 Hello everybody. Happy St. Patrick's Day. Want to get your attention? Are we gonna have some fun? Okay, I cannot see out of these. I'm gonna take them off now. Okay, so so I'm gonna talk about bells and whistles, and I did bring some props, so I've bell and I have a whistle. Okay, so this is gonna be a sort of a shopping list talk. I want to find out first how many of you were in the beginner workshop yesterday. Okay, good number. So are most of you here beginners? Okay, I'm gonna talk about plugins, and I think you talked about that yesterday also, but I'm gonna talk about some sort of some fun extra plugins that can make your word, your WordPress website do a little bit more. Clicker. So about plugins. Does anybody know what a plugin is? Okay, so a plugin extends the functionality of your website. It basically lets your website do some extra things that the basic install doesn't do, because WordPress is open source. You all know what open source is? It's a great thing about WordPress is that you could probably ask any question to say, can my website do X? And most likely someone else has had that same question or need, and so they or a developer has built a plugin to solve that problem. It's a great thing about WordPress is that we have the ability to make it do a lot of things. There is something called the WordPress repository, what we call the repo. There are two ways to access this. You can go to wordpress.org and go to plugins or you can go into the dashboard of your website and go to plugins, add new and do a search for whatever type of plugin you're looking for. You can also start with a Google search and say, can my WordPress website display text backwards or something like that? And you'll find out if someone has created a plugin for that. So it's a great thing that people are able to add to WordPress and extend the functionality oftentimes at no cost to you as a user. It can also be a challenging thing because there are, there can be many different plugins that attempt to all do the same thing. And some of them may be better than others. So how do you choose a plugin? If you've ever gone online to choose a restaurant or a hotel, you probably look at reviews. You can do the same thing with WordPress plugin. When you do a search and you're in the repo or in the dashboard of your website, you can see the ratings that people have given that plugin. And you can see how many people have rated it with that number of stars. So that's one important way to select a plugin. Another thing to look at is when it was last updated. So if something hasn't been updated for a couple of years, more than likely it's not your best option because that means it hasn't kept up with some of the updates that have been made to WordPress core. And it may also mean that that developer is no longer supporting it. And then also, how many active installs are using that plugin? So the most popular plugins are often the best plugins because lots of people have discovered that they work really well or that they do something really important. A plugin that only has 10 or 20 installs may be brand new, but it may also be something that it doesn't work very well. And so people aren't using it. So that's another factor to consider. So these are some basics about plugins. You probably heard some of this yesterday, but it's worth reviewing before I go into my shopping list of bells and whistles. So there are some things that you might want to do. How many of you have a brand new website that you just started yesterday or in the past recent time? So you may find that there are some things that you want to start doing with your website after you've set it up. The first one is forms. Almost every website that you build has a contact form on it. If it doesn't, it probably should because people should be able to reach you through your website. Instead of publishing your email and having people send you email directly, it's recommended that you have a contact form. But there are other kinds of forms that you can put on your website. You can ask people to give you more information than just contact you. You can sell things with a basic form on your website. You can give them different options with dropdowns, radio buttons. You can take information from people that's a lot more detailed. So there are some plugins that do a great job at helping you build forms. What I'm going to be doing is showing you some of the top plugins for each of these categories. And you can do a search in the repo for them. I'm not going to show you how to set them up because we don't have time. But I'm going to tell you what some of these top plugins are and what some of the differences might be between them so that you can go and make a list. And if you're looking to put a form plugin, for example, on your website, you can remember that I mentioned these and try out a couple of them to see which one fits your need better. Some of it's personal because some of them may have an interface that works better for you in the way your brain works. The top contact form in the WordPress repo is called Contact Form 7. It's free. It's very easy to use and it's very basic. One thing that it doesn't do is it doesn't keep the information in your database. So that means if someone fills out a contact form with Contact Form 7, it emails you to say this is the information from the person who tried to contact you, comes to your email. Well, if for some reason you don't get that email or you lose it, then that information is gone. So the other form plugins, which are free in their basic version, the top plugins, these do store the contact information or whatever other form information in the dashboard in the database on your website. So Caldera Forms is a free freemium plugin. It has a great user interface. It has very good support and startup guides. Ninja Forms also has a free version and has also drag and drop interface. And Contact Form by WP Forms, I think that you learned about that yesterday in the plugin class. That's also a very basic, easy to use form plugin. All three of these are what are called freemium model plugins. That means that there's a basic free version in the WordPress repository. And if you want to add extra functionality to them, you purchase add-ons or pro versions of these, ranging anywhere usually from $29 up to $200 or $300. Gravity