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Essential Wordpress Plugins
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essential-wordpress-plugins.md

New Install for Wordpress.

Updates:
20211123 Updated from mindmap - "Essential Plugins" - available if you contact me!

Quite a few plugins here! Top ones are pretty much essential for a decent website. Create a child theme (see my other GIST for creating a child theme properly).

TOP Plugins - should be used pretty much on all sites

  • WP All in one Security and Firewall (https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-wp-security-and-firewall/)

    997 5*'s (as at 20211123)

    A COMPREHENSIVE, EASY TO USE, STABLE AND WELL SUPPORTED WORDPRESS SECURITY PLUGIN

  • WP Smush - https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/ - Author: WPMU DEV

    5,192 5*'s (as at 20211125)

    Optimize images, turn on lazy load, resize, compress & improve your Google Page Speed with the incredibly powerful and 100% free WordPress image smusher, brought to you by the superteam at WPMU DEV!

  • WP Clean UP - https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-clean-up/ - By BoLiQuan

    WP Clean Up can help us to clean up the wordpress database by removing “revision” “draft” “auto draft” “moderated comments” “spam comments” “trash comments” “orphan postmeta” “orphan commentmeta” “orphan relationships” “dashboard transient feed”.

  • Disable Comments - https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-comments/

    Instantly allow or disallow comments from any post type in WordPress (Pages, Posts, or Media) to stop the spammers and gain complete control over your full website. WP-CLI Support & Control comments via XML-RPC and REST-API too!

  • Redirection - https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/ - John Godley

    I Personally use this redirection plugin on ALL SITES!

    Redirection is the most popular redirect manager for WordPress. With it you can easily manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This can help reduce errors and improve your site ranking.

  • Admin Columns - https://www.admincolumns.com/

    Growing websites can become challenging to manage. Admin Columns helps you to overcome this challenge. Create insightful overviews to easily find, order, filter and update your content.

  • Duplicate Post - https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/duplicate-post/ - By Enrico Battocchi / Yoast

    The Yoast Duplicate Post plugin is one of those WordPress plugins that seem to do one thing and does that extremely well. In its core, the Yoast Duplicate Post plugin allows you to simply make a copy of a post or a page. That’s it! But this opens up a whole range of possibilities — from building a complete editorial flow to quickly build landing pages to boost your SEO.

  • Enable Media Replace - https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/enable-media-replace/ - By Måns Jonasson

    A free, lightweight and easy to use plugin that allows you to seamlessly replace an image or file in your Media Library by uploading a new file in its place. No more deleting, renaming and re-uploading files!

  • Table of Contents Plus - https://wordpress.org/plugins/table-of-contents-plus/ - By Michael Tran

    A powerful yet user friendly plugin that automatically creates a context specific index or table of contents (TOC) for long pages (and custom post types). More than just a table of contents plugin, this plugin can also output a sitemap listing pages and/or categories across your entire site.

  • Strong Testimonials - https://wordpress.org/plugins/strong-testimonials/ - http://demos.wpmission.com/strong-testimonials/

    In just a few steps, you will be collecting and publishing your testimonials or reviews. Beginners and pros alike will appreciate the wealth of flexible features refined over 4 years from user feedback and requests.

  • WH Tweaks - https://wordpress.org/plugins/wh-tweaks/ - By Webhead LLC

    Often times, ideas from WordPress Ideas (https://wordpress.org/ideas/) or bugs from WordPress Trac (https://core.trac.wordpress.org/) take years to make it into WordPress Core. Sometimes even if everyone agrees on the fix it still doesn’t get in. This plugin is the temporary patch you’ve been waiting for. Activate any feature you want and disable any you don’t want.

  • Contact Form 7 - https://wordpress.org/plugins/contact-form-7/ - By Takayuki Miyoshi

    1,336 5*'s

    Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

  • Popup Maker - https://wordpress.org/plugins/popup-maker/ - By WP Popup Maker

    Popup Maker is the best popup plugin WordPress has to offer. It is extremely versatile & flexible. Bend it to create any type of modal or content overlay for your WordPress website. Customize every facet of your popups, from theme and position, to targeting and cookies.

  • WP Sitemap Page - https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-sitemap-page/

  • Shortcoder - REALLY useful as you can use replaceable parms! - https://wordpress.org/plugins/shortcoder/ - By Aakash Chakravarthy

    Just get it! REALLY save a lot of time.

  • Master Slider (pro version available) - https://wordpress.org/plugins/master-slider/ - By averta

  • Display Posts Shortcode - https://wordpress.org/plugins/display-posts-shortcode/ - Author: Bill Erickson

    Add the shortcode in a post or page, and use the arguments to query based on tag, category, post type, and many other possibilities. You can also customize the output with parameters like: include_date, include_excerpt, and image_size. JOB DONE :)

Contact form 7 - used on most sites - here's some add-ons

General helpful plugins

Optional

Page Builders - nice to have - there are so many!

Lightboxes - go for ones that work with jquery and lightweight

  • WP Featherlight - https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-featherlight/ WP Featherlight is a WordPress lightbox plugin for adding a minimal, high-performance, responsive jQuery lightbox to your WordPress website. At its core, WP Featherlight is a WordPress plugin wrapper for the Featherlight jQuery lightbox plugin. When installed, the plugin will automatically display all standard WordPress images and galleries in a simple, minimalistic lightbox popup.

    In order for WordPress images and galleries to be lightboxed, you need to select the “Media File” option when choosing where the thumbnails should link. You can also select the “Custom Link” option if you make sure to link directly to an image file. This should work for any image file, even if it’s hosted on another website.

    It’s also possible to lightbox videos, iframes, and ajax content with WP Featherlight by adding data attributes to your content. For more details on custom content loading, check out the featherlight documentation.

Boilerplate and Shortcodes

WooCommerce

Commercial Plugins

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