In this post I will show you the most helpful plugins you should use when starting a WordPress blog or website.

Now that you have a website or blog started and have installed your WordPress theme, it’s time to install all the plugins you need. I will show you the best WordPress plugins to get your blog functioning so it does exactly what you want it to.

Plugins can do lots of different things, from making your content more shareable to making your website load faster and improve search engine ranking. See those social media icons at the top of this post, those are from a plugin.

Before you start publishing content, take a look at the following plugins that I recommend.

Best WordPress Plugins – Anti-Spam

You are probably familiar with email spam. There’s also a high chance of receiving spam on your website.

Akismet

To help combat this, use the plugin Akismet. It automatically filters out spam from the comments people leave on your post so you don’t need to delete them manually.
Akismet actually comes installed with WordPress, you just need to activate it by following the instructions from this post.

Best WordPress Plugins – Contact Form

A contact form is needed to allow your visitors to contact you. The plugins below range from simple to advanced, depending on what you need to accomplish.

Fast Secure Contact Form

You have many options when it comes to contact forms but my favourite is Fast Secure Contact Form. It looks intimidating at first, but most of the default options are fine and it’s easy to modify. One thing I really like is how flexible it is. It also has Akismet spam protection support built-in to combat spam in your contact form.

Alternatives: More advanced contact form plugins include Contact Form 7 or Ninja Forms.

Best WordPress Plugins – SEO and User Experience

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and user experience are both very important. You want search engines like Google to generate traffic to your website.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast helps drive traffic to your website from search engines like Google. It helps search engines easily find the important items on your website, making your website rank higher in Google search results.

Google Analytics by Yoast

You want to be able to track how many visitors you have to your website and Google Analytics is one of the best ways to do so. Google Analytics by Yoast allows you to easily have your Google Analytics code in every page of your site. This will show you important statistics on how people interact and find your website.

W3 Total Cache

A fast website is great for SEO and user experience. W3 Total Cache optimizes your site behind the scenes to make it load faster and boost your SEO. It’s truly a must have plugin.

Best WordPress Plugins – Social Media

Social media plugins are important for promoting your website. They give your website visitors an opportunity to easily share your content, helping to drive more traffic to your site.

Jetpack

Jetpack is one of those plugins that keeps getting better. More and more features are being added to Jetpack and now it is a “must have”. It has many different features: 36 at the time of writing. My favourite is the “Sharing” module – a customizable way to add buttons to your posts or pages that your visitors can click to share your website to social media.

Alternatives

• Simple Share Buttons Adder. If you don’t want to use Jetpack (you really should at least try it), this plugin is another way to easily add all the social sharing buttons you need.
• Digg Digg has many different options, including floating and static buttons.
• Social Warfare is a premium plugin, but with this you get what you pay for. It has a lot of options, including floating and static buttons, link shortening, analytics, click to tweet, and frame busting. It is relatively cheap for all the features you get.

Simple Social Icons

Simple Social Icons puts links to your social networks on your website. This gives your website visitors an easy way to find all of your social networks. On my site they are on the top right with icons that link to Twitter, Google+, etc. Some themes have this feature built-in, but if the theme you use does not, then use this plugin.

Best WordPress Plugins – Security and Maintenance

WordPress Security isn’t a very exciting topic, but you can’t ignore it. With WordPress being such a popular platform, many people will try to take advantage of easy ways to get into your website.

Plus, along similar lines, you need to have backups of your WordPress database and files. This is just in case a hacker gets in, or in case you need to rollback a change.

iThemes Security and/or Wordfence

These are the standard in security plugins. They offer many features that are considered security best practices for WordPress.

iThemes Security can do many things, from removing the admin account to renaming your database table prefix. You can uninstall this plugins after it does its magic.

Wordfence offers firewall protection along with scanning the files on your website for any changes compared to the original files. It also scans for any malicious looking files.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox or WP-DBManager

Backups are a must. There are two things you should backup: Your database and the files on your website (including pictures). Keep in mind when backing up your files, the backup can get pretty large, so email doesn’t work for that.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox will back up your database and files directly to Dropbox. Once in Dropbox you can move them to a local file system (to free up some space on Dropbox).

If you only need to back up your database (maybe because you use a hosting provider like SiteGround to backup your files) then you can use WP-DBManager to email your database backup to you.

Limit Login Attempts

People will try to get into your WordPress admin panel. To slow them down, use the Limit Login Attempts plugin to ban them after X number of failed log in attempts.

Alternative: Jetpack also offers a “Protect” module. Also, Wordfence has a similar option. Both help against brute force attacks on your WordPress log in page. So if you decide to use one of those options, then this plugin isn’t needed.

