October 24, 2016
We get it, a custom WordPress site may not be the first steps for everyone. If you are thinking of running your own WordPress website or if you have an existing one, here are 5 plugins / tools to get started. *If you are not familiar with WordPress then its best to check in with your developer to see if your current version is compatible!
Yoast SEO
WordPress is already quite good with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) but Yoast provides an additional level of optimization to help with search visibility for your blog or website. It provides page analysis, meta and link elements, creates Facebook and Twitter share link content and more.
Cost: Free
Contact Form 7
Contact forms are keyto a business or a blog. Contact 7 is easy to use and you can customize the fields you want as well. Best of all you can integrate this with Mail Chimp. If you have an email subscription service, you can collect emails right through this form. There’s a large community of support to help you when things like field validations aren’t working perfectly too.
Cost: Free
Google Analytics
This isn’t a WordPress plugin but it’s crucial to have analytics running for your website. This way you can gauge the performance of your content, pull data and gather insights to optimize your content to understand what is working for your audience. If you are looking for something more in depth, our team helps businesses with their SEO as well (send us a note).
Cost: Free
EWWW Image Optimizer
We talked about image optimization in our previous blog and why you should optimize them for the web. The good news is you can also optimize your image with the EWWW Image Optimizer WordPress plugin.
Cost: Free
Disqus
Manage your comments through a third party application. Disqus created threaded conversations with a moderation tool so you can manage your comments under a single dashboard. A lot of bloggers use this tool, so it’s a good way to easily allow people to engage with your website. If you need to manage the conversation on your site this could be the WordPress Plugin for you!
Cost: Free
At the end of the day, it all comes down to the needs of your website. Be careful not to overcrowd your site with plugins though. Plugins that don’t get regular updates can potentially make your website vulnerable to attacks or broken pages. We try our best to limit the number of plugins we use because they aren’t always reliable. Often third party developers can be slow to adjust ti changing WordPress requirements. We try to provide solutions that are developed in-house when possible, but there are a few plugins that you just can’t live without sometimes!