 Welcome to the journey. Today, we're going to talk about WordPress plugins that we cannot live without. First of all, business owner and entrepreneur, your business is priority numero uno. And the last thing you want to be doing is spending hours and hours trying to maintain your website. So that's where WordPress and WordPress plugins come in. We don't recommend you install every single one that we talk about. See what's best for you and your website and your business. Alright, so you are a WordPress master. So what are some of your favorite plugins for design? Yeah, so I definitely have my favorites, my go-to for all things. But if you want to just stick with using the Gutenberg editor, the new WordPress editor in WordPress, highly recommend Koblox. It just basically adds just extra functionality to designing the site. But my favorite, favorite, favorite go-to design plugin is Elementor. It's super visual. It helps me just be on the actual website and make my edits from there. I'm a visual person. I don't like the backend too much. I kind of see what I'm doing, so it definitely helps. Alright, so the next category of plugins are optimization. So these are things that make your site run better, faster, all good things. What is your top one? Stronger. So there's lots of things you can do when it comes to optimizing your site, right? So one of my favorites and it's become super popular by WPMU Dev is WP Smush. Now what this plugin does is exactly what the title says. It smushes, compresses your images on your websites. They're not as big. Because not everybody has lightning fast internet speeds at home. So all that stuff they have to download makes your site kind of slow. And site speed is one of the most important things that you should be optimizing for on your site because it's an important factor for Google on whether it's going to rank your website. But even more importantly, it affects your users. If your website is taking four ever to load 5, 10, 15 seconds because you have these massive images, they're heading out. So this plugin saves the day, makes them small but does not affect the quality. Yes, and to really pair with WP Smush is having some sort of lazy load plugin. Like lazy load by WP Rocket is a plugin you can use, it's free. And basically what lazy load does is it only loads images that the visitor can see. So that means all the other images on your page, your browsers have to load it right away so it makes your site even faster. Yeah, so if you're a fashion blogger and you're talking about your favorite top 10 spring outfits and you just have this massive photo shoot and you love it and all those images are super important because you have product links that you're linking to. You don't want to waste a whole bunch of time loading 100 images all at once. And so this will do just when the user is looking at the three images, it loads those as they scroll down, it just loads the next ones. It's really cool. It looks nice too, it looks fancy. It's like a little fade-in effect and it's super easy to use. Literally you go to the plugin settings, you click a couple checkboxes, hit submit and that's all you have to do. Alright, so more image optimization, images as you know is super important. So a kind of newish technology like a .webp format. Basically what that is is just a different type of image format kind of for the web. So it takes images and basically reduces up to 25% in size with the same quality. So there's a plugin called Webp Express that you can use to convert your JPEGs, your PNGs to that .webp extension. And what that does is it should hopefully help your site load that much faster because there's less to load. Now this technology is a little bit newer. So test it out maybe on like a staging site, maybe not your production site to make sure everything works. So there is a lot of rewrites and redirects that need to happen to basically make this plugin work. Nice. And another really cool optimization plugin is called Autoptimize. That's auto, optimize, smush them together and that's actually what it does is it smushes your code on the back end. So you know majority of the time you're not going into the back end of your code but your website is made up of code, right? And then that is translated to your users. Let that code takes up space and that space takes up page load time, right? So what Autoptimize does is it takes all the spaces within your code and it just smushes them all together so you can load super duper, super fast. Yeah, that's what we do. And last but not least, when it comes to optimization plugins that are our favorites is a plugin called WP Disable. Now what this does is it's going to disable the different functions inside of WordPress that maybe you don't actually need on your website. So the extra bloat that is just there with WordPress is not for you. You just go ahead and disable it with a couple clicks of a button and you're good. Your site loads a little bit faster. That extra stuff isn't there and we all win. So the next section of plugins are security plugins and these are so important because you don't want your site getting infected with malware or getting hacked. So tell me about one of your favorite security plugins. Yeah, so one of my favorites really to harden the WordPress itself because WordPress is super popular. It covers over a third of the internet and the last thing we want to do is have a site be hacked. Redirectly do malicious things, then your brand is just destroyed. So these plugins