Drop us an email at podcast, at vcsengineeringcom, if you have any questions on topics you want us to cover, any questions on this episode or suggestions. We'd love to hear from you and that's all we have for this week. Make sure you're subscribed to our podcast and we will see you next week.