WordPress spice with plugins

Wordpress logoSo, PHP and MySQL, two slightly suboptimal technologies run a fairly large chunk of the internet in the form of WordPress. You have the idea for a blog or maybe want to knock up a quick corporate web site. What’s your first step?

Themes

  • Choose a WordPress theme. There are loads out there, some free some paid for. My site of choice for finding themes free or otherwise is Themeforest. A fair number of the themes are free, and you can choose 2 or 3 column, responsive and so on.

Having chosen your host (we use bluehost.com for www.pandaandpolarbear.com and this site), then it’s time to flesh out the functionality of your site with plugins.

Plugins

  • Akismet – a pretty good comment spam filter plugin. It will mark spam for you so you can you through and trash it. Not sure I’ve ever had a spam comment go through.
  • Cloudflare – These guys are making the internet better. A DDoS, CDN and free SSL solution. 128 data centres. Who is to argue with that?
  • Cookie Consent – Everyone needs this, right?
  • XML sitemaps. Does what is says on the can!
  • Jetpack – Even more themes, stats, SEO tools, Security stuff.
  • Loading Page – while the page is loading, shows a pretty graphic. Given the stats on site abandonment, any distraction is worth it.
  • NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster – lets you spam nearly 30 social media channels.
  • P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) – Really useful to see where the CPU time is going and if a plugin is taking the time. In my experience, plugins take about 50% of the page render time.
  • W3 Total Cache – caching is good. Most site are not that dynamic so caching is relly good to have.
  • Wordfence Security – useful to have. We’ve had someone uploading rogue JavaScript to WordPress and this spotted it.
  • WP Smush – optimise graphics for the size you’re rendering them at. This is a cool speedup. When you’ve got four years of art, it’s a big win.
  • Yoast SEO – If you’re wordy like me, it’s good to have something reminding you of the good stuff to put in your posts to get the attention of the search engines.
  • Amazon Associates Link Builder  – nice integration with Amazon associates.
  • Finally, Link checker – useful to check for broken links, or destination pages that have gone away.

Other stuff

Don’t forget to sign up to the Google suite, Google analytics, Google webmaster tools, and Google Lighthouse.

Conclusion

That’s a small selection of the plugins we use. There are a whole bunch of Woocommerce related WordPress ones and others related to selling stuff.

I did a site for Dusty Knuckle Pizza, which was working great until they foolishly decided to spend money and get something worse. IMHO.

So that’s that. Your site is now standing on the shoulders of giants.

Remind me, why do people still build web sites manually?