should help with some of that security. And the first plugin that I really recommend is Securi. It looks like Securi. It's just a WordPress hardening plugin. It's going to do a lot of stuff on the back end for you. All you have to do is do a couple clicks of a button and click save and it does everything for you to really harden WordPress itself. Awesome. And if you want to learn a little more about what to do if or when your site gets hacked, we have an awesome video right here all about it. So check it out. And the other plugin I just can't live without is really simple SSL, especially for first-time users or beginners or people that just don't want to even deal with it like myself. What it does is after you have an SSL installed on your website with WordPress, it doesn't do the redirect for you. So even though you have the SSL there, your site still shows HTTP colon slash slash. No good. It's plug-in, you activate it and it's there and it's going to add all the redirect scripts, do all the things in the back end, and then your site's secure. You have that HTTPS. You have that lock symbol that no longer says not secure. Google now loves you. Your rankings are getting boosted. Always just click a button. It really helps me out. Just save time because I don't want to go in the code and set up those redirects. Go into the back of the database, go into the files and find all the HTTP links. This makes your life so much easier and it's super quick to use. Our next category of plug-ins are plug-ins that help you get found online. And the number one plug-in, this probably is my top plug-in. You should never stop talking about it. It is Yoast SEO. So basically SEO is one of the most important things that you should be doing. If you have a website but no one is finding you, it's because your website is not optimized for search engines. Right. And what Yoast SEO does is it makes some of the back end technical things very easy. It optimizes your site in a way that Google can find it. It creates certain things like robots.txt files and site maps. But then it makes it really easy for you to edit your on-site work and content. So that's the two parts of SEO. You have your on-site and your off-site work. And Yoast SEO helps you do everything on-site. So easy, so awesome. I really can't talk about it enough. I love it. I'm a super fan. So the great thing about Yoast SEO is that, again, it helps you with your on-site and your keywords to make sure that the content that you're writing on your pages and blog posts are targeted and are written in a way that Google is going to rank those pages. So let's say for my website, there's a new movie trailer that came out for a movie that everyone's really excited about. It will help me and guide me as I'm writing that, letting me know that, hey, this blog post is too short. You don't have the keyword in your title. It will just give me all the tips and then it will rank it on a scale. So that way I know these are the things that I need to do to give my article the best chance of ranking. Super cool. It makes it very easy for SEO novices or SEO experts. Yeah. I love the little checkbox that way. Kind of like little progress. Cool. I'm almost there. Cool. I nailed it. So now you've done everything to optimize your site for search engines, but it's really important that you're tracking where all that traffic is coming in and different sources. And yes, Google Analytics is so important, but it's another dashboard on another site you have to log into. So that's where Google Analytics dashboard comes in. It takes it into your WordPress site. So it's all there very easily. Yeah. And it's the first page you see when you log in. So you log into your site and there's a little graph saying what are your top posts? What's not working? What is? And you can kind of dig in deeper directly on your site without having to go to Google Analytics. And what's cool about it is these plugins will actually give you the information that you really care about inside your dashboard. Google Analytics is a lot. It's overwhelming. Sometimes some things don't make sense. Yeah. These plugins help just a little bit. So the next plugin I love because it helps other users all over the Internet find your content. It's called Next Scripts Social Poster. And basically what it does anytime you post a new blog post, it automatically pushes it out to all of your social networks. There's a giant list and you can choose to do all of them or some of them. So if you have followers that follow you only on Twitter or people that are only on Facebook or whatnot, you can just go anytime you hit publish for one of your articles. Poof! Off it goes. And the really cool thing is you can edit your individual captions for Twitter. You could have a different one for Facebook, obviously. There's different character links. And so that way the users on each of those platforms are getting a really unique experience. It's really cool. It saves you a lot of time. You spent a lot of time on this post. The last thing you wanted to do is just to fall on deaf ears. So this gives you a chance to spread it out to the world so they can find it. Absolutely. And I don't recommend enabling this plugin while you're developing a website because you might throw out a bunch of posts that should not have gone out. Right now with the internet being so global as it is and being able to get a visitor from literally anywhere in the world that means some of those users might have be speaking a different