Plug-in Recommendations

Now that I’ve been working with WordPress for 8 years I figured it was time I talked about the plugins that I use. I will be reviewing and talking about the plugins that I have found useful in my journey.

I will continue to update this post as I discover and use new plugins with each new project I have.

Please note that some of this information was taken directly from the about section from these plugins without much editing on my part.

Admin Columns

This is a handy plugin to help you manage and organize columns in the posts, users, comments and media lists in the WordPress admin panel. Allowing you to transform the WordPress admin screens into more beautiful, clear overviews.

Akismet Anti-Spam

This plugin is now called Akismet Spam Protection. It checks your comments and contact form submissions against their global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

The major features in Akismet include:

  • Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
  • Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
  • URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
  • Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.
  • A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.

You’ll be prompted to get an Akismet.com API key to use it, once activated. Keys are free for personal blogs; paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites.

All-in-One WP Migration

This plugin which was introduced in 2013 and used by over 60 million websites to date, is verifiably one of WordPress’ most trusted and utilized plugins for moving websites with absolute ease or just creating backups when making changes or running updates so you don’t loose your site if something were to fail.

Carefully built with the non-technical user in mind, this plugin comes loaded with newbie-friendly functions that allow you to migrate/backup your WordPress website with little to no technical knowledge or experience.

Ready to migrate your website? It’s fast and easy as 1, 2, 3:

  1. Install All-in-One WP Migration plugin.
  2. Hit the export button to bundle your database, media files, plugins, and themes into one tidy file.
  3. Unpack the file at the new location with an easy-to-use “drag and drop” feature in the WordPress dashboard of your new website.

Follow these three simple steps, and your site will be live at its new location with minimal stress and above all, zero downtime!

One feature that makes this plugin widely loved (to the tune of over 6,000 5-star user reviews so far) is that the technical requirements for installing the plugin are simple.

If you have WordPress version 3.3+ and PHP version 5.3+, you are good to go. All-in-One WP Migration also supports all versions of MySQL and MariaDB.

Features Spotlight:

  • Supports custom uploads, plugins, theme folders, and more.
  • Available in over 50 language translations – including Japanese.
  • Accessible for individuals with disabilities (WCAG 2.1 AA Level compliant)
  • No limitations on host or operating system.
  • Supports a vast range of hosting providers — click here for a full list of supported providers.
  • A long list of premium extensions that gives you the power to do more.
  • Mobile device compatible.
  • Intelligent and flawless auto-replacement of website url during import.
  • Full product support.
  • Browse WPRESS files online with Traktor Web
  • Extract WPRESS files on your computer with Traktor Desktop
  • And lots more!

Here are some other reasons to use All-in-One WP Migration …

Trusted by the Government and Big Corporations:

Many enterprise customers, government organizations, and universities use,
love, and trust All-in-One WP Migration for their websites. Here are some examples: Boeing, NASA, VW, IBM, Harvard University, Stanford University, Lego, P&G, Automattic, State of California, State of Hawaii.
This broad adoption and usage of All-in-One WP Migration demonstrate how safe, reliable and adaptable the plugin is for just about any website migration/backup needed.

Full Compatibility and Support:

All-in-One WP Migration has been extensively tested and confirmed to be compatible with most WordPress plugins and themes possible.
This means you don’t experience cross-plugin compatibility issues that can slow down, bug, or break down your WordPress website when you install and use All-in-One WP Migration.
As a matter of fact, All-in-One WP Migration has partnered with multiple theme/plugin vendors to distribute their themes/plugins with them as a single, easy to use, easy to install package.
These vendors trust them and their plugin to provide their customers with reliable product delivery, support, migrations, and backups.

Cloud Storage Supported:

All-in-One WP Migration supports and syncs seamlessly with top cloud storage services.
The plugin comes preinstalled on all Bitnami WordPress sites running on AWS, Google Compute Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

All-in-One WP Migration Unlimited Extension

The all in one WP migration unlimited extension is an add-on extension to add unlimited downloads to the plugin mentioned above. A must have for larger websites or ones that are updated more often and therefor have a need for more often backups just incase you need to revert to a previous state of your website.

Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker is an essential tool to help monitor and test all internal links & external links on your site looking for broken links. It helps you fix bad links to improve SEO and user experience.

Features

  • Monitors external links and internal links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
  • Detects links that don’t work, missing images and redirects.
  • Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email.
  • Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
  • Prevents search engines from following broken links (optional).
  • You can search and filter links by URL, anchor text and so on.
  • Links can be edited directly from the plugin’s page, without manually updating each post.
  • Highly configurable.

Basic Usage

Once installed, the plugin will begin looking at all your content looking for links. Depending on the size of your site this can take anywhere from a few minutes up to an hour or more for larger sites. When this process is complete, the plugin will start checking each link to see if it works. Again, the time this takes depends on how big your site is and how many links there are. You can monitor the progress and tweak various link checking options in Settings -> Link Checker.

The broken links, if any are found, will show up in a new tab of the WP admin panel at Tools -> Broken Links. A notification will also appear in the “Broken Link Checker” widget on the Dashboard. To save display space, you can keep the widget closed and configure it to expand automatically only when problematic links are detected. E-mail notifications need to be enabled separately (in Settings -> Link Checker) if you want this option as well.

The “Broken Links” tab will by default display a list of broken links that have been detected so far. However, you can use the links on that page to view redirects or see a listing of all links – working or not – instead. You can also create new link filters by performing a search and clicking the “Create Custom Filter” button. For example, this can be used to create a filter that only shows comment links.

There are several actions associated with each link on how to fix them. They show up when you move your mouse over to one of the links listed the aforementioned tab:

  • “Edit URL” lets you change the URL of that link. If the link is present in more than one place (e.g. both in a post and in the blogroll), all occurrences of that URL will be changed.
  • “Unlink” removes the link but leaves the link text intact.
  • “Not broken” lets you manually mark a “broken” link as working. This is useful if you know it was incorrectly detected as broken due to a network glitch or a bug. The marked link will still be checked periodically, but the plugin won’t consider it broken unless it gets a new result.
  • “Dismiss” hides the link from the “Broken Links” and “Redirects” views. It will still be checked as normal and get the normal link styles (e.g. a strike-through effect for broken links), but won’t be reported again unless its status changes. Useful if you want to acknowledge a link as broken/redirected and just leave as it is.

You can also click on the contents of the “Status” or “Link Text” columns to get more info about the status of each link.

FareHarbor for WordPress

You can include shortcodes for embedded calendars ([fareharbor]), embedded grids of activities ([itemgrid]), and buttons that open a booking overlay ([lightframe]) anywhere on your site that you wish.

Jetpack

This plugin will make your site safer, faster allowing you to get more traffic.

This plugin has security, performance, and growth tools made for WordPress sites by the the same WordPress experts that are responsible for WordPress itself.

Protect your investment

Jetpack Security provides easy‑to‑use, comprehensive WordPress site security so you can focus on running your business instead of the security.

  • Real-time backups and one-click restores with VaultPress Backup
  • WAF, automated malware scanning, and one-click fixes with Jetpack Scan
  • Powerful spam protection for comments and forms with Akismet Anti-spam

Instant performance and UX

Jetpack’s performance features make your site lightning-fast, while also improving your SEO and giving your visitors a better experience.

  • Full HD, ad-free video inside the WordPress editor with VideoPress
  • Instant site search to help your visitors find your content with Jetpack Search
  • Free speed enhancements to rank higher on Google with Jetpack Boost
  • Free global CDN to deliver content instantly

Grow your audience effortlessly

Jetpack’s growth tools help you find new visitors, turn leads into customers, and customers into advocates for future customers.

  • Auto-share post and pages to social media on your schedule with Jetpack Social
  • Native WordPress CRM to convert your leads and create repeat customers with Jetpack CRM
  • Free advanced WordPress site stats with Jetpack Stats

Jetpack Protect

Jetpack Protect is a free security plugin for WordPress that scans your site and warns you about vulnerabilities, which helps your site keep one step ahead of security threats and malware.

WHAT DOES JETPACK PROTECT CHECK FOR?

