After following my previous post, you should now have a fully working WordPress install ready for you to build your own website. When you first tried to build your website, you were probably thinking to yourself something along the lines of, “Man, this WordPress thing doesn’t have a lot of features. It would be nice to have at least some functionality.” You’re definitely not alone, so here’s the WordPress plugins that I personally use on this blog and on mostepicwebsite.com. They might not be the best plugins in the world, but I’m using the free version of all of them, and they work well enough despite half of them begging me to pay for them. Let me know in the comments if you have any more suggestions for plugins.
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Comments
It may seem trivial, but this was actually pretty difficult for me when building this blog. I ran into various roadblocks like fighting off spam bots, or if I should require users to create an account. It didn’t help that by default, WordPress had basically no customization options for the comment box. After trying out many different WordPress plugins and lots of experimenting, but in the end, I settled on allowing users to comment anonymously, and a WordPress plugin for the comment box so I get the features I want.
wpDiscuz
That WordPress plugin I decided to use was wpDiscuz. What I like about this plugin is that it has lots of customization features, and most importantly, it has support for reCAPTCHA and email notifications (Although they didn’t seem to work in testing). There’s a few minor issues that I have with it like the formatting in the comment box looking different than what is displayed after you click “Post Comment”, and there’s some weird UX issues (Users don’t have the ability to delete comments, which is something I wanted), but overall it seems to get the job done just fine.
Akismet Anti-Spam
As it’s name implies, this plugin is a simple anti-spam plugin already included with every WordPress installation. All you need to do is create an Akismet account, enter your API key, then you’re basically all set. There’s a few simple options, but the defaults will be just fine for most people.
Email Notifications and Newsletter
This was another seemingly trivial thing that took a lot of experimenting a deciding (More specifically, newsletters). In the end, I decided to do everything through WordPress, mainly because it’s more convenient, and I can more easily switch email providers if I find a better one.
WP Mail SMTP
It might not have a very catchy name, but as its name also implies, this is a WordPress plugin for sending emails. By default, WordPress will use PHP to send emails, however, it’s not nearly as reliable as using a service like Sendinblue (What I’m currently using, no affiliate plug this time), and also most hosting providers block SMTP port 25. This will result in your emails having a much greater chance of not being delivered or going to spam. They do have a pro version with more features and customization, but the free version is good enough.
FluentCRM and Fluent Forms
After trying out various plugins and what Sendinblue has to offer, I decided to FluentCRM with Fluent Forms. Like every WordPress plugin, they beg you to pay for it, but luckily the free version has a decent amount of features. The main features that I wanted were mandating that users click on a link in a confirmation email to be subscribed, and also reCAPTCHA support. There was a surprising number of plugins that either lacked at least one of these features, or had the features I wanted behind a paywall, so it was relieving seeing that these plugins had those features for free.
FluentCRM:
Fluent Forms:
Optimization and Caching
If you want your website to run well, you’ll want at least some caching. Combined with Cloudflare, this can help your website load faster, which is especially important for users with poor internet, or are physically located far away from your server. I’ll be going over how to setup your WordPress install behind Cloudflare and what settings I chose for the WordPress plugins I’m about to list in a future post, so you can look forward to that and subscribe to my newsletter to get a notification right in your inbox.
Before installing any of these plugins, make sure that you get everything set up first. Otherwise, you’ll end up like me trying to figure out why changes aren’t behaving properly or saving just to find out that it was a caching plugin.
WP Fastest Cache
Like many WordPress plugins, it has a descriptive yet not so catchy name. But as its name implies, this is a plugin for caching. There’s a decent amount of features, but like every WordPress plugin, if you want more advanced features including statistics on your caching and stuff, you’ll have to fork up some cash.
Smush
Unlike most WordPress plugins, this one has a both catchy and somewhat descriptive name. This is a WordPress plugin for optimizing the images on your website. Not only does this plugin compress all of the images on your website without sacrificing quality, but it also includes features like lazy load. If you don’t know, lazy load is a neat thing that won’t display an image on your website until a user scrolls to it. This can save bandwidth by not pointlessly displaying images.
OMGF (Optimize My Google Fonts)
If you use Google Fonts on your website, then this is the plugin for you. This is a WordPress plugin that will download Google Fonts locally to your server. This will both improve privacy and performance for your visitors. Unlike a lot of WordPress plugins, the majority of features are free, and it doesn’t beg you to pay.
Presto Player
By default, WordPress doesn’t seem to handle videos very well. What seems to happen is that WordPress will use whatever video player your web browser has built in, and it’ll also load the entire video by default. This uses a lot of bandwidth and slows down your website for visitors, especially on a website like mostepicwebsite.com. With Presto Player, it lazy loads videos, and it will buffer them like how YouTube works instead of serving the entire video file. It also gives you the ability to customize the video player (More advanced customizations are paywalled), and use Google Analytics (Also paywalled, I guess they really want you to upgrade).