language. And I know I only know English so I can't go and translate everything. There are translating plugins like Weglot and Polylang that go in and automatically translate your website for you and go and make edits afterwards if the automatic one didn't work as well. But it's definitely helpful to really reach that global audience and expand your business online. That's awesome. Another plugin that I absolutely love is called Pretty Links and it does just that. It makes your links in your URLs nice and pretty and bite-sized. So let's say that I'm on a podcast or on my YouTube channel and I want to direct people to my podcast page. Basically what it will do is take my big long link and all they have to do is type in my website name backslashpodcast and it will go straight to that page. It's easy for your users to remember because they're not going to remember this big long link and so you can create little bite-sized links that redirect to your main one. Yeah, that's super important. Especially with WordPress, if you create a post it'll do like my post title is 10 ways to optimize your site. It'll be 10-waves-2-optimized-your-site and having to tell someone that especially in a quick form like video or just talking to them is awful. They're going to type it wrong. They're not going to remember. They're going to give up. Yes. Just those quick little bite-sized, just slash podcast or slash optimize. Slash 10 tips. 10 tips. Whatever it you want to do, it makes it easiest to say is mydomain.com slash 10 tips. And then they're there. There we go. Another plugin that I love if you are using AdSense or even any sort of ad platform to monetize your site is called Quick AdSense. And what I love is that sometimes when you have your AdSense code it can be kind of confusing on where to put the code and then you have to put it in this section and I want it to appear here, here and here. Let's be honest, I've totally crashed my site by going in and trying to do that myself. That's where Quick AdSense comes in. Basically, Quick AdSense does all of that work for you. And all you do is you check boxes of I want an ad to appear before my post. I want an ad to appear after my post. I want one to appear on my sidebar. Whatever you get to pick and boom, it appears right there. So speaking of possibly breaking your website, there's a plugin called WP File Manager that does just that, gives you a file manager inside of WordPress. So instead of having to go via FTP using a third-party program like FileZilla, you basically can manage all your files in the back end directly in your dashboard. Super quick, super easy. And this one is just super cool just to give you your visitors that look like next level of customer service. There's a site and plugin called Talk2, Talk.2. Basically, it's a free chat software you can put on your website. There's a mobile app too, so you can actually respond to visitors on your website directly from your phone and give them those quick answers of quick customer service to potentially boost sales, boost customer service, boost retention, boost loyalty. And it's a free plugin. I highly recommend it to any really brick-and-mortar type business or someone that's constantly on their website anyways. It's definitely helpful. Yeah, if users are coming to your website and they're asking you quick questions, they're probably people who are interested in potentially buying your product or service. So if they know that they're getting a response right away and it's from the business owner or someone who works for the business, that gives a lot of confidence that this business is on top of it and they'll probably end up buying from you. The last WordPress plugin that we cannot live without is called WooCommerce. I love WooCommerce because if you're already using WordPress for your website, you don't want to have to send your users to another shop platform that gives them a different user experience. WooCommerce allows you to have that e-commerce functionality within WordPress. It's slick, it's simple, it's awesome. Tell us a little more. Yeah, so it obviously will give you that e-commerce ability but it makes just managing your e-commerce store that much simpler, right? So you have an order management area. So you can manage customer orders. You can respond to customers directly in WooCommerce itself. You can set up shipping rates. You can set up taxes. You can set up advanced taxonomies. You can set up advanced attributes. So if you want certain products to have blue shirt, large, and then some engraving or whatever else you want to have on your product, you have the ability to do so with WooCommerce. It does literally everything for you. There are some extra premium features you can always get at WooCommerce.com. And there are tons of third-party plugins you can use to add on to the functionality of WooCommerce. Just go to plugins, add new, search WooCommerce, and there's going to be tons of different things to make WooCommerce even better. All right guys, I hope you liked the WordPress plugins that we cannot live without. They're amazing. Now let us know in the comments below what your favorite WordPress plugin is. I'm interested. I'll be down in the comments. Take good notes because... We're going to add them to our own sites. Yes. And while you're there, make sure you smash that like button. If you got some value out of this, and hey, subscribe to our channel and ring that bell so you get these episodes first. This is The Journey. We'll see you next time.