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The BlueBird WordPress Plugins I show you mine, you show me yours

BlueBird websites are 100% WordPress! This is important because we want to give our clients the power to easily change anything on their website without having to hire a web designer to do it. Considering the changes in SEO and the ever evolving technological advances this feature is essential.

WordPress creates an interface between you and the Internet. It converts your information into code which the web browsers convert back into the pleasing and informative presentation your customers need to see.

Plugins add custom functionalities to WordPress that make your website unique.

 

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One of the beautiful things about working with the most popular CMS is the huge amount of people that create plugins to add functionality to WordPress. This is a blessing as well as a curse because more plugins also means more load time for the website. Too many plugins is one of the major reasons why some websites take a long time to load. Every time we install a plugin we have to ask ourselves if the load time is worth the added lag. With our “WordPress Garage” program we help site owners fix problems with their websites and often these are created by WordPress plugins

I often try new plugins on my own site before I install them on my clients’ websites. In the Listly below you can find my current plugins and comments about why I like them.

Free vs Premium

The WordPress plugin directory lists over 35,228 free plugins. That is a huge amount of tools at our disposal and the majority of them are regularly updated to the newest changes in the WordPress core. Some of them even develop into features that are built into the next WordPress version.

In my experience premium plugins often offer more functionality and support for a relatively small fee. Some of my favourite plugins cost money and in most cases the fee to pay the developer for their work and continued support is well worth it.

Make sure you check that you have the correct license and when it expires.

Let’s look at some of my most important WordPress Plugins:

SEO

The plugin WordPress SEO by Yoast certainly warrants its own blog post. I install this on every website I get my hands on because it makes doing on-page SEO simple for anyone. Because it also creates XML sitemaps, Open Graph tags for Facebook, Twitter cards and many more things you can get away with fewer plugins over all.

A premium version is available but the free one will be sufficient for most.

Speed

Site load speed is extremely important for a good visitor experience. There are many things you should do to reduce the time it takes to display a web page. But at some point there is no way around a caching plugin that works behind the scenes to make everything load faster (I’m not going to get more technical here). I have spent a lot of time setting up the most common caching tools but then I arrived at this one:

WP Rocket works out of the box and has a few options that can be added. It really takes the headache out of caching.
The pricing for this premium plugin starts at $39 per year.

Security

Hackers love to hack!. It is very important to set your security settings as tight as possible and to update your software regularly. There are several security plugins available.

Sucuri will scan your website for free and send you email updates. It includes several suggestions to make your site more secure. If your site should still get hacked Sucuri can help you repair the damage for a fee.
I came across Wordfence recently when I helped a client clean up her hacked website. Wordfence actively scans your site and sends regular email alerts. The premium version does even more and costs $33 for one license. Wordfence adds even more checks and balances to your site and scans more actively. Now that I installed Wordfence I am more confident that I am protected well.

Sharing

I am very passionate about adding social to websites. I have tried all the usual sharing plugins recommended by many experts and was often frustrated by the load time they add to the site and the fact that most of them don’t play very well with some mobile browsers. After a lot of experimenting I now recommend one of two options:

Shareaholic adds a large amount of options to your site without too much bloat. It’s free and works well
As much as I hate the name I love the tool. Mainly because it’s unintrusive, wonderfully responsive and stylish. $24 well spent. Social Warfare also integrates a great “tweet this” function that allowed me to delete a plugin that did this before. The ability to customize the default sharing tweet and image goes beyond the settings WordPress SEO offers. Update January 2nd: After today’s experience I am happy to add lightning speed, personal customer service to the list of advantages!
I hope that team at Social Warfare  will introduce a few more networks to choose from.

Both sharing plugins have their advantages, they both work well on mobile and let you customize how things are shared. In the end it might be a question about the style of buttons that fit your site’s design.

Below you will find more of my current plugins. If you like we can have a little discussion about each of them in the Listly comments.

Vote for your favouritesSuggest your favourites in the comments!

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The BlueBird WordPress Plugins

I'm creating a list of the WordPress plugins on my website. Vote for your favourites and let's see what is the most popular one.

Source: http://businessbluebird.com/bluebird-wordpress-plugins/

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | Antispam Bee

Say Goodbye zu Spam in deinem Blog. Kostenlos, werbefrei und datenschutzkonform. Für Kommentare und Trackbacks. Blog-Spam bekämpfen ist die Stärke von Antispam Bee. Seit Jahren wird das Plugin darauf trainiert, Spam-Kommentare zuverlässig zu erkennen (auf Wunsch auch sofort zu beseitigen). Dabei greift Antispam Bee auf unterschiedliche Techniken zu, die sich zur Identifizierung von Spam-Nachrichten bewährt haben.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | Fanciest Author Box * Only Author Box Plugin You'll Ever Need

Fanciest Author Box is a WordPress plugin that will enable reader engagement and verify your Google authorship while increasing click-through rates.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | Instagram image gallery

This advanced widget lets you beautifully showcase Instagram photos on your blog or website. For your own photos or a #hashtag feed Thumbnails or slideshow Wide range of custom options: background and text colors, photo borders, widget width, slideshow pace and much more.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | Listly: for bloggers, brands &amp; journalists who crave reader participation &amp; growth

