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What are the best WordPress plugins for my new website? It’s the most common question that you might come across.
Are there any WordPress plugins that are completely free? To be honest most of the plugins out there are free with option to upgrade. This way you get the option to test the plugin to some extent before you actually consider buying.
We are going to discuss the top of the shelf plugins that anyone with new or even existing website must have.
Let’s break them down with following categories:
- Performance – Improves overall performance of your website (LiteSpeed cache, CDN, Lazy load images, & optimize images to improve the speed of website)
- Security – To prevent bot attacks and phishing scams (Google noCaptcha, SSL)
- Enhancement – Improve the appearance of your website (Contact form 7, subscription form)
- Technical – Does the job in the background i.e. inactive log out, cron jobs
- SEO – Helps yor rank your website in search engines (Yoast SEO)
#1 Performance
The website performance is the crucial part for being online 24×7. Think about it for a sec, if your website is down, what would be the impact on your business?
Here are a few things that I could think off:
- Loss of sale to competitor – you can loose sales to your competitor
- Brand reputation at stake – if the website is down quite often
- Lots of complaints – your customers won’t be able to make purchases. This will turn into negative feedback
- Financial loss – Your business can have major financial impact
- Liability – Not able to meet debt requirement or minimum repayments
To ensure you don’t come across any of that you must have the following plugins installed on your website.
LiteSpeed cache is one of the best WordPress plugins to have on your website. It helps with speeding up your website and improves overall functionality.
Some of the features include:
- Object Cache (Memcached/LSMCD/Redis)
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- Combine CSS/JS
- Minify inline CSS/JS
- Browser cache
- Lazyload images/iframes
- Database Cleaner and Optimizer
- Import & export settings
How to configure LiteSpeed Cache properly
Installing and activating a plugin is one thing but configuring it properly require understanding.
What do I mean by that?
It’s easy enough to say that you have activated it. However, you can miss out on the full potential that it has to offer, if not configured properly. That’s why we have found the perfect step by step guide for you offered by LiteSpeed itself. You can learn about each components yourself and decide whether that option should be turned on for your website.
#2 Security
The question you should ask yourself, are you:
- beginner
- Intermediate
- pro
If you are new to creating websites then you should start with basics about website security. A website without security is something like soldier without gun.
If you are an intermediate user, hold a website currently or pro, then would already know the importance of secure website.
Either case, it is extremely important to secure your website from hackers, bots and spammers.
Not only they can ruin your analytics data but can cause serious damage to your brand reputation. Any damage to your business name means no more sales. Customers will shift away from your business and the end result is financial loss.
There are many plugins that can make your life easier to safeguard your website.
Let’s take a look at our must have list:
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Managing multi-users websites can be a daunting task. Monitoring the website logged-in user activities is simpler by installing the User Activity Log Pro WordPress plugin. It is a magnificent monitoring plugin that tracks all admin activities performed by members, administrators, and authors. Moreover, the plugin informs about the WordPress core updates, theme-plugin updates, post updates, etc. It also logs when a user is banned or when a user’s password is changed. The effective plugin for tracking user’s logs. It has a free version too but with limited functionalities.
Some of the features include:
- Custom Event Log
- Database Integration And Migration
- Log Reset Option
- User And Role Selection
- Favourite / Unfavourite Log
- Password Security
- View Log Detail (Old/New Comparison)
- Email Notification On Different Activities
- +many more.