Forms
You probably already know what a form does and why you would want one, so without wasting anymore time, I’ll just jump right into my recommendation.
Forminator
You probably already guessed what this plugin does from its catchy, descriptive, and distinctive name, but this is a plugin for creating forms and stuff like that. This plugin is probably made redundant by Fluent Forms, but I don’t feel like comparing the features, so it’s staying. I picked this plugin not only because it has a lot of features, but the free version is also really good, and there’s only a handful of features that are paywalled. It also doesn’t feel pushy about paying for the premium version, which is something that I can’t say about the majority of WordPress plugins.
SEO
Since WordPress by default doesn’t offer many options in terms of SEO, you’ll probably want to install an SEO WordPress plugin to help with that. This way you can ensure that your website shows up in Google search properly and you actually get visitors.
Yoast SEO
I didn’t look too much into SEO WordPress plugins if I’m being honest, but I chose Yoast SEO mainly because it was recommended by a lot of people, and the free version had a good amount of features (Although they do like to beg you to upgrade). They also have a lot of helpful tutorials in articles that you can access simply by clicking the question mark icon.
Security and Backups
The last thing that you want when running a website is to have it get hacked, or loose all of your data because someone decided to use RAID 0. No matter how you lost your data this time, luckily WordPress plugin developers have thought of some solutions. Depending on your setup, there might be additional plugins that you need to install, but I’ll be covering security in my next post.
Sucuri Security
This is a security plugin that has various features, like audit logging, email alerts, website scanning, and more. This plugin also gives you tips on how you can improve the security of your website. Another thing that’s nice about this plugin is that it doesn’t seem to beg you for money.
UpdraftPlus
I personally use UpdraftPlus for backing up both of my websites. Even though it loves to beg you to buy the premium version, the free version has a decent amount of features, and it works well enough. I even used it to migrate mostepicwebsite.com and this blog from my testing environment (Although I did a backup and restore instead of using the migrate feature). There’s many different locations that you can backup to (Although almost half of them are paywalled).
The Little Things
There’s many fancy WordPress plugins out there, but there’s also many simple and very useful plugins that arguably should be features built into WordPress. For the most part, these plugins also have a very good free version and don’t beg you for money every 5 seconds.
Easy Table of Contents
As its simple name implies, this is a simple WordPress plugin for generation a table of contents on any post, page, or whatever you want. The vast majority of the features are free with very few of them being paywalled. Overall, it does exactly as it advertises, so no complaints. This is something that I wish was included with WordPress by default.
Remove Footer Credit
Another feature that isn’t included with WordPress but should be is the ability to disable footer credit. Luckily this very simple WordPress plugin solves that issue for you, and all it takes is a bit of skill with inspect element.
Velvet Blues Update URLs
If you’re migrating a WordPress website from one domain to another, then this another very simple but useful WordPress plugin. I’ve used this when migrating mostepicwebsite.com and this blog from my testing environment to my cloud server. This plugin allowed me to easily update all of the URLs on my websites so everything worked perfectly. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be maintained anymore, but since this plugin is so simple, it shouldn’t be prone to breakage or security issues.
Add From Server
If you’re using Cloudflare, then you probably know that Cloudflare limits the file size of your uploads. Luckily you can work around this by using FTP or something like that and upload the file directly to your server. Unfortunately you might discover that the file doesn’t appear in your media library despite it being in the correct directory and format. This simple WordPress plugin will come to the rescue by allowing you to select the file and manually add it to your media library. Like some other plugins here, unfortunately it’s not maintained anymore as far as I can tell. But because of it’s simplicity, you shouldn’t need to worry about any issues.
WP Dark Mode
Who doesn’t like having a dark mode on their website, especially on a website that looks like mine? This WordPress plugin allows your visitors to toggle between light and dark mode with a flip of a switch. They’re pretty pushy about paying for the premium version, but the free version works well enough, and I also can’t find a better free replacement.
Media Cleaner
A very useful WordPress plugin that helped me migrate mostepicwebsite.com from my testing environment was Media Cleaner. Somehow I ended up with a bunch of duplicates, but luckily this WordPress plugin made it very easy to remove all of them. Unlike a lot of WordPress plugins, it also doesn’t seem very pushy about its premium version.
I don’t have anything interesting for the conclusion for this post, but I hope that you enjoyed reading it and maybe was helpful. If you have any suggestions, comments, or complaints, then feel free to leave a comment. Also, stay tuned for part 4 (The final post in this series), where I’ll talk about using WordPress with Cloudflare and Fail2ban along with some other optimization and security tips.
Part 4: Coming Soon
That is one very sussy comment