Useful WordPress Plugins
The plugin’s below are the ones that I use at this blog. I focus on plugins that don’t need change of the theme and that are easy to use. I am using Websynthesis hosting as my hosting provider and they have great support.
If you want to see the Plugins that I used to use and you might find useful check the Not Useful WordPress plugins post.
- Broken Link Checker – Checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. When I needed help the author responded the same day on his blog. It turned out to fix itself, so this has been excellent to use.
- Contact Form 7 – Easy contact form for people to send you web based email.
- Easy 404 Redirect – Apparently your SEO is hurt if you don’t have a custom 404 page. This allows you to select your homepage or a specific page.
- EWWW Image Optimizer Cloud – This automatically optimizes your images for the fastest loading and smallest database size. You want to do this for people who are on slower connections, and really the data it deletes is redundant.
- Gmedia Gallery – Best image gallery plugin I have used.
- Search in Place – Want to make the search box on your WordPress site act like google and pop up suggestions as they type? This will do that. Very cool. Even shows a thumbnail preview.
- Simple Share Buttons Adder – This gives you share buttons that I think look classy. No speed impact unlike other plugins.
- Simple Tags – This automatically tags your content. Works great.
- Special Recent Posts FREE Edition – This makes a nice thumbnail and description of posts for the widget area.
- Video Thumbnails – Scans posts for videos and displays a thumbnail from an image in that video.
- wordpress related Posts with thumbnails (Lite) – This is a beautiful related posts plugin with a nice thumbnail and more options if you want to upgrade.
- W3 Total Cache – Complicated to install and I had to have my provider help me. Required for Websynthesis.
- WordPress SEO by Yoast – This is what is considered the #1 plugin for SEO purposes. It does a ton of stuff.
- WP Simple Galleries – Works great. Has beautiful output.
Useful modifications to theme
You can’t use the plugins below if you are using some hosting providers like Websynthesis or WP-Engine. Ask your hosting provider if you can use the text below.
- From this page: Here is the simple solution to Remove query strings from static resources :In your theme’s function file (Appearance > Editor > Functions.php), add the following code before the closing PHP tag (%>) at the bottom of the file:
function _remove_script_version( $src ){
$parts = explode( '?', $src );
return $parts[0];
}
add_filter( 'script_loader_src', '_remove_script_version', 15, 1 );
add_filter( 'style_loader_src', '_remove_script_version', 15, 1 );
- Another useful script that speeds up the page. Copy and paste into your .htaccess file. You might find this video helpful.
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
# | Expires headers |
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Serve resources with far-future expires headers.
#
# (!) If you don't control versioning with filename-based
# cache busting, you should consider lowering the cache times
# to something like one week.
#
# https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_expires.html
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
# CSS
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 year"
# Data interchange
ExpiresByType application/atom+xml "access plus 1 hour"
ExpiresByType application/rdf+xml "access plus 1 hour"
ExpiresByType application/rss+xml "access plus 1 hour"
ExpiresByType application/json "access plus 0 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/ld+json "access plus 0 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/schema+json "access plus 0 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/vnd.geo+json "access plus 0 seconds"
ExpiresByType application/xml "access plus 0 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/xml "access plus 0 seconds"
# Favicon (cannot be renamed!) and cursor images
ExpiresByType image/vnd.microsoft.icon "access plus 1 week"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 week"
# HTML
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 0 seconds"
# JavaScript
ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 year"
# Manifest files
ExpiresByType application/manifest+json "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType application/x-web-app-manifest+json "access plus 0 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/cache-manifest "access plus 0 seconds"
# Media files
ExpiresByType audio/ogg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/bmp "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/svg+xml "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType video/mp4 "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType video/ogg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType video/webm "access plus 1 month"
# Web fonts
# Embedded OpenType (EOT)
ExpiresByType application/vnd.ms-fontobject "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType font/eot "access plus 1 month"
# OpenType
ExpiresByType font/opentype "access plus 1 month"
# TrueType
ExpiresByType application/x-font-ttf "access plus 1 month"
# Web Open Font Format (WOFF) 1.0
ExpiresByType application/font-woff "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-font-woff "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType font/woff "access plus 1 month"
# Web Open Font Format (WOFF) 2.0
ExpiresByType application/font-woff2 "access plus 1 month"
# Other
ExpiresByType text/x-cross-domain-policy "access plus 1 week"
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