11 Essential Plugins Wordpress Plugins

Transcript

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you'd be surprised how easy it is to transform your WordPress website into a high performing slick-looking super secure Powerhouse without any coding skills I'm talking about plugins of course hi I'm Alex from brainstorm

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force and I've been working with WordPress websites for well over 15 years in this video I'm going to be sharing with you 11 essential WordPress plugins that will revolutionize the way that your website looks and the way that it Works you're going to learn how you

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can boost your website speed by up to 50% instantly how you can secure your website from Frets how you can improve the SEO that search engine optimization and how you can add some really slick

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Design Elements really easily so stay with me to the end of this video Because by the end you'll have the ultimate tokit for your WordPress website to make it stand out from the rest I've grouped the plugins together your find the different groups in the timings below we're going to start with some general

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use plugins but I've also got some cool marketing plugins performance plugins security and backup plugins we're going to be covering everything so let's go so let's start with the essential General plugins these are plugins that just improve your quality of life when you're

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working with WordPress they add extra functionality that once you've got you'll wonder how you ever lived without it First Essential plug-in that you've got to install is fluent SMTP WordPress websites send quite a lot of emails maybe it's a password reset

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maybe it's notification of a new comment maybe if you're running woocommerce it's a notification of a new order which is of course a very important email but the problem is is that these emails don't always get through it's very common for these emails that come from WordPress

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websites to get lost or end up in a spam folder which of course means they get missed with fluent SMTP you can eliminate these send Problems by connecting your website to any SMTP server you like if you've got website hosting you've probably already got an

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SMTP server and you'll be able to find those details by logging into your hosting control panel alternatively fluent SM SMTP works with systems like Amazon sces Gmail Google workspace send grid mail gun pepy post postmark spark

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post elastic Ma I mean the list goes on pretty much any email provider you can think of and that's the first plugin I mean it's not particularly exciting but it's certainly essential next up we got a plugin that again I install on every single website and that is insert

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headers and Footers insert headers and Footers makes it really easy as the name suggests to insert things into the header or the footer of your website the most common things that I use this plugin for are to add tracking scripts and other bits of code things like the

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Google analytics tracking code or The Meta pixel code it's really easy to do with this plugin you can simply just copy and paste the code in and you're good to go it's also useful if you need to authenticate your site with certain Services they'll often give you a little bit of code and ask you to insert it

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into your website again with this plugin you can just copy and paste it in next up we got my favorite form plugin which is WP forms WP forms is an easy to use form plug-in that allows you to create and add forms to your website maybe you

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want some contact form so that people can get in touch with you maybe you want a form so that people can sign up to your newsletter WP forms has got it all it comes with some great templates to get you started but it's really easy to customize to with a simple and easy to

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use drag and drop interface the free version of WP forms is pretty comprehensive but there is a pro version available too if you want some extra Fields if you need to add some extra marketing Integrations or if you want to use things like condition logic as well

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as your contact forms and your newsletter forms you can also add payment forms you can add multi-step forms you can add calculator forms it's a really powerful form plugin and it's definitely one that I would use on pretty much all of my websites while we're talking about form plugins I

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actually just want to tease another form plugin that's going to be available really soon and it's called sh forms I've been playing around with this form builder in beta and well I don't want to say too much now but but this form plugin is looking like it's going to

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blow all of the others out of the water as soon as it is available for everyone I will be doing a video so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss out on that the next plugin is going to save you a lot of time the plugin is called sh triggers and it allows you to

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streamline and automate your business processes from your WordPress website so what this means is that you can easily and effortlessly connect your WordPress website to existing apps and software that you're already using in your organization maybe you want something as

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simple as a Google sheet with all the entries from your WordPress forms that's fine you can create an automation that when someone fills in a form a new row is created in a Google sheet maybe you need to send a WhatsApp message when someone places an order on woocommerce

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short triggers can help you do that too short triggers is really flexible and it works with a ton of different apps go check it out today and see what processes and automations you can come up with that will make your life so much easier the next two plugins I want to

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share with you will help improve your marketing and the design of your website the first is spectra which is a free page builder plugin Spectra adds a whole load of cool extra blocks to your WordPress website allowing you to create some really fantastic designs and

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layouts some of the blocks that I think are absolutely essential especially when it comes to improving your websites marketing are the call to action block the buttons the price

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tables and the testimonials another really cool feature with Spectra is the popup Builder which allows you to create popups you can easily design your popup and it works with any WordPress form plug-in

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including WP forms that I mentioned earlier so you can capture email addresses or maybe have some other call to action for example to buy a product Spectra is a really powerful plugin and it's got a whole load of extra features that I've just haven't got time to mention in this video but we have got a

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full walkthrough video on this channel you'll find a link to it in the description certainly worth checking out and you'll be able to discover how Spectra can really improve the way that you create WordPress websites continuing on the marketing theme when it comes to

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marketing it's important to be a to track everything that's going on on your website what your visitors are doing which campaigns are working what they're clicking on which pages are the most popular and this is all done through analytics one of the most popular choices is of course Google analytics

