If you are DIYing your website or new to WordPress, here are the first five WordPress plugins you need to use on your website for functionality.
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Transcript:
Welcome to The Work your wellness biz podcast, a podcast for nutrition and fitness professionals. I’m your host, Jess Freeman here to help you save time and look good online.
If you are dry on your WordPress website, or maybe you’re thinking about DIY on your WordPress website, this video is for you, I’m gonna give you five plugins you need on your website to get started.
If you’re new here, my name is Jess. And this channel is all about helping you create a more smooth and profitable online business with the help of your website.
So let’s dive in to those five plugins that I think almost every single business owner needs on their website. The first plugin is the GDPR plugin.
Now there are a dozen or more different options for this, they all pretty much do the same thing, they just look a little bit different or give you different styling options. I personally use the cookie yes plugin.
But like I said, there are a ton, they all pretty much do the same thing. So just type GDPR cookie into the plugin search directory and look through the different options you can always install, test it out.
If you don’t like it, uninstall, try another one. But that’s what I use. Next, you’re going to need an SEO plugin, because a big part of having a website is being found in Google search.
We all want that. And while you can definitely rank without actually using a search plugin, it’s always helpful, especially if you’re DIY nine. Because they kind of give you hints and tips on your pages and content for hey, you need your keywords more or you need more links, etc. So I really like rank math. Yoast is really, really popular, but I really like rankmath better, it gives you more options for free.
Whereas some of those options you’d have to pay for in Yoast, I’ve also noticed a slight difference in speed improvements like site speed improvement by switching to rankmath. I did a full video on rankmath, which I’ll link to below if you want to check that out. Then if you’re going to want a contact form that is built into the website, you’re not using a third party forum like Google Forms type form, I use HoneyBook for all my inquiry forms.
So I don’t have a built in contact form. It’s a third party one that I’m linking to, you want to use WP forms, I have used a lot of different form plugins for your clients over the years. And I always come back to WP forms it is my favorite my go to it looks nice, it’s easy to build, it’s easy to update.
And they have some built in spam protection because the bots love to fill out the contact forms. So make sure you are turning that function on but WP forms is my go to, then you’re gonna want to install exact metrics. So this plugin connects to your Google Analytics. So you will have to first set up Google Analytics.
And then you’ll install this plugin, you’ll say connect, it’ll take you to Google Analytics and login and kind of authorize that way. And basically, it helps do the tracking of for Google Analytics on your website. But it also gives you a little preview on your dashboard. So you can see how much traffic you’ve gotten in the last 30 days.
You can pay if you want to see more analytics right on your dashboard. Or you can keep the free version and then just log into Google Analytics to see the more in depth information over there. And lastly is one of my favorite favorite plugins, which it’s weird to have a favorite plugin, but I do pretty links.
So this is a really handy plugin if you are someone who does a lot of affiliate marketing or is just an affiliate for different products. So basically, you install this plugin, you can say here’s my affiliate link for this product.
And I want this to be the URL to redirect. So for example, one of my favorite WordPress hosts is flywheel is who I use, it’s who most of my clients use. I’m also an affiliate for them. So if I talk about them on YouTube, in my blog on Instagram, I can say go to Jess creatives.com/flywheel to sign up.
That is my affiliate link. So my affiliate link gets used and I don’t have to say like, Oh, it’s you know, whatever. The crazy like flywheel.com/ 124 ABC, you know, like those weird affiliate links where it’s super long and a string of numbers. So that’s how you can make pretty links with this plugin and easily call out your affiliate links in videos and blog posts, emails whenever
So that is why I love that plugin. All of those plugins are free, you can download them right from the WordPress plug in directory, I will give you one bonus plug in that I love and that is WP Rocket.
This is a great speed plugin, if you need to speed up your website or just want to make sure like the speed is top notch, there are a lot of other things you can do to work on site speed.
So don’t feel like this is the only option. If you have a good host, and you are compressing your images, that is a huge factor in helping site speed. But if you’re still struggling with that, that is my go to. The last thing I want to say about plugins is make sure you keep them updated. This is a huge, huge thing. It’s a huge part of the security of your website and making sure that everything keeps working without fail. Anytime my clients are having issues on their website or something’s not working or something is no longer showing up like pages blank or the form is missing.
It’s because the plugin is outdated. And I’ve only had one client one in 10 years have their site infected with malware and was hacked and it was because the plugins were out of date, like all I don’t even know how many there were like 1215 plugins that we were using. And they were severely outdated. We’re not being kept up to date. And we had major issues. So make sure you keep your plugins updated.
If you have questions about other plugins, any of these plugins I’ve mentioned, let me know down in the comments below. If you enjoyed this video, give it a thumbs up and I will see y’all next time.
