Wordpress has been around for over 15 years now and continues to grow in popularity among small & medium businesses, blog owners, non-profit organizations, and many other website owners. Over time amazing plugins have made their way into the marketplace, allowing WordPress to do things it never has before, including running online stores, creating user communities, and more.

When creating a WordPress website you should always be fully aware of the plugins you are using, and how they can impact your site. Generally, as developers, we urge clients to limit the amount of plugins they use. They can slow down loading speeds and even lead to security vulnerabilities if left out-of-date. These are our favorite plugins for efficiency, security, and migrations with this platform, making it a more useful CMS for the average website owner.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is an amazing contact form manager, allowing you full control over the form customization and the mail contents with simple markup. All these forms support Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and more. You can find more information at contactform7.com

Disqus for WordPress

Disqus is a popular blog commenting system trusted by millions of publishers to increase reader engagement, grow audience and traffic, and monetize content. Disqus installs in minutes and automatically imports your existing comments. Then it helps websites of all sizes engage directly with their audiences to build loyalty, retain readers, and foster thriving communities however, our favorite feature is the ability to block spam! Find more here disqus.com

Really Simple SSL

If you’re looking to switch over to HTTPS (and you should), Really Simple SSL automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https. To keep it lightweight, the options are kept to a minimum. The entire site will move to SSL with a few clicks. Find out more information here really-simple-ssl.com

Slider Revolution

An innovative, responsive WordPress Slider Plugin that displays content in a beautiful way. Whether it's a Slider, Carousel, Hero Scene or even a whole Front Page, the visual, drag & drop editor is easy to uses and allows you to add effects, animation, buttons, and more with just a few clicks. Learn more about this capabilities at revolution.themepunch.com

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance, caching all pages for static output, and minifying the code. Although there are no visual effects added, this plug will speed up your website drastically. Find more at w3-edge.com/products/w3-total-cache/

WP Smush

We’ve found this to be the best-performing image compression plugin for WordPress. It automatically optimizes and resizes images saving space and speeding up your website. It can be use to quickly reduce image size and site speed. Check it out premium.wpmudev.org/project/wp-smush-pro/

Yoast SEO

This one is essential. Yoast SEO is the best all in one WordPress SEO plugin, completely optimizing your site for search engines. It also helps you write content visitors like to read, by giving readability advice. Read more about Yeast SEO here yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open source e-commerce plugin designed for WordPress. It makes it easy for small to large-sized online merchants to sell products with WordPress. It has top quality support communities and a broad range of plugin extensions built to integrate seamlessly. WooCommerce is a top pick for eCommerce solutions on WordPress. Find out more about getting started here woocommerce.com

WordFence Security

Wordfence is the ultimate security for WordPress. Its “Threat Defense Feed” arms Wordfence with the newest firewall rules, malware signatures and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your website safe and online at all times. Keeping your hard work safe is important, learn more at wordfence.com

All-in-one Migration

This plugin exports your entire WordPress site with no technical knowledge required. You can backup, export, or upload a complete WordPress instance to a different location with a drag and drop tool in WordPress. Additionally, there is an unlimited option to find and replace operations in your database during the export or backup process. Read more about it and get started servmask.com

To get started with your new WordPress site, schedule a call with us, send an email to info@mk-dir.com, or give us a call at (857)400-9159. Make Directory offers affordable packages to help your business grow online!