WP-Optimize

Keeping your WordPress database running quickly helps with the overall speed of your website. WP-Optimize is great for database cleanup and as a database optimization tool. It can be scheduled to clean up all your post revisions (which takes up a lot of space), remove comment spam and make your database faster by optimizing it.

Optional: P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

If you have a lot of plugins your website can run sluggish and cause slow loading times for your website visitors. P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) can help to identify which plugins are slowing your website down.

Conclusion

WordPress has many plugins available to do pretty much anything you want on your website. Just keep in mind that it is always better to add the desired functionality inside a theme (or better yet a child theme) if possible. Having too many plugins can cause performance issues, and they can also have security implications.

You need to keep your plugins up-to-date, since often the author will fix security vulnerabilities. Having many plugins means a bad guy has more ways to get into your website. Also, keep in mind that if a plugin hasn’t been updated in two years, it might be abandoned by the author and would no longer be getting the needed security fixes.

What plugins do you use, and why do you like them?

Need Help?

Feel free to contact me if you need any help choosing, or configuring your WordPress plugins. Make sure your website stands out from all the rest. I can help!

The post The Best WordPress Plugins to Kick-Start your Blog appeared first on Ryan Daniels.

In this post I will take a close look at all of the things you need to consider when choosing a WordPress Theme. I will also provide you with some of my picks for the best WordPress themes.

Imagine this, you have the greatest content on your website (or plan to shortly) and really think everyone should be reading it. The problem is, people aren’t paying attention. You get a few visitors but nothing like what you expect. You want to be getting tons of traffic to your website.

What could be the problem? Does your website look like it was made 10 years ago? Is it too boring or distracting? Choosing the best WordPress theme for your website can make all the difference to present your content in a stunning way.

Now that you have a good understanding of what WordPress is, and how to start a blog from my previous posts, we need to talk about how to choose a WordPress theme.

Purpose of your website or blog

This is the first and most important question because you want a WordPress theme that will compliment the purpose of your website or blog.

What is your website for?

What do you want it to achieve?

If you are a photographer you’ll want a theme that offers a place to showcase your beautiful photographs.
If you are a local business you will want a clean look with an area for a map and address, along with a contact form and an about section.

Budget – Free Theme or Premium Theme

The next decision to make is a Free or Premium theme?

There are many free themes and the best part is they are free! However, some downsides are that free themes aren’t always maintained or updated. Another thing to consider is how much you want to customize the theme. Is there documentation for it? And lastly, will there be support for it?

Premium themes are not too expensive, usually around $50 (a one-time fee). Plus, they are well maintained, documented, and offer support. More on that in a bit.

Theme Features to Look For

Now that you have your website goal established and an idea for a budget, you need to decide what features you require in a WordPress theme and begin to research options.

A few things to keep in mind while researching for a new design:

>> Visual Appeal

Is the theme visually appealing to you and does it match the look you want to achieve for the purpose of your website?

>> Theme Functionality and Customization Options

Can you easily modify the look of the theme, including the colours and number of columns? Can you move elements around easily?

>> Responsiveness

Make sure the theme offers mobile responsiveness. This is important because many people now use their tablets or phones to view sites instead of a computer with a large monitor. You need to make sure your website will look nice on every device. Most recent WordPress Themes have this functionality.
Sites like BrowserStack and Matt Kersley’s Responsive Design testing and Google’s Mobile Friendly test can help test this.

Also, confirm the theme works across all web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer). A site like browserling can help test this.

>> Support and Documentation

It can be difficult to figure out if the developer provides a good level of support. Check the theme’s support forum and try to determine how fast questions are answered. Also, consider when the theme was last updated, and how often it has been updated.
The theme should have documentation available so it will be easy to understand how to make any changes.
Plus, check how other people rate the theme from reviews.

Research and Explore WordPress Themes

Now that you have all of these things in mind when looking for a WordPress theme, it’s time to start exploring.

Here are a few places you can find free and premium themes:

• Themes from WordPress (Free)
• StudioPress (Premium)
• My Theme Shop (Free & Premium)
• Theme Forest (Premium)
• Elegant Themes (Premium)

Recommended Themes

Like I mentioned above, everyone will have a different purpose and different goals for their website. With that being said, here are a few themes that I recommend for a starting point.

Best WordPress Themes that are Free

Multipurpose theme: Point Theme

Easy to customize because it has tons of options including changing the colours, sidebar location, add custom CSS, add a logo, add custom header code. It also has built-in Ad space options, about the author and related posts section. The Point Theme is mobile friendly (responsive) and looks great.

