First Published: 11th of September, 2019 by Patrick Carpen.
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When you’re building a WordPress website, plugins are essential to giving your website the functionality that it needs, or that you need your site to have.
Thankfully, the WordPress Repository is full of plugins to supply just about every need. Need a photo gallery? A plugin got you covered. Need better comments functionality? Try WPDiscuz. How about a stream of your latest post on the homepage? There’s a plugin for that. Need to integrate your Facebook Page onto every page of your website? Check.
In fact, there are so many plugins available for WordPress web developers that you might get carried away. But here’s a warning! Do not install more plugins that you actually need! In fact, you should keep plugins to a minimum on your WordPress site for the following reasons:
- Too many plugins slow down your site.
- Plugins tend to conflict with each other – so only install what you need.
- Plugins need constant updating – and outdated plugins can make your website vulnerable to hackers and viruses.
With that being said, there are some plugins that I personally think no website should live without. So, the first thing to do after installing WordPress on your website is to quickly install the following plugins: – and I’ll explain why: –
- Revision Control – Each time you edit a post or page, WordPress stores the old version as a “revision.” By default, WordPress will store unlimited revisions. Imagine if you edit 100 pages 10 times! That is a total of 1000 pages, 900 of which are just revisions taking up space and other resources! You need to keep revisions to a bare minimum. With Revision Control WordPress Plugin, you can set the maximum number of stored revision to 3, 2, 1 or any number.
- Loginizer – For some reason, websites, and just about anything else on the internet are always under constant attack by hackers and viruses. If you have a website, you run the risk of it being hacked and taken down or stolen. Loginizer is a very good security measure for WordPress. It limits the number of login attempts before the system locks out a user. Say, for example, you set the limit to “3” login attempts. If hackers try to hack into your WordPress website through brute force password guessing, they will be locked out after the 3rd failed attempt. For greater security, you can set the limit to “2” or “1” failed attempt before lockout.
So what are you waiting for? Go outfit your WordPress Website with these “essential” plugins before exploring the “luxury” plugins.