3 Must Have WordPress Plugins

So you have a WordPress site or blog, or are thinking of putting one up, listen in closely on this podcast while “Digital Dave” points out the 3 Must Have WordPress Plugins. The good news is if you stay to the end he gives a 4th bonus plugin as well that could possibly just save your WordPress site from significant damage.

Episode Transcript

So these are the three WordPress plugins that are must have for any WordPress site. Now, some of these are not sexy, but they are highly needed. Some of these are really, really, really helpful for bringing in traffic and bringing in great results for your website. Let’s start off with these one at a time, and actually, the good news is that by listening to this episode, we’re going to give you a fourth plugin that is a must have absolutely free. They’re all free, but we’re going to give you a fourth one today just for listening.

The first one is Akismet, and this is maybe mispronounced, I’m sorry if I mispronounced it, that’s what I call it, is a plugin that is absolutely crucial you have on your WordPress site. You will be having a site live out on the internet where people can actually make comments about your blog post.  You can go in and disable the ability for them to see the fields to submit posts to your website, however, there are a lot of creative folks out there that have figured out how to submit comments in roundabout ways to your site that do not involve even filling out the form on the web. I don’t want to go into the details of that, but I’ll just show you some statistics from just one of the websites we maintain.

This one here, very clearly gets comments on a regular basis, however, most of these comments are just spam, they’re garbage, and you don’t want these clogging up your database and your website, which can cause multiple things. One issue is that it can cause slowness on your site if there are thousands of these being submitted, and if they were ever to get approved on accident, you could have comments out there that just really aren’t appropriate, so Akismet is a free plugin in most cases, however, you may want to purchase it, and I believe the way they still do it is that you pick the price. You say, “I want to pay you $x a year,” they give you a license key and you can use that on your website.

Now, just to give you some quick statistics on this site, you can see that this blocked 624 spam comments in the last six months, 16,870 over the life of the website, with what it considers to be 99.98% accuracy with only three false positives. Now that to me is extraordinary in helping you maintain your blog without getting bogged down and having to go through literally in some cases thousands of comments to decide either to delete them, mark them as spam, or trash, or whatever you want to do with them versus the ones that are actual true, real comments that you may want to post on your blog. So again, Akismet, one of those WordPress plugins that’s a must-have, that’s number one.

The second one that we’re going to look at today is another plugin that is to me, critical, and I’m going to give you two instead of one that can be used. I don’t know if they can be used simultaneously though, which I think is an issue, but you want to have some type of a plugin that helps you with the SEO of your website and your blog post. Now, in this particular site, we’re using a plugin called All in One SEO, and this plugin allows you to do a lot of different things, including stuff at the site level, where you can set up different types of SEO at your site level, you can connect your Google Analytics through here, you can change various SEO settings on a global basis.

But what I think is even more critical is that if you go down to the post level, you’ll see that what this does is that at the end of every post, it creates the information for your articles to be picked up and SEO’d, and this just allows you to organize it in an easy way, where you can put in the title, a description, and it actually helps you with the lengths of these. Like it’s saying this title is kind of longer than is preferred at 60 characters. This one’s about right, but it’s yellow. Usually, you want it to be green, so maybe you want to take a few characters out of this and it’ll change back to being okay at that point, and most importantly, you can put in your keywords, your comma-separated keywords for what you’re trying to rank for this particular piece of content.

So this was a piece of content for our smoothie and coffee business, where we wanted to rank or try to rank for some very specific keywords, so it allows you to organize it easily for each and every post. Another one that I like is called Yoast, and that’s Y-O-A-S-T. This one was called All in One SEO, but Yoast is another one, so we’ll call that one of the two that are number two. The only difference with Yoast is that Yoast allows you to actually grade your onpage SEO. So for instance, if you’re trying to rank for particular keyword, down here in let’s call this the Yoast area here, it will actually show you your grading as to how you’re doing with your page layout, wording, et cetera, titling, all the things and factors that go into trying to maximize the SEO of that page, how that ties in with the keyword that you’re trying to rank for on that page, and it gives you a score. It gives you a green, a yellow, or a red, depending on how you’re doing. Of course, greens are great, red’s not so great.