This plugin scans your site on a daily basis and warns you about:

  • The version of WordPress installed, and any associated vulnerabilities
  • What plugins are installed and any related vulnerabilities
  • What themes are installed and any associated vulnerabilities

OVER 25,000 REGISTERED MALWARE AND VULNERABILITIES IN OUR DATABASE

Security is something that constantly evolves over time. Jetpack Protect leverages the extensive database of WPScan, an Automattic brand. All vulnerabilities and malware are entered into their database by dedicated WordPress security professionals and updated constantly as new information becomes available to best protect your site.

EASY TO SETUP AND USE

There’s nothing you need to do to configure it – the setup process is as easy as:
1. Install and activate the plugin
2. Set up it with one click.

After you activate the plugin, Jetpack Protect will run daily automatic malware scans on your WordPress site and update you on vulnerabilities associated with your installed plugins, themes, and WordPress core.

Missing Menu Items

Are you frustrated with navigating around the latest WordPress admin while you are building your site? Are you asking yourself why does it take so many clicks to get to Editor Templates?

The Missing Menu Items for WordPress plugin adds lots of useful Editor related links to the admin navigation.

Missing Menu Items adds the following under the Appearance menu for instance:
* Reusable Blocks
* Navigation Menus
* Templates
* Template Parts
* And more coming soon…

Redirection

The redirection plugin is the most popular redirect manager for WordPress. With it you can easily manage your 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This can help reduce errors for your users and improve your site ranking.

It has been a WordPress plugin for over 10 years and has been recommended countless times. And to boot, it’s free!

Redirection is compatible with PHP from 5.6+.

REDIRECT MANAGER

With this plugin you can create and manage redirects quickly and easily without needing Apache or Nginx knowledge. If your installation of WordPress supports permalinks then you can use Redirection to redirect any URL.

There is full support for regular expressions so you can create redirect patterns to match any number of URLs. You can match query parameters and even pass them through to the target URL.

The plugin can also be configured to monitor when post or page permalinks are changed and automatically create a redirect to the new URL for you.

CONDITIONAL REDIRECTS

In addition to straightforward URL matching you can redirect based on other conditions such as:

  • Login status – redirect only if the user is logged in or logged out
  • WordPress capability – redirect if the user is able to perform a certain capability
  • Browser – redirect if the user is using a certain browser
  • Referrer – redirect if the user visited the link from another page
  • Cookies – redirect if a particular cookie is set
  • HTTP headers – redirect based on a HTTP header
  • Custom filter – redirect based on your own WordPress filter
  • IP address – redirect if the client IP address matches
  • Server – redirect another domain if also hosted on this server
  • Page type – redirect if the current page is a 404

FULL LOGGING

A configurable logging option allows to view all redirects occurring on your site, including information about the visitor, the browser used, and the referrer. A ‘hit’ count is maintained for each redirect so you can see if a URL is being used.

Logs can be exported for external viewing, and can be searched and filtered for more detailed investigation.

Display geographic information about an IP address, as well as a full user agent information, to try and understand who the visitor is.

You are able to disable or reduce IP collection to meet the legal requirements of your geographic region, and can change the amount of information captured from the bare minimum to HTTP headers.

You can also log any redirect happening on your site, including those performed outside of Redirection.

ADD HTTP HEADERS

HTTP headers can be added to redirects or your entire site that help reduce the impact of redirects or help increase security. You can also add your own custom headers.

TRACK 404 ERRORS

Redirection will keep track of all 404 errors that occur on your site, allowing you to track down and fix problems.

Errors can be grouped to show where you should focus your attention, and can be redirected in bulk.

QUERY PARAMETER HANDLING

You can match query parameters exactly, ignore them, and even pass them through to your target.

MIGRATE PERMALINKS

Changed your permalink structure? You can migrate old permalinks simply by entering the old permalink structure. Multiple migrations are supported.

APACHE & NGINX SUPPORT

By default Redirection will manage all redirects using WordPress. However you can configure it so redirects are automatically saved to a .htaccess file and handled by Apache itself.

If you use Nginx then you can export redirects to an Nginx rewrite rules file.