Listly lets your audience actively contribute to your posts, while giving you the power to moderate. In reality, no list is ever complete. With Listly, the audience help your content evolve via social engagement. Communities form around shared interests, needs & expertise. Use Listy to create, curate or collaborate to build awesome, people-ranked numbered-lists.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | Online Client Engagement - Contact Form &amp; Appointment Scheduler | vCita

Transform your small business website into a LiveSite. vCita helps you capture more business online, and deliver amazing service

This plugin allows you to do the following: 1. Change the order that your plugins are loaded. 2. Selectively disable plugins by any post type or wordp

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | Smooth Scroll Up

Smooth Scroll Up is a lightweight plugin that creates a customizable "Scroll to top / Back to top" feature in any post/page of your WordPress website.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | Wordfence - WordPress Security Plugin

The current frequency of attacks we're seeing across all WordPress sites running Wordfence is attacks per minute. Map is currently showing of all attacks to avoid overloading your web browser. These statistics and the graph below are continually updated if you stay on this page.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | WordPress SEO Plugin * XML Sitemaps &amp; more! * Yoast

Easily optimize your WordPress site with one plugin Yoast WordPress SEO is the most complete SEO plugin available for WordPress. It offers everything you need to optimize your site. Content analysis functionality Learn how to write better content with the built-in content analysis function, and easily optimize your site's titles and descriptions for Google.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | Social Warfare: The Ultimate Social Sharing Weapon

Studies show that fewer options to choose from actually increases the number of people who take action. By focusing on the 5 biggest names in social media, rather than plastering dozens of social networks icons, we have seen a drastic increase in activity on sites that use this plugin.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | BackupBuddy - WordPress Backup Plugin to Restore &amp; Move WordPress

"I recommend BackupBuddy to every single person I talk to who runs a WordPress powered website. There is no comparable plugin that includes the amazing feature set of BackupBuddy. Knowing all of my sites are fully backed up on a schedule helps me sleep at night, and that peace of mind is priceless."

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | Editorial Calendar

Did you remember to write a post for next Tuesday? What about the Tuesday after that? WordPress doesn't make it easy to see when your posts are scheduled. The editorial calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | Facebook Posts Embedded

This plugin allows you to embed Facebook posts everywhere in your WordPress site. Simply use the Facebook button on the page/post editor. Alternatively, you can embed Facebook posts by adding the URL for the post to the plugin shortcode: [fbembedpost href="http://www.facebook.com/link-to-post" width="550"/]

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | Livefyre Comments 3

Livefyre Comments 3 replaces your default comments with real-time conversations. Our social integration features make it easy to capture all the conve

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | Reduce Bounce Rate

Get the real Time On Site and Bounce Rate in Google Analytics. Google Analytics calculates the Time On Site based on the length of time between a user entering your site and their last page view. This won\'t give you the REAL Time on Site and Bounce Rate stats.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | YARPP recommendation engine

Grow traffic and monetize content by adding relevant recommendations to your site. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin delivers related content based on a unique algorithm that successfully matches audiences with the content they want to see on your site and others across the web.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | WooDojo - enhance your WordPress website with WooThemes modules

Add Twitter & Instagram feeds, social links and tabber widgets to your website with this free WP plugin.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | WP-Members

WP-Members™ is a membership plugin for WordPress®. Perfect for newsletters, premium content sites, and more! The plugin restricts selected WordPress® content to registered site members. WP-Members™ puts the registration process on the site front end so it is inline with your content (and thus your branded theme) instead of the native WP login page.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | WP-Optimize

WP-Optimize is an extensive WordPress database cleanup and optimization tool. It doesn't require PhpMyAdmin to clean and optimize your database tables. Please show your support for this plugin by giving it a rating :) Now hosted at GitHub. I do not monitor wp forums, so use plugins(at)ruhanirabin.com for support questions.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | Cache Plugin for WordPress - WP Rocket

Speed Up Your WordPress Site in Less than 5 Minutes With the Cache Plugin WP Rocket.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | WP Smush.it

Yahoo's excellent Exceptional Performance series recommends optimizing images in several lossless ways: stripping meta data from JPEGs optimizing JPEG compression converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs stripping the un-used colours from indexed images Smush.it offers an API that performs these optimizations (except for stripping JPEG meta data) automatically, and this plugin seamlessly integrates Smush.it with WordPress.

The BlueBird WordPress Plugins | KingSumo Headlines: Headline optimization for WordPress

Over headlines optimized Howdy, I'm Noah Kagan, one of the creators of KingSumo Headlines. Like you, the success of my business depends upon how well I can promote my work through writing. It's a big investment. Some pieces, like the one I wrote just last week, take me over 30 hours to write.

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Frithjof
I am the the founder of BlueBird Business Consulting (formerly Tweet4Ok). My focus is on Social Media strategy and education. My blog covers topics ranging from how-to social media posts to more general topics of concern for a rapidly changing digital world. Favourite quote: “To succeed in the business of the future we have to become the very people we are trying to reach” ~ Brian Solis
Frithjof

@bluebirdbc

Digital Media strategy and integration. Websites that work! FixMy #WordPress #SocialMedia educator. 30 day Email list Bootcamp
#WordPressPlugins - 5 Great Plugins To Protect Your Data --> https://t.co/8qjwQzv6IG - 19 mins ago
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