Here you have your freshly installed new site on WordPress, it’s time to make it yours! An important tool for customizing on WordPress are plugins. Plugins are small apps that run on your site to extend its functionalities: from tracking to sharing, from organizing content to backup and security,
One of the new features brought by Benny, WordPress’ most recent update, is a refreshed plugins’ interface. There are currently 33,294 plugins (and counting) on WordPress, how do you choose the right ones?
When starting or designing a new site on WordPress, there are endless customization options for added functionalities most of them are free, some freemiun (free basic + pay full version), some are only with payment.
Therefore, plugin selection can quickly become a long & confusing affair, but these are 5 plugins that I install right off the bat for a new site:
This feature-rich plugin developed by Automattic (WordPress’s parent company), has an excellent social media publishing tool (Publicize) that allows you to easily link all your social accounts for easy sharing at publication. Also the Jetpack’s stats are very handy, they are not an alternative to Google Analytics (or Universal Analytics) but good enough for a quick check on traffic, or a suitable alternative if Google Analytics really really frightens you. Free.
Second in my list is always SEO by Yoast, because what the search engines’ bots see on your page is as important as what your visitors read. SEO Yoast is really an excellent plugin in that it can be used by professional webmasters as well by newbies. It offers a lot of features and settings, but do not get intimidated by the more advanced tools, you can activate it just as is and dig in deeper as you go. Underneath your visual editor appears a new window that helps defining keywords and with them rank your content for search engine likeability. Yoast guides your content creation to optimize it, so it can proudly roam the web and bring you new audience.
Here is what the SEO management looks like on your WP editor space:
Free, Premium version from $ 89
Comment Spam Moderation
However, not all bots were created equal, some scan your site to facilitate search and some are specialized in collecting information for spammers. Give it a few weeks, and titles like ****Cheap Snearkers!****, or comments like
“Setting off firecrackers was believed by many to be an effective way to dispel misfortune and evil in ancient times. It soon became a tradition.hollister magasinWhile the Swiss missed out on his third title of the season after playing in seven finals, he did start putting the pieces in place as he begins”
will start to flood your site, before you know it you have hundreds of comments on hold for moderation (did you remember to choose that option in the settings -> discussion settings?). It is very time consuming just to delete them, so to cut the spam the tools are:
Akismet, developed by Automaticc and asks for donation (they are happy for $20+, but anything is OK),
or Disqus: more than a moderation tool, it’s a social network of comments, with excellent user verification system.
Before passing to the more fun stuff, here is one last “behind the scenes” plugin that it’s good to install right away:
A security plugins that monitors and reports about suspicious traffic around your site, Wordfence is easy to use and comes with several features. It reports, for example: who logged in and who attempted to login, where are they from and offers customizable settings to block suspicious IPs. The free edition is pretty good for simple sites, but if your site handles critical info like payments, then the premium version ($$) certainly gives you peace of mind at a very reasonable cost.
After securing the backend, now I can start to talk about the front end or what your visitors see on the site. Let’s start with some social media sharing tools, that showcase on your site all your social channels:
Today’s social media run on visual and now more than ever a picture is worth a 1,000 words. The Alpine Press seems to be nicely cornering this market. Its widgets for Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Picasa and pf course just Photos allow to bring seamlessly all your visual social media content into the site. They certainly require a little hacking but the instructions are clear and the process is easy enough. Features include selection of specific feeds to show in your widget or post, size of the images, gallery format and frequency of feed updates. Overall Alpine put out great flexible and reliable plugins. Donations welcome!
Finally, it’s time to take care of the exciting contents planned for the site. In order to make contents appealing and memorable to the most distracted web surfers out there, presentation is crucial. Shortcodes are an increasingly used tool to enhance content presentation on the front end. They are brief snippet of code that insert stylistic elements in your post/page: dropped caps, tables, dividers, icons, buttons…
Shortcodes plugins come in a variety of styles and options, but SU is the most complete and flexible collection I found so far. Donations and positive reviews welcome.
This are my top 5 WP plugins, what are yours?