So again, that’s Yoast, that’s Y-O-A-S-T. That’s another plugin, so that’s number two, we’ll call that just number two, and then number three, one that I find very, very helpful, and you can get both a free and/or paid version of this and we use both on many of our sites. Some are free, and some are paid. It really depends on what you want to post your post to within your blog. What this plugin does is that, as it says in its name, Revive Old Post, is it allows you to on an ongoing basis, go back on a kind of a random basis, although you can put some settings in here to control which ones get posted, it will go in and create a title excerpt and an image of your posts that you have on your blog that you may have posted a year, or two years, three years ago, and it will take that and it will go back out and repost to some of the social media sites.

For instance, for this particular site, we kind of just focus on re-posting our content to Twitter in this particular case, so we have the free version here for this site where we’re just re-posting a 140 character string with a shortened link on Twitter. It says right here that our next post will be on Twitter in one hour and 10 minutes, so it’s just randomly picking one of our way old posts, putting it out on Twitter, and getting us some additional traffic to posts that we might have posted two or three years ago. A lot of times, it’s just forgotten that you have this old post and you’re not really doing anything socially to re-promote your old post. It’s a great free way to re-promote your post.

On many of the accounts, we do have the paid version, which you can buy in blocks of users, I think it’s three or more or something like that, and we have some connected to Facebook, some connected to our Linkedin account. You can do Zing and Tumblr as well. So this is called Revive Old Post. If you just want to repost out to Twitter, you can just use the free version and it’s great. So those are the three must-have WordPress plugins that you should install with every WordPress installation or website that you create.

Now today, for listening, I’m in such a good mood that I’m going to give you a fourth one. And this one is really, really can save you, and for anybody who has hosted a WordPress blog over the years, there’s always people trying to hack your blog. It’s just the way that it is,  and I’m sorry that that is the case. You certainly want to be with a very good hosting provider that can provide you some protections, certainly the ability to restore your sites easily and help scan your sites for issues if and when you kind of see or know of them.

What this one is called, it’s called Wordfence, and it’s a security plugin and it comes again in a free version and a full version, and it is a plugin that really gives you control over blocking people from literally trying to bring down your site, trying to hack your site, and I’m not going to go through this in depth today. This is our bonus, it’s called Wordfence. It has its ups and downs. The ups of it is that it really gives you control over like, here’s traffic from Chicago that’s probably could be legitimate. I’m looking over here and I got this traffic over here from Istanbul, and what you’ll see is if you start to see repetitive, constant, same traffic from the same people over and over again, this could be somebody on a repeated basis trying to jam a login through WordPress to get in as an administrator and really do havoc to your site, so I can block this IP, I can block this network.

I can see who this person is from the WhoIs registry online. It gives me the ability to do some really great things on a security level. I’m not going to go through this in depth today, just wanted to give you a brief overview of a great security plugin that you can add, and as I mentioned, there’s a free version. You can see on this particular site that there’s no blocks today or this week. There was 853 this month though, so actually it’s been doing some work behind the scenes. This is the free version, you can also get the upgraded version.

The downside to Wordfence is that when it’s on, we have seen it interact with some themes that use other special plugins within that theme for creating content for instance where it just wouldn’t work. It would be like you’d click on something and the button wouldn’t do anything. We had to go in and disable Wordfence and then it would start working again. That’s the worst case scenario, if that were to happen, is that to just realize this plugin does so much that out of the box you may have to go in and set some special rules to not block your own stuff in some cases from not working. That’s the downside to Wordfence, but certainly worth it if you are concerned about the security of your website then look at Wordfence.

That’s it for today’s episode of Where Marketing Meets Technology. We hope you got some good ideas on these WordPress plugins. Again, these are the three WordPress plugins that we absolutely recommend that you have on every WordPress site that you host. Again, the fourth one was a bonus. These three with the bonus one are critical, we believe, to maintaining and keeping your WordPress up and operating without being violated by other people, and allowing you to use some plugins that allow you to maximize the traffic back to your website. So we hope you’ll check back for the next episode, we thank you for joining us today.

Additional Resources

Akismet WordPress Plugin

All-In-One SEO WordPress Plugin

Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

Revive Old Post WordPress Plugin

Wordfence WordPress Security Plugin