Forms is a fully premium plugin, but I think it's the most popular form plugin that's been around for a long time. It's what I mostly use. It doesn't have as, I would say, as modern of a interface as the others that were on the former side, but it does have a $59 purchase price, and it includes all of the add-ons. Some of the add-ons you might find in a form plugin are connections to PayPal and Stripe, so that you can actually sell things with this form. Conditional Logic, which means you can have certain fields show up only if someone clicks on something. So, for example, if they click the answer yes, then another form area would show up, keeps your forms from being too cluttered. Okay, Events. If you have events in whatever your organization or your company or your client's company, if you publish events, you could, in your WordPress page or post, list your event information and then go and delete it after every event, but that would be a real pain in the neck. It wouldn't be very good for SEO, and it just, it's not the best way to publish events. So, there are some great event plugins that allow you to create on the back end your event with the date and time. You can put locations and maps, detailed information. You can do registration or RSVPs. These three are the top event plugins. I've used all three of them. I use Events Manager most often, but the other two are also very well supported and have good support within their organization. They all have a pro version, which can range from $75 up into a couple hundred, and those will let you do things like collect payment for your RSVP or your registration. Social sharing. So, one of the best ways to gain traffic to your website is to publish it in your social media channels. If you post blog posts, for example, you can share them on Twitter and Facebook yourself. You can do that using plugins, or you can just do it manually. You can also take your blog post and on the actual post include opportunities for your users to easily share those themselves on their feeds, increasing your traffic even more. So, there are three top plugins that put these buttons, either at the top or the bottom, floating on the side of your blog post. These also add to any share buttons, is the only one up here that's completely free. Social warfare has been getting a lot of great publicity lately. People really love that plugin. It does have a premium version, but it allows you to get a lot of information on the back end statistics of how many people are sharing it and where it's being shared. And then Sumo is also a premium plugin that has a free version, but you need to set up an account. Images. Okay. Images can really make your website look great. They can also really make your website perform badly. So, Lindsay talked about site speed and how that can affect your website's ranking in Google. If you take images from your phone and add them to your computer and then add them from there into your website, more than likely, they're huge. They're not optimized for the web. So, you need to optimize your photos before you put them on your website. And that means making them the right size and also making them the right resolution. There are plugins that will do this automatically for you when you upload your image to the website. And they will also allow you to go back to images that are already there and to compress those. Image galleries. Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry, I was getting the time alert. So, sorry. Yeah. These are all, E-W-W-W is free. And these Smush and Tiny PNG also have free versions, but Tiny PNG and Smush, you can get a premium version which will allow you to optimize more photos that are already on your site. Can I go to the next slide? Sorry. Okay. So, image galleries can really be beautiful if you have something that you're showcasing a lot of photography on your site. If you have products that you're showing, you can do an image gallery which will allow you to have more options to how the images are displayed. WordPress has a gallery option already built into it without a plugin, but there are plugins that will let you do more with them, including have a light box, which means when somebody hovers or clicks on the image, it will pop open. These three are the most popular. I would say if you're starting out, you can use Foo Gallery or Enviro Gallery. They're easier to use, I think, than NextGen. And then I also put Instagram feed up here because if you or your clients don't like to go into your website and put images on there or do anything on the back end of the site, but they use Instagram, which is super easy. I have a real estate client, for example, who doesn't want to touch his website, but he posts a lot of stuff to Instagram. So what you can do is use this Instagram plugin and it will pull the feed from your Instagram into your website. So that's a great way to keep your images fresh, put a lot of new content on your site without actually having to go into the dashboard to do it. I'm going to move quickly through these. These are the whistles. So these are security plugins and I know there are some other talks about security here today. These are the top security plugins that are free or freemium. WordFence is completely free. They've just updated their user interface and it's very nice. It does scans for you and it will alert you when files have changed, when malware is detected and it will help you clean those up. Here's some more security plugins. SiteLock and Security are some of the top names in Security in WordPress. They are more expensive, but they do have free versions. So the SiteLock plugin, if you install that and you follow the instructions to set up an account, you can set up a free SiteLock account and it will allow you to do some scans and some very basic things on your site. Lindsay talked about Google Analytics. So she mentioned monster insights. There's another Google Analytics plugin which is called Google Analytics Dashboard. These make it really easy for you to connect your website to Google Analytics. And then she also talked about Yoast and there's also all-in-one SEO pack, which a lot of SEO agencies use. Sure. I'll also put these slides up afterward too. Performance. So redirection. I'm just going to leave that up there. I'm not going to go into detail, but if you change the URL