Our Top WordPress Plugins – Part II
WordPress is the most popular way to build a website. Your business will do well to have a full-featured website that works well. Check out our top WordPress plugins to optimize your site. You can also go back and check out the first part of this series.
Advanced Database Cleaner
Your WordPress site lives in a database. That is, everything that your WordPress site is in a database. You’ll find every image, paragraph of text, product, and user profile referenced and stored in your database. Unfortunately, you’ll also find “leftover” data there, too. That would include spam comments and temporary info. A large database slows down your site, especially one filled with junk. That’s where Advanced Database Cleaner, by Younes JRF, comes in. The free version of the plugin lets you clean some common areas of your database: Drafts, Revisions, and Auto-Saved Drafts. After your blog post is completed, do you really need the 7 versions that were saved for you as you worked on it? Use ADC to optimize your site. The paid version gives you an advanced look at your database, and a scheduler. So check out this Plugin if you feel your site is running slow.
Akismet Anti-Spam
Unfortunately, spam is at an all-time high. It seems that one spam farm is shut down, three pop up to take its place. Spam can clutter your site with get-rich-quick schemes, adult content, and off-topic sales pitches. Spam can be even more malicious than that because a legitimate user to your site could follow the spam link and up getting hacked or phished. You have a moral obligation, then, to keep your users safe. One way to do this is to vigilant about spam infecting your site. You can use the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin by Automattic to help combat the threat. Once it’s set up (you’ll need to create a free account at WordPress.com first) it will run in the background and do what it does best: fight spam. This plugin is highly recommended because it comes from the makers of WordPress itself: Automattic. It’s updated often and just plain works.
Regenearte Thumbnails
Another plugin that could help speed up your site is Regenerate Thumbnails by Viper007Bond. As you switch between themes, or edit your images, you end up with different versions. These stray versions could add more of a load on your website. If you take the time to clean things up once in a while, it can help the performance of your site. This plugin will help with that. It’s had over 10 million installations since launch and is highly-reviewed. We use this plugin on our sites whenever we deal with a lot of images. It’s quite useful. On a sad note, the author of the plugin, Alex Mills (aka Viper007Bond), died of cancer in early 2019. Please consider donating to the Oregon Health and Science University to keep his memory alive.
The Takeaway
Running your own WordPress site shouldn’t be too difficult with the right help. These Plugins have certainly helped us in all our endeavors. We hope they help you, too. Leave us a comment below if you would like to share any plugins you find useful.
And don’t forget to check out Part I in our top WordPress Plugins series.
