Tag Archives: plugins

The best WordPress Plugins for your Site!

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WordPress Plugins

We last posted about WordPress Plugins here in 2017 so it’s time to do a refresher.

This is great if you’re setting up a site for the first time, and want to have everything safe and secure so you can maintain your site worry-free.

  1. Askimet Anti-Spam – This is the GOAT of all plugins. Something you should have enabled on any WP site to prevent unecessary spam. If anything, it’s the first plugin you should have activated to protect your site from the get-go!
  2. JetPack – another out the box must have. Additional layer of security for your site.
  3. Classic Editor – If you’re not a fan of the new style Gutenburg and prefer editing your posts and pages using the TinyMCE editor, this is what you’re looking for.
  4. Contact Form 7 – a simple and no frills contact form for your site with CAPTCHA integration. On every site we configure we implement this over the standard out the box contact form. Reduce spam, and stay secure.
  5. Really Simple SSL – activate SSL on your site in the simplest way possible. This does require your site to have a valid SSL certificate applied, or active Let’s Encrypt functionality (all our new hosting packages feature this out the box).
  6. Site Kit by Google – great new plugin developed by Google to get your site linked in to Analytics, AdSense, and Search Console. Improving by the day with new features and functionality.
  7. UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore – nothing worse than making changes to your site and / or it getting hacked and you not having a backup. Schedule automated backups for your site’s database and files on a regular basis.

There are several others that we use, so if you would like to know more please do get in touch or comment on this post 🙂

If you would like help getting these setup and working on your own site, get in touch with us through our contact form.

Best WordPress social media sharing plugin!

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JetPack logo

We’ve used a lot of plugins, but most tend to become unsupported or have problems when WordPress updates. Since testing a WP multisite install on one of our sites, the JetPack plugin is the one that seems to work the best for us so far. And to be fair, the free option is the one we stick for for the majority of ours and customer installs, as it does what we need it to do.

The description of the plugin is quite self explanatory: Jetpack enables you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account to use the powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users.

In laymans terms, if you are hosting your own WP installation, then installing the JetPack plugin enables the features you would normally only get through a WP hosted site (where you create a site through them directly at https://wordpress.com/ but for a custom domain and any other features you will have to pay).

The main features of JetPack free are to provide site stats, anti-spam protection and also protect your site from malicious login attempts. These alone are reasons to use the plugin!

Another feature of the plugin are the social media sharing tools including the automatic posting of new posts to Twitter and Facebook. This works really well and works well on multisite without any problem either where others won’t.

JetPack is now supported and maintained by WordPress directly so you can rest assured that this won’t drop off the face of the Earth any time soon 🙂

For more information on the plugin check out http://go.frantik.it/jet

And if you’re looking to create a website we’d love to host it for you http://go.frantik.it/host

Top WordPress Plugins you must Have!

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This is a much discussed subject but we wanted to share the must have plugins you definitely need to install having first installed WordPress.

Having a whole site running off WP is a much debated topic but the ease of use and endless addons you can install to get your site to do pretty much whatever you like, is just one of the reasons why WP is one of the most used off the shelf content management systems currently available.

  1. NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster

Everyone has either a Twitter or Facebook account and the easiest way to get your blog post shared on either is by using this plugin. Yes WP does it natively, no it’s not the greatest. We use this plugin on every WP site we configure and it’s ease of use and simplicity is why it’s on our list. PS. It does share to so many other websites too…

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpshare

2. Shareaholic

Everyone loves to share content. This plugin adds cool share buttons to your blog posts and also allows you to monetize your content (optional). We’re mainly including it here due to the buttons, and the ability to customize and use URL shorteners to track click throughs.

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpbuttons

3. UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore

We’re surprised that WP doesn’t have native backup tools, allowing you to backup to external cloud storage or FTP sites. We’re sure it’ll come in future updates but for now, this nifty plugin does the trick. The free option gives you the ability to schedule backups to remote storage with completion/failure notifications. A must to ensure that your site’s files and database are backed up safe and sound!

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpbackup

4. Disqus

WordPress’s built in comment system is OK, but not brilliant. It works in the most part but Disqus has been doing a better job of it for a long time. It allows better customization and many more configuration options than included with the basic WP install.

Link:  http://go.frantik.it/wpcomments

5. Askimet

Everyone hates spam, especially spam comments. We’re sure you’ve been on a site with random comments unrelated to the original post. With this installed that should reduce the amount of spam comments and allow you to better moderate comments posted to your site. This is included by default with the WordPress.com sites but if you’re setting up a custom install make sure to activate it!

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpnospam

6. JetPack

Advanced stats, sharing, and a whole load more. Most of the stuff you need to pay to get the extra features but we just like it for the additional stats. It adds this to the Dashboard and admin bar when an admin is logged in. Worth having for that alone we think.

Again, if you have a site hosted via Wordpres.com then this is included by default, but if you’re self hosting you’ll need to add it. We still think it’s worth installing.

Link: http://go.frantik.it/wpjet