FINE-GRAINED PERMISSIONS

Fine-grained permissions are available so you can customise the plugin for different users. This makes it particularly suitable for client sites where you may want to prevent certain actions, and remove functionality.

IMPORT & EXPORT

The plugin has a fully-featured import and export system and you can:

  • Import and export to Apache .htaccess
  • Export to Nginx rewrite rules
  • Copy redirects between sites using JSON
  • Import and export to CSV for viewing in a spreadsheet
  • Use WP CLI to automate import and export

You can also import from the following plugins:

  • Simple 301 Redirects
  • SEO Redirection
  • Safe Redirect Manager
  • Rank Math
  • WordPress old slug redirects
  • Quick Post/Pages redirects

SEARCH REGEX COMPATIBLE

Simple Custom CSS and JS

With this plugin you can customize your WordPress site’s appearance by easily adding custom CSS and JS code without even having to modify your theme or plugin files. This is perfect for adding custom CSS tweaks to your site.

FEATURES

  • Text editor with syntax highlighting 
  • Print the code inline or included into an external file
  • Print the code in the header or the footer
  • Add CSS or JS to the frontend or the admin side
  • Add as many codes as you want
  • Keep your changes also when you change the theme

Site Health Tool Manager

Depending on your server setup, there may be tests in the WordPress Site Health tool that are not relevant and will never pass. For example, you may have background updates disabled if your entire site is kept under version control.

This plugin adds a simple settings page to exclude those tests from the Site Health Status page.

Note: This should only be used to disable tests with a legitimate and acceptable reason for failing. It should not be used to hide tests which can be fixed.

Site Kit by Google

Site Kit is the official WordPress plugin from Google for insights about how people find and use your site. Site Kit is the one-stop solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make the site successful on the web. It provides authoritative, up-to-date insights from multiple Google products directly on the WordPress dashboard for easy access, and it’s all for free.

BRINGING THE BEST OF GOOGLE TOOLS TO WORDPRESS

Site Kit includes powerful features that make using these Google products seamless and flexible:

  • Easy-to-understand stats directly on your WordPress dashboard
  • Official stats from multiple Google tools, all in one dashboard
  • Quick setup for multiple Google tools without having to edit the source code of your site
  • Metrics for your entire site and for individual posts
  • Easy-to-manage, granular permissions across WordPress and different Google products

SUPPORTED GOOGLE TOOLS

Site Kit shows key metrics and insights from different Google products:

  • Search Console: Understand how Google Search discovers and displays your pages in Google Search. Track how many people saw your site in Search results, and what query they used to search for your site.
  • Analytics: Explore how users navigate your site and track goals you’ve set up for your users to complete.
  • AdSense: Keep track of how much your site is earning you.
  • PageSpeed Insights: See how your pages perform compared to other real-world sites. Improve performance with actionable tips from PageSpeed Insights.
  • Tag Manager: Use Site Kit to easily set up Tag Manager- no code editing required. Then, manage your tags in Tag Manager.
  • Optimize: Use Site Kit to easily set up Optimize- no code editing required. Then, set up A/B tests in Optimize.

Yoast Duplicate Post

This plugin allows users to clone posts or pages of any type, or copy them to new drafts for further editing.

How it works:

  1. In ‘Edit Posts’/’Edit Pages’, you can click on ‘Clone’ link below the post/page title: this will immediately create a copy and return to the list.
  2. In ‘Edit Posts’/’Edit Pages’, you can select one or more items, then choose ‘Clone’ in the ‘Bulk Actions’ dropdown to copy them all at once.
  3. In ‘Edit Posts’/’Edit Pages’, you can click on ‘New Draft’ link below the post/page title.
  4. On the post edit screen, you can click on ‘Copy to a new draft’ above “Cancel”/”Move to trash” or in the admin bar.
  5. While viewing a post as a logged in user, you can click on ‘Copy to a new draft’ in the admin bar.

Steps 3, 4 and 5 will lead to the edit page for the new draft: change what you want, click on ‘Publish’ and you’re done.

