A list of the most useful free WordPress plugins that pcbuyerbeware.co.uk uses
A few words about WordPress, the best Content Management System (CMS)
WordPress is the best and most supported Content-Management System (CMS) currently available. To create a WordPress powered website, you find a website host that provides the WordPress software, buy a website domain, install it on that domain, choose your theme, which can be free or purchased or created by yourself, if you have the knowledge, and then use plugins to deliver all of the features that you must have or want to add. The list below is of the plugins that I use on this website.
A Content Management System allows you to make changes to settings that affect every page. For example, instead of adding advertising code to every page that a standard HTML website requires, you just use a plugin that adds the code to every page whenever the page is requested by a web browser. This allows you to experiment with ads on the fly.
It’s best just to use plugins that deliver one feature, not several features, such as Jetpack, because they can screw things up for other features, such as your comments or contact form.
Note that WordPress.org covers websites that allow customisations using plugins. WordPress.com provides the means to create a domain-based website that cannot be customised with plugins. A website built using WordPress.com is able to use the Jetpack plugin, but, in my experience, using Jetpack on a WordPress.org site causes problems.
If you don’t donate towards the development of the WordPress plugins that you use, providing links to their developers’ sites is the least that you should do. I have created this page for that purpose. Note that you should check that your WordPress plugins are supported fairly regularly. The reason being that developers of plugins often abandon support for them and subsequently they don’t work with new versions of WordPress.
To find out if a plugin is supported by the version of WordPress installed on a website open the WordPress admin’s Plugins heading and open the Description option. For example, when I did that for the “Add to All” plugin, this is the message that it provided: “Warning: This plugin has not been tested with your current version of WordPress.” In other words, the plugin may or may not work with the version of WordPress that is installed.
This website’s WordPress plugins in alphabetical order
1. – Add to All – A powerful plugin that will allow you to add custom code or CSS to your header, footer, sidebar, content or feed. – By Ajay D’Souza – https://ajaydsouza.com/wordpress/plugins/
2. – AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) – Adds AMP support to your WordPress site. Also see Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP, #5- below.. – By Automattic. – https://automattic.com/
This plugin adds support for the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project, which is an an open source initiative that aims to provide mobile optimised content that can load instantly everywhere. –
3. – Cookie Law Info – A simple way of ‘implied consent’ to show your website complies with the EU Cookie Law, which came into force on 26 May 2012. – By Richard Ashby – http://cookielawinfo.com/
4. – Disable Comments – Allows administrators to disable comments on their site globally. Comments can be disabled according to post type. By Samir Shah. I got tired of using a comments anti-spam plugin that I installed after my site was hit by hundreds of spam comments every day, Fortunately, I now use this excellent plugin to disable comments on all of its pages and posts. – https://github.com/solarissmoke
5. – Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP – Makes sure the default WordPress AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) plugin uses the proper Yoast SEO metadata. By Joost de Valk. – https://yoast.com/
6. – Quick Adsense – Quick Adsense offers a quicker & flexible way to insert Google AdSense or any other type of ads’ code into a blog post. By http://quickadsense.com/
7. – Really Simple SSL – Lightweight WordPress plugin without any setup to make your site SSL-proof. This means that your site is labelled with the encryption lock in the address bar for all of its content, signifying that it is encrypted and secure. Site ranking is improved with the search engines if the site has SSL enabled and demoted if that is not the case. However, note that your Facebook Likes will disappear. They apply to the previous non-encrypted http version of your site. The encrypted https site will show the Likes that it gets from scratch. Plugins are available that can recover the Likes from the previous http site. Also note that this website lost about a third of its monthly number of visitors after I upgraded it to SSL. Apparently the search engines see an https site as a different site from an http site in spite of always showing the https lock when you just enter the site’s domain name – pcbuyerbeware.co.uk or the link to a blog page, such as pcbuyerbeware.co.uk/blog/smishing-vishing-sim-card-swap-theft-scams/ – in a web browser’s address bar. It remains to be seen if it will recover the lost visitors and increase their numbers.
How to recover Facebook likes after moving to https/ssl –
https://really-simple-ssl.com/knowledge-base/…
I decided not to work for Facebook and Google any more and got rid of my site’s social media buttons altogether. Those social media sites are actively promoting screwball liberalism and are censoring or restricting the conservative-media sites.
Really Simple SSL automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https. To keep it lightweight, the options are kept to a minimum. The entire site will move to SSL. My website host enabled a free SSL certificate for me and then I just activated “Really Simple SSL” in my WordPress Plugins control panel and the https lock appeared in the address bar for all of my pages and images. If you have problems, your website host should be able to fix them.
My website host enabled a free SSL certificate for my site that Let’s Encrypt provides. My host did not charge for enabling it. It lasts for 89 days and its renewal is automatic. You get an email notification when the certificate is renewed.
“Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority brought to you by the non-profit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG).”
HTTPS – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS
How to get FREE SSL Certificate for Website (HTTPS) –
https://geekflare.com/free-ssl-tls-certificate/
8. – Redirection – Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors. By John Godley, who is currently modernising the plugin. – https://urbangiraffe.com/
9. – Relevanssi – This WordPress plugin replaces the WordPress search with a relevance-sorting search. By Mikko Saari. Google Search is not very well implemented by WordPress plugins, so I use this one, which is much better than the standard WordPress Search. – http://www.mikkosaari.fi/
10. – UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore – Back up and restore: take backups locally, or back up to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, (S)FTP, WebDAV & email, on automatic schedules. By UpdraftPlus.Com, DavidAnderson. – https://updraftplus.com/
11. – WP Super Cache – Very fast caching plugin for WordPress. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. – https://automattic.com/
12. – WP-Opimize – WP-Optimize is WordPress’s #1 most installed optimization plugin. With it, you can clean up your database easily and safely, without manual queries. By David Anderson, Ruhani Rabin, Team Updraft. The optimization that this WordPress plugin provides that I like the best is the one that removes the stored versions of saved pages that are no longer used. Every time that you save a draft or edit, that version of the page is saved. They mount up alarmingly and only the latest saves could be of any use. – https://updraftplus.com/
13. – Yoast SEO – The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more. By Team Yoast. – https://yoast.com/. Explore the information that the Yoast WordPress plugin provides at the bottom of each of the pages and posts of your website on SEO and readability. Visit the site for tutorials, SEO courses, sign up for the newsletter.
