The BlueBird WordPress Plugins I show you mine, you show me yours
BlueBird websites are 100% WordPress! This is important because we want to give our clients the power to easily change anything on their website without having to hire a web designer to do it. Considering the changes in SEO and the ever evolving technological advances this feature is essential.
WordPress creates an interface between you and the Internet. It converts your information into code which the web browsers convert back into the pleasing and informative presentation your customers need to see.
Plugins add custom functionalities to WordPress that make your website unique.
One of the beautiful things about working with the most popular CMS is the huge amount of people that create plugins to add functionality to WordPress. This is a blessing as well as a curse because more plugins also means more load time for the website. Too many plugins is one of the major reasons why some websites take a long time to load. Every time we install a plugin we have to ask ourselves if the load time is worth the added lag. With our “WordPress Garage” program we help site owners fix problems with their websites and often these are created by WordPress plugins
I often try new plugins on my own site before I install them on my clients’ websites. In the Listly below you can find my current plugins and comments about why I like them.
Free vs Premium
The WordPress plugin directory lists over 35,228 free plugins. That is a huge amount of tools at our disposal and the majority of them are regularly updated to the newest changes in the WordPress core. Some of them even develop into features that are built into the next WordPress version.
In my experience premium plugins often offer more functionality and support for a relatively small fee. Some of my favourite plugins cost money and in most cases the fee to pay the developer for their work and continued support is well worth it.
Make sure you check that you have the correct license and when it expires.
Let’s look at some of my most important WordPress Plugins:
SEO
The plugin WordPress SEO by Yoast certainly warrants its own blog post. I install this on every website I get my hands on because it makes doing on-page SEO simple for anyone. Because it also creates XML sitemaps, Open Graph tags for Facebook, Twitter cards and many more things you can get away with fewer plugins over all.
A premium version is available but the free one will be sufficient for most.
Speed
Site load speed is extremely important for a good visitor experience. There are many things you should do to reduce the time it takes to display a web page. But at some point there is no way around a caching plugin that works behind the scenes to make everything load faster (I’m not going to get more technical here). I have spent a lot of time setting up the most common caching tools but then I arrived at this one:
WP Rocket works out of the box and has a few options that can be added. It really takes the headache out of caching.
The pricing for this premium plugin starts at $39 per year.
Security
Hackers love to hack!. It is very important to set your security settings as tight as possible and to update your software regularly. There are several security plugins available.
Sharing
I am very passionate about adding social to websites. I have tried all the usual sharing plugins recommended by many experts and was often frustrated by the load time they add to the site and the fact that most of them don’t play very well with some mobile browsers. After a lot of experimenting I now recommend one of two options:
I hope that team at Social Warfare will introduce a few more networks to choose from.
Both sharing plugins have their advantages, they both work well on mobile and let you customize how things are shared. In the end it might be a question about the style of buttons that fit your site’s design.
Below you will find more of my current plugins. If you like we can have a little discussion about each of them in the Listly comments.
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