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but with the release of Google analytics 4 it's become increasingly difficult to get some good information out of it which is where my next plugin comes in this plugin is called independent analytics and I think it's a great replacement for Google analytics you can

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easily install independent analytics from the WordPress plug-in directory and once it's installed it will start tracking all your users and it reports the information right there within your WordPress dashboard the reports are really easy to use you can create your

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own reports if you're running woo Commerce it can track that as well and I've been using it on a lot of my newer sites and I find it just a really refreshing alternative to Google analytics and if you're in Europe don't worry it's fully gdpr compliant and it's

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lightning fast so it's not going to slow down your website some of the reports I really like are the referral reports where it will show you whether your traffic is coming from social media or whether it's coming from search engines speaking of search engines that moves us on to the next plugin which is rankmath

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SEO rankmath is a fully featured SEO plugin and again it's something that I use on every single we site that I run the two most important things I think with rank map are the XML site Maps which are easy to configure and set up an XML sitemap is what you submit to the

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search enges like Google so that they have a clear understanding of the structure of your website and can crw it correctly the other feature I like with rank MAF is the redirect and monitoring functionality which will basically keep an eye on your pages and it will spot if there's any 404s and alert you to them

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so that you can set up some redirects it also monitors whether you change URLs within your website and automatically creates a redirect to the new URL therefore preventing any 404s occurring you can also add redirect manually if

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you need to there's a whole load of other modules within rankmath that you might find useful depending on your needs things like a Content AI to help you put together content am to improve the speed of your mobile Pages it's got instant indexing for search engines like

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Bing and Yan index there's a whole load of stuff and you can switch it on and off as and when you need it so there my design and marketing plugins let's move on to a couple of plugins that will keep your website nice and safe and secure the first plugin I want to share with

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you is malare which is a security plugin one of the problems with WordPress because it's made up of so many different bits of software different themes and different plugins and because it's such a popular platform it is often the target of attacks by hackers of

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course you need to make sure you do the basics like renaming your admin account and using strong passwords but you can add an extra layer of security with malare you can get a hold of malare over on the malare website and once you've got it up and running it provides a

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seven layer protection system you get things like a realtime firewall you get login protection you get bot protection daily malware scans vulnerability monitoring and instant malware removal if you need it it hopefully not although

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obviously sometimes that does happen malware can get installed on your website and this is obviously bad news for your visitors and for search engin so you want to get it removed as quickly as possible in the past I've used manual services to do this but recently one of

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my sites was hacked and I installed malare and it removed the malware well within a few minutes really quickly and really easily it's a very simple process you basically just click a button to get mare installed on your site now and give yourself some peace of mind when it

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comes to security speaking of Peace of Mind another great way to get peace of mind when it comes to websites is to have a regular backup that way if something does go wrong you can always restore the site to a point where it was all working fine one of my favorite

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backup plugins is WP Vivid WP Vivid is a free backup and migration plugin and you can install it from the WordPress plug-in directory once you do you can schedule regular backups of your website it's really easy and straightforward to

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use and you can save the backups to a variety of different storage locations one of the great things about WP Vivid is that if something does go wrong maybe you install a rogue plugin maybe you just mess up a whole load of designs maybe you delete some pages and you need

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them back there is a oneclick restore functionality with WP Vivid that just makes it so easy to get you back up and running really quickly so if you're not going to install any other plugins today I strongly recommend you in inst those two because at least you'll be able to sleep well at night last but not least

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let's talk about Speed and Performance which are of course very important when it comes to websites people just haven't got the patience anymore to wait for your website to load and search engines like Google they just don't like slow websites the faster the website the

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better it will rank on the search engines now if you're running Spectra on your website you probably don't need to worry too much as you'll already have a really fast website especially if you're on some good hosting but if you have got some performance issues or you just want to turn it up a little bit more squeeze

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out a little bit more performance from your website then I've got a couple of good plugins that you need to check out the first is WP fastest cach you'll find it in the WordPress plug-in directory install it and then you've just got a few tick boxes that you need to tick and

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you should see a notable increase in the performance of your website if you want to check the speeds of your website before and after running a plugin like this why not try out the Google page speed score or the tools over at GTM metrics.com I tried WP fastest cash out

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on a test site and I was able to achieve a score of 100 out of 100 on Google page speed which is pretty fantastic another good way to increase the performance of your website is to optimize your website's images my favorite image

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optimization plugin is re smush.it which basically compresses your images without losing any quality so that they are a better and smaller file size so that they load much quicker and improve your website's performance it's really easy

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to use a couple of basic settings you can compress the images that you've already got on your website and then you can also set it to compress the images as you upload them if you got a website that's got a lot of images I think you'll see a big Improvement by using this plugin and that's it they are my

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Essential plugins hope you enjoyed this video do go and try some of those plugins out you'll find links to them all in the description you'll find more plug-in videos on the brainstorm Force channel for example if you're running woocommerce you're going to want to check out this video where we go through

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some of the add-ons for woocommerce that will make your store so much better or if you're an elemental user then don't miss our Elemental add-on video as well I think you'll find it really useful but anyway until next time good luck with your sites see you see you later

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