The Savvy Seller with Kristen Doyle

159. The 5 WordPress Plugins I Put on ALL my Sites

• Kristen Doyle, TPT seller, SEO coach, and web designer

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You know that feeling when you open your WordPress dashboard and see a plugin list a mile long—some you don’t even remember installing? I’ve been there too. But after managing a dozen WordPress sites for my own business, I’ve figured out exactly which plugins are worth using and which ones just slow things down. In this episode, I’m sharing the five plugins I always install and why they’re non-negotiable for things like security, SEO, performance, and overall peace of mind.

These tools are doing some serious behind-the-scenes work, from protecting your site from hacks to improving your search rankings and speeding up your pages. I’m also sharing my favorite drag-and-drop builder, why image compression matters more than you think, and the plugin I built myself to make daily backups and updates effortless. And if keeping up with all of this sounds like one more thing on your already-full plate, don’t worry, my WordPress Care Plan covers it all, with a team that’s got your back 24/7!

Links & Resources:

Show Notes: https://kristendoyle.co/episode159 

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Check out my Everything Page at https://kristendoyle.co/everything

Kristen:

If you have a WordPress site, I bet you love a good plugin as much as I do, but I know sometimes it can be a little overwhelming to figure out which ones you really need and which ones you don't. Plugins are awesome for expanding the functions that are on your WordPress site, for doing things like giving you security and improving your performance and all kinds of those things. But it is important to only use the right ones and not just add tons of random plugins to your site if you don't have a really good reason to have them on there. It might or might not surprise you to hear that I actually have about 12 WordPress sites for my business. Now, if you know me personally, you're probably thinking, yeah, that checks out. That sounds about right. If you don't, that might sound crazy, but remember, I'm a web designer, and I have coaching and template sites and all of those things. So I do actually have about a dozen WordPress sites for my business, and across all of them, there are five plugins that I always install. So today I'm going to share exactly which plugins make the cut and why they are so important for handling everything from SEO to security to backups and performance. Are you a digital product or course creator, selling on platforms like Teachers Pay Teachers, Etsy, or your own website? Ready to grow your business, but not into the kind of constant hustle that leads straight to burnout? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Seller. I'm Kristen Doyle, and I'm here to give you no-fluff tools and strategies that move the needle for your business without burning you out in the process—things like SEO, no stress marketing, email list building, automations, and so much more. Let's get started, y'all. So these five plugins are my must haves, because they handle some really important things on your website, but they don't add a lot of extra bloat. One issue with adding too many plugins is that your site can get overloaded and it can start to have some performance issues, or even plugin conflict issues because you have too many plugins installed. So these are some that are nice and lightweight, and they do a great job of their core function. second to help you make sure that Alright, the first plugin that I always install is called Solid Security. Now, if you do not have a security plugin on your site, you need one. Absolutely hands down need a security plugin. Solid Security is great because it provides built in firewalls, it prevents hacks and also brute force attacks. Brute force attacks are when bots are attacking your website just with tons and tons of traffic or login requests and those sorts of things, and they do that in order to get the site to go down. And Solid Security can help to prevent that, as well as actual hacking attempts. Another thing I love about Solid Security over some of the other security plugins out there is it actually has some tools inside to help you fix some really common security vulnerabilities. Things like, if your user account for you, the admin, the main admin on your site is user number one, that is a hidden vulnerability that hackers can exploit in order to get into your site. And if you think that your site isn't going to be hacked because it's so small, or you know, who would ever want to hack my site, keep in mind that WordPress is the single most popular website platform, which means it is also the most frequently hacked, or at least most frequently attempted to be hacked. So you really need to make sure you've got a good security plugin in place, and that you're fixing some of those vulnerabilities, like having user one as an admin account on the site, and Solid Security can complicated. So that's another reason that I really love it. you're doing the right things in order to rank higher in search. It helps you with things like optimizing your page titles, adding meta descriptions, counting and checking your keyword density on your posts. And it also includes built in schema markup. Schema markup is just fancy language for this specifically structured data that helps search engines to understand your content. So for example, a blog post would have one type of data, whereas a product would have different types of data. A product is going to have a price. It's going to have images, maybe even a manufacturer, depending on what type of product we're talking about. And so schema markup just provides the right type of data for the different types of content that are on your site. Rank Math also includes built in redirect functionality, which means you don't need an extra tool like pretty links or redirections in order to create those link redirects that you're probably already using. I really, really recommend Rank Math over Yoast or All In One SEO, because it gives you those extra features and it's not as bloated as some of the others, especially if you go in on Rank Math and you toggle off the modules you're not actively using. It can make it really lightweight and keep from slowing down your site. Now, personally, I use and recommend Rank Math Pro. I include it in my care plans for my maintenance plan clients. But even the free version of Rank Math is better than the free versions of Yoast or All In One SEO. I would almost even argue that the free Rank Math is better than the paid version of Yoast. Alright, plugin number three, this one is one plugin that can help with your site speed a little bit. And this one is called Imageify. What it does is it automatically compresses your images as you upload them, and it does that in a way that doesn't reduce or diminish the quality of the image