Once your website is set up on WordPress, the next step is to choose which plugins you’d like to use.
A plugin is simply a piece of software that you can add on to your site that gives you more functionality to do certain things.
There are plugins for nearly any task you can imagine: plugins to prevent spam comments, plugins to improve site speed, plugins to add security to your site, etc.
Here is the list of plugins that I personally use for each of my sites (these are all free):
Contact Form 7: Allows you to insert a contact form on any page of your site.
Insert Headers and Footers: Allows you to insert code in the header or footer of your site; particularly useful for setting up Google Analytics on your site (more on this later).
Limit Login Attempts Reloaded*: Limits the number of times that someone can attempt to log in to your WordPress dashboard.
Social Warfare: Displays social media icons so people can easily share your articles to different social media platforms.
Two Factor Authentication*: Enables two-factor authentication when logging in to your WordPress dashboard. Thus, if someone happens to guess the username and password to your dashboard, they would still need access to your phone to get the second password required to log in.
WP-Sweep: Cleans up duplicated data on the back end of your WordPress including auto drafts, unapproved comments, spam comments, and other unused data. This helps increase your overall site speed.
WPS Hide Login*: Allows you to change the URL of your WordPress login. For example, instead of letting it be yourdomain.com/wp-admin you can change it to yourdomain.com/sneaky-login.
Yoast SEO: Allows you to easily modify the slug, title, and meta description of an article, which are all important factors for SEO (more on this later).
*These plugins are optional, but they do enhance the overall security of your site and minimize the chances that you could get hacked.
Caution: Don’t Add Too Many Plugins
The more plugins you have on your site, the more software you have running in the background and the slower your site will run. Thus, it’s important to add only plugins that you absolutely need.
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