There is also a template tag, so you can put it in your templates and clone your posts/pages from the front-end. Clicking on the link will lead you to the edit page for the new draft, just like the admin bar link.

Yoast SEO

YOAST SEO: THE #1 WORDPRESS SEO PLUGIN

Since 2008 Yoast SEO has helped millions of websites worldwide to rank higher in search engines.

Yoast’s mission is SEO for Everyone. Their plugin’s users range from that bakery around the corner to some of the most popular sites on the planet.

GET AHEAD OF THE COMPETITION

To rank highly in search engines, you need to beat the competition. You need a better, faster, stronger website than the people who sell or do the same kinds of things as you.

Yoast SEO is the most-used WordPress SEO plugin, and has helped millions of people like you and me to get ahead of, and to stay ahead of the competition.

TAKING CARE OF YOUR WORDPRESS SEO

Yoast SEO is packed full of features, designed to help visitors and search engines to get the most out of your website. Some of the favourites are:

  • Automated technical SEO improvements, like canonical URLs and meta tags.
  • Advanced XML sitemaps; making it easy for Google to understand your site structure.
  • Title and meta description templating, for better branding and consistent snippets in the search results.
  • An in-depth Schema.org integration that will increase your chance of getting rich results, by helping search engines to understand your content.
  • Full control over site breadcrumbs, so that users and search engines always know where they are.
  • Faster loading times for your whole website, due to an innovative way of managing data in WordPress.
  • [Premium] E-mail support for our Yoast SEO Premium users.
  • [Premium] The possibility to expand Yoast SEO with the News SEOVideo SEOLocal SEO and WooCommerce SEO extensions.
  • [Premium] New! Yoast SEO Premium comes with wide-ranging crawl settings that help you improve how search engines crawl your site.
  • [Premium] New! Yoast SEO Premium comes with an IndexNow integration to ping search engines like Microsoft Bing whenever you publish or update content.

WRITE KILLER CONTENT WITH YOAST SEO

We all know that content is king, that’s why Yoast SEO is famous for its state-of-the-art content and SEO analysis. Yoast SEO gives you:

  • SEO analysis: an invaluable tool while writing SEO-friendly content with the right (focus) keyphrases in mind.
  • Readability analysis: ensures that humans and search engines can read and understand your content.
  • Full language support for: English, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Indonesian, Polish, Portuguese, Arabic, Swedish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Turkish, Czech, Norwegian, Slovak and Greek.
  • A Google preview, which shows what your listings will look like in the search results. Even on mobile devices!
  • Innovative Schema blocks for the WordPress block editor, so that your FAQ and HowTo content can be shown directly in the search results. Plus a breadcrumbs block to guide your users.
  • [Premium] Internal linking blocks to easily improve the structure of your content. Easily add a table of contents block, a related links block, a subpages block, or siblings block! Plus, we’ll keep adding these easy-to-add blocks to improve your site structure.
  • [Premium] Social previews to show you how your content will be shown on Twitter and Facebook. Plus: Social Appearance Templates to guarantee a consistent look.
  • [Premium] The Insights tool that shows you what your text focuses on. This way you can keep your article in line with your keyphrases.
  • [Premium] Optimize your content for synonyms and related keyphrases.
  • [Premium] Optimize your article for different word forms of your keyphrases, as the singular and plural. But also different verb forms, synonyms, and related keyphrases. This makes for more natural content!
  • [Premium] Automatic internal linking suggestions: write your article and get automatic suggested posts to link to!
  • [Premium] An orphaned content filter to detect posts that have no links pointing towards them!
  • [Premium] SEO workouts to make working on your site as easy as ABC. These SEO workflows will get your site into shape in no time!
  • [Premium] New! Yoast SEO Premium comes with a new word complexity feature that gives you actionable feedback on using difficult words. This feature is in beta and English only for now.
  • [Premium] New! Yoast SEO Premium comes with a new inclusive language analysis that helps you write inclusive content. This feature is opt-in, in beta and English only for now.