itself. So your graphics that have text on them, all of your photos, those things will still have nice, sharp images and graphics on your site, but the file size itself gets compressed. Now, one little caveat with this one, that doesn't mean export giant files from Canva and upload them, because, you know, you have Imageify and it will compress. It's going to compress the data within the file. But if you are downloading a 5000 by 5000 pixel file when you really only need maybe 800 pixels wide for a blog post image, then you still have an image that is much bigger than it needs to be. So you want to do the right size when you export your images and then also add this extra layer of compressing the file itself through Imageify. One thing that makes Imageify a must have for me is that it helps to improve page load time, and that's good for SEO, but also just for user experience. Nobody wants to sit around while they wait for images to load. I love that Imageify has kind of a set it and forget it function. So you install it, you activate it. It is paid, so you add your API key and then it runs automatically for you. With those paid plans, you can also bulk optimize all your old images that you already had on the site before you added Imageify. This is another one that I include in my care plan for people who are on those, so if you're on a care plan and you don't have Imagify, just let me know, and I'll be glad to add it for you. Plugin number four is Elementor. This is my go to drag and drop page builder. It helps me to create gorgeous layouts and do it really easily and quickly without having to type a bunch of code. Could I do it with code? Absolutely. Do I want to? No, I don't. So Elementor is great because it makes it really easy for you to edit your own content. And I pick Elementor over some of the other page builders because I find that it loads a good bit faster and it just feels less clunky in general than some of the other builders, like Divi or Beaver Builder. An important warning about Elementor, though. Don't use Elementor for your blog posts, just stick to the regular WordPress block editor. Some people call that the Gutenberg editor. That is going to be important for you, just in case you ever need to switch page builders, it'll help you to avoid formatting issues and having to redo, you know, maybe hundreds of blog posts. Another thing to keep in mind with Elementor is, while I love the freedom it gives you and the ability to build really complex pages easily, if you are not a designer and you don't understand what you're doing, it's really easy for people to add tons of extra code blocks, extra containers or spacers to your pages that you're creating. So if at all possible, use some templates from some people who do know how to build those pages the right way and customize those rather than starting from scratch. That'll help make sure that you're not bloating those pages the same way we talked about how you can toggle off modules in Rank Math to reduce the bloat on your site. You want to make sure even the pages you build on Elementor have as few containers and elements and things as possible. Alright, my fifth must have plugin that I put on all of my sites is actually my KD care plan plugin. This is my plugin that allows me to automatically backup sites once a day. It is monitoring my websites 24/7 for security issues and downtime. And yes, I did say security, even though I also use Solid Security, I like having both of those on there. Solid security is running once a day scans, but my plugin is also just monitoring 24/7 for any issues that pop up. So it's two layers of security, and I think that's just so important. It's also watching for downtime, meaning if my site goes down and is not accessible, it will let me know. And it gives me the ability to do safe plugin and theme updates, where I can easily roll back if something goes wrong. And it really just gives me such peace of mind, knowing that is there and that I always, always, always have those backups. Now, even if you're not on my care plan so you don't have this plugin installed on your site, running your backups, you do need to make sure that you have something that is backing up your site every single day, because you cannot rely on the ones from your web host, because if your site gets hacked, those backups from your web host can be one of the first things to go sometimes. Alright, so your action step for this episode is go take a peek at your plugin list right now. If you have tons of plugins on your site, maybe look through it and see what you really do still need to have. I would say to aim for under 20 plugins for a website without e-commerce shops like WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads or something like that. And if you do have a shop, then I would still say, try to stay under 25 or 30 plugins on your site. I have seen as much as 50, 60, or even more plugins on certain websites. And let me just tell you, the more plugins that you have, the more problems they can cause. So go through and make sure you don't have plugins on your site that you don't actually use or need anymore. Too many plugins can cause some problems, like slowing your site down, and they can cause conflicts, because sometimes plugin A doesn't play nicely with plugin B. And if you have 50 or 60 plugins on your site, it can get really hard to figure out which two plugins are having the problem. Not to mention, the more plugins you have, the more updates you need to make, the more potential there is for trouble to come up. Keep in mind, keeping your plugin list short isn't just about having a clean and a short list. It really is about protecting your business, making your life easier in the long run. But these five plugins will give you some really great security, SEO performance and some peace of mind. So if you do not have these plugins on your site, go and get those and then take a peek at the rest and make sure you've done a little plugin cleanup. Now, if managing all of this yourself sounds like one more thing on your already full plate, or you know you've been ignoring your plugins and not updating them, I would love to help you with that. My WP care plan includes all of the paid plugins that I talked about today, as well as some others, and my team and I handle all your updates safely. We monitor your site 24/7. In fact, a lot of times we fix the problems and then let you know that they existed so you don't even realize a problem has come up until we've already solved it for you. The team and I also update your plugins and your website every single week, and personally take a look at your site so you know that someone is putting their eyes on your website to make sure that everything looks good. Now if you want that kind of peace of mind, you can shoot me a DM on Instagram@kristendoyle.co or you can check out the link in the show notes to learn more about the care plan. Thank you so much for listening today, and I'll talk to you soon.