Check out the Point Theme.

Blog or Business: Zerif Lite Theme

Great theme for a Blog or a Business. The Zerif Lite Theme offers a customizable footer section so you can include your business phone number and address, a nice “About Us” section to put your business and a built-in section for Testimonials. It’s also mobile responsive and has a lot of documentation.

Check out the Zerif Lite Theme.

Best WordPress Themes that are Premium

Photography theme: Ambiance Pro Theme

Puts your photography in the spotlight by using a grid with the featured picture as a background for the post. The Ambiance Pro Theme also offers options for custom headers, landing pages, and is mobile responsive.

Check out the Ambiance Pro Theme.

Food Blog: Foodie Pro Theme

A Foog Blog or website needs to pull in the viewer with their pictures. Foodie Pro Theme is another great theme that can also be used for a Photography website. Options include a built-in slider to feature your pictures, customizable “About Me section”, Ad space, easy to change the fonts, and mobile responsiveness.

Check out the Foodie Pro Theme.

Business: Architect Theme

The Architect Theme is perfect for a business. It has a Testimonials section and a Projects/Portfolio page. Other options include CSS animation to get a visitor’s attention, Google Maps to highlight your location, and a contact form. Documentation is available to help you along the way and support is included.

Check out the Architect Theme.

Need Help?

Feel free to contact me if you need any help choosing, configuring or customizing your WordPress Theme. Make sure your website stands out from all the rest. I can help!

Be sure to check out the next article: The Best WordPress Plugins to Kick-Start your Blog.

The post How to Choose a WordPress Theme for your Blog or Website appeared first on Ryan Daniels.

WordPress has a long history considering it is in a fast paced industry. Many products have come and gone but WordPress has evolved to become one of the most popular software products to run a website on the internet.

But what is WordPress?

WordPress is a free, open-source blogging tool and content management system (CMS) based on PHP (which is a programming language) and MySQL (which is a database). (Thanks Wikipedia).

WordPress.org VS WordPress.com

On WordPress.org, you can download and install the WordPress software on your own server (or on a Shared Hosting provider like SiteGround). This is the most flexible option.

On WordPress.com, the WordPress software is offered as a service on the WordPress.com website. You can sign up and start a WordPress.com website in seconds however there are many limitations compared to hosting WordPress yourself. You can easily sign up and see what WordPress is all about but for anyone remotely serious about starting a blog or a website I strongly advise against permanently using it. There are so many limitations it is best to use the self-hosted option.

For the rest of this discussion I’ll only be referring to the self-hosted option.

Benefits of WordPress

WordPress is easy to customize. You can do almost anything you want with WordPress because it is open-source and there are many different themes and plugins to change its behaviour. Countless developers have created a solid foundation in the WordPress software.

WordPress is extremely popular. Over 23% of the top 10 million websites run on WordPress. That didn’t happen by accident!

Tons of developers have created thousands of free WordPress themes and free WordPress plugins for you to add to your WordPress website.

Now that you know what WordPress is, you are probably wondering what is a WordPress theme and what is a WordPress plugin.

What is a WordPress Theme?

A WordPress theme changes how your website or blog looks. By default WordPress comes with a few basic themes (which are ok, but somewhat boring). In the past, using other software to change the look of your website was a very difficult task. But with WordPress, you can easily switch between themes with the click of a button.

Once you switch to another theme all your content is still there, it’s now just formatted differently.

There are almost 2,000 free WordPress themes, in addition to many premium WordPress themes from companies like StudioPress. There are a few benefits to using a premium theme, but we’ll save that for another discussion.

What is a WordPress Plugin?

A WordPress plugin is software that you install into WordPress to perform a specific task. For example, the plugin Better WP Security provides some enhancement to the WordPress security (the name is pretty obvious!) offered by default from WordPress. Just don’t rely solely on plugins for security. (I’ll also save this for another discussion).

There are over 38,000 free WordPress plugins and numerous premium WordPress plugins. With so many plugins you can do anything you can think of. While plugins are extremely useful since they add additional functionality, be careful not to use too many because it can slow down your website and cause other issues.

Cost of using WordPress

Like I mentioned before, WordPress is free software to use for your website. However having a website on the internet means you need to have a hosting provider. Website hosting can be as little as $3.95/month from SiteGround, which also includes a free domain name.

To begin creating a WordPress website, check out my previous post on How to Start a Blog.

Hopefully this article has answered some basic questions around WordPress, and when someone asks “What is WordPress?” you’ll be able to tell them.

Contact me if you need any help installing WordPress or setting up your WordPress website.

The post What is WordPress? appeared first on Ryan Daniels.