of any of your posts or pages, you need to redirect those so that Google doesn't get confused or if someone has made a link to that page in the past and they go to it. If you've changed it, it will show a 404 error. You've probably seen that. So if you ever change the URL on your website, you'll need a redirection plugin and this one's great. Anti-spam is already in your website. Any new WordPress install will have it. But it is a premium plugin. You have to have an account. And then plugins are awesome. I've given you a bunch of plugins to use. If you use a lot of them and they're good, it's probably not a problem. But sometimes you might find that your website slows down. And it may be because one of the plugins on your site is not a good fit for your site. So you can use this. It's called P3. You can install that. And it will do a scan of all of the plugins on your site and show you which one is dragging it down. So that's a really good tool to use if you notice that your website is slowing down after installing all these plugins I'm telling you about. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm going to run out of time. So I want to leave time for questions. So I'm just going to tell you caching. Does anybody know what caching is? Do you guys know what caching is? Okay. So it will help your website load faster because it's sort of like a memory that is in your browser. It helps your users, your visitors. Their browser will keep a copy of the site once they visited it so it will load faster the next time. And so there are some great WordPress caching plugins. I like auto optimize. It's very easy to use. W3 is a little bit complicated and if you it's very aggressive. So I've had websites sort of break when you use that. You can always turn it off. BJ Lazy load is not necessarily a caching plugin but it will help your website load faster above the fold. So that means it won't load things at the bottom until people start scrolling. These will all help your website perform faster. Okay. These are some bonus things. Page builders. Once you've learned how to get your website up and running with a basic WordPress editor, you might consider a page builder. They're built to use your front end of your website to help make it easier for you to make your websites more interesting design oriented. And they do a lot of great things. Beaver builder and Elementor are the two in the WordPress community that are talked about as being the best because they don't slow the site down a lot. I use beaver builder and I highly recommend it. And table press. I think that that was talked about in your beginner talk yesterday. But tables are very tricky on websites now that we are being mobile friendly because it's hard to get them to fit. So a plugin like table press will help the content in your table get mobile friendly. Okay. Advanced custom fields. That is a more advanced plugin but it allows you to add more fields to the back end of your website where the editor is. So let's say you have, you want all of your pages to have a section where there's a special image. You can make a field in the back end of your site that will do that. Better click to tweet is a really great plugin. It does social media that I was talking about with the sharing. You can highlight a section of your blog post and use this plugin. And you've probably seen this before in the middle of a blog post. People just click on that. And it will automatically share that content on their social media on their Twitter feed and tag you in it. And then duplicate page does just what it says it does. User switching. If you're building a website for someone else and let's say it's a membership site it allows you to see what the user that's not you sees. Does that make sense? And really simple SSL. Who knows what an SSL is? Yes. Secure socket layer. So on your website when you have to have now HTTPS and the green padlock at the top. If you've switched from a non SSL from an HTTP site to an HTTPS site, really simple SSL will do everything that needs to happen without you having to worry about it. It will change all of the content over to HTTPS for you and make your site compliant. Okay. WPCore is a plugin that lets you manage all your plugins. So if you're building a lot of sites you can use WPCore. You can put all of your favorite plugins into WPCore. And then on your new site install WPCore and it will tell you it will put links to all of the plugins that you've entered into it. So you don't have to keep going back to the repo for every new site and adding them all. So there are other plugins that do something like this. There's one called sync from iThemes that does something similar. This is free WPCore. If it's only if it's in the repo, if it's freemium, if there's a free version in the repo, yes. Okay. Sorry I had to rush through that. I know I'm sort of out of time, but I will go at the happiness bar to answer questions for you. I have my speaker cards here too. So if you'd like to take one of these and contact me that way. Sorry that I ran out of time. Okay. I will take two questions. Go ahead. Yeah. She asked if I've ever used redirection. Yes. Yes. Yes. She asked if you can take, if you have an HTML site or a different kind of site or an old site, can you use redirection for the new WordPress site? And the answer is yes. There's a bulk upload. So what you'd want to do is get an export of all of the pages from your old site using something like screaming frog is something that you can use to get all the URLs, put it into a spreadsheet, and then you have to also put in the new URL for each one of those and you can upload that CSV file with redirection. Yes. A developer site that puts all the plugins together. Yes. So there are some, some aggregator type of sites. There's one called WPML that owns that smush plugin I mentioned where they have a monthly or an annual fee that you pay and they have their own premium plugins that do a lot of these things. What I would say is that you're better off choosing the ones that you like and using those because when you use something like that, you're wedded to their version of it, which may not do all the things that you want to. Yeah. Anyway. Okay. Thank you so much. I will be in the happiness bar in just a few minutes. I really appreciate it. Hope that was helpful. Happy St. Patrick's Day.