KEEP YOUR SITE IN PERFECT SHAPE

Whether you are an online entrepreneur, blogger or content creator, a developer, a (WordPress) SEO expert or a business owner, Yoast SEO will help you keep your website in perfect shape by:

  • Tuning the engine of your website, so you can work on creating great content!
  • Giving you cornerstone content and internal linking features to help you optimize your site structure in a breeze.
  • Translating your content to structured data where possible, to help search engines understand your website.
  • Helping you manage your team: with our SEO roles you can give colleagues access to specific sections of the Yoast SEO plugin.
  • [Premium] Automatically creating redirects when URLs change or when pages are deleted, and providing tools to manage or create redirects.
  • [Premium] Showing you social previews to manage the way your page is shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

TRUST THE EXPERTS

Yoast is powered by a team of expert developers, testers, software architects, and SEO consultants. They work constantly to stay at the cutting edge of WordPress SEO, and to improve the plugin with each and every release.

Yoast SEO is the only WordPress SEO plugin made by world-renowned SEO experts.

GET PREMIUM SUPPORT

The Yoast team offers regular support on the WordPress.org forums. But they hope you understand that they prioritize their Premium customers. This one-on-one email support is available to people who have purchased Yoast SEO Premium.

  • redirect manager that prevents “404: page not found” errors
  • Optimize without worrying about over-optimization with intelligent word form recognition available in multiple languages.
  • Internal linking blocks to structure your site easily.
  • Internal linking suggestions while you’re writing.
  • Preview your content to see what it will look like in the search results and when shared on social media using the Google preview and social preview.
  • Cornerstone content checks that point search engines to your most important pages.
  • Connect Yoast SEO to Zapier to easily create zaps that instantly share your published posts with 2000+ destinations like Twitter, Facebook, and much more.

THEIR EXTENSIONS TO FURTHER IMPROVE YOUR WORDPRESS SEO

Check out these SEO add-ons by Yoast:

  • Yoast Local SEO optimizes your website for a local audience.
  • Yoast Video SEO ensures that Google understands what your video is about, increasing the chances of ranking in the video results.
  • Yoast News SEO for news websites that want to improve their visibility and performance in Google News.
  • WooCommerce SEO for all online shops that want to perform better in the search results and social media.

These extensions work fine with the free version of Yoast SEO. But of course, the premium extensions also include 24/7 support.

INTEGRATIONS

Yoast SEO integrates seamlessly into a range of themes and plugins. It works particularly well with:

Contact Form by WPForms

WORDPRESS CONTACT FORM BUILDER PLUGIN

WPForms believe that you shouldn’t have to hire a developer to create a WordPress contact form for your site. That’s why they built Contact Form by WPForms, a drag & drop WordPress form builder that’s EASY and POWERFUL for any user to use.

WPForms allows you to create beautiful contact forms, feedback form, subscription forms, payment forms, and other types of forms for your site in a matter of minutes, not hours!

At WPForms, user experience is their #1 priority. Their pre-built form templates and workflows make WPForms the most beginner-friendly contact form plugin currently on the market.

The WPForms Challenge guides you through creating your first form in under 5 minutes, if that’s the way you choose to go. They will walk you through using the form builder all the way to adding a form to a page on your site! WPForms includes integrations for popular page builders like the WordPress Block Editor (also known as Gutenberg), Classic Editor, Elementor, and Divi making the whole process seamless for all users.

WPForms is a 100% mobile responsive contact form solution, so your contact forms will always look great on all devices that your visitors use, be it mobile, tablet, laptop, or desktop.

WPForms’ contact forms are also highly optimized for web and server performance because they understand the importance of speed when it comes to SEO, marketing, and conversion. They can honestly say that WPForms is one of the fastest WordPress contact form builder plugins in the world because of this.

WPForms Pro

This plugin is the lite version of the WPForms Pro plugin that comes with all the contact form features you will ever need including email subscription forms, multi-page contact forms, file uploads, conditional logic, payment integrations, form templates, and tons more features. Click here to go to their purchase for the best premium WordPress contact form plugin now! and choose one of their licences based on how many sites you manage or features you need!

Conclusion

Well there you have it. Those are the plugins that I use on a regular basis for websites that I build.

To find these plug-ins and many more go to the Plug-in directory on your WordPress website.


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