WordPress plugins provide an opportunity to add additional customization and functionality to any site. As part of the Hawaii Beach Guide reset, all plugins that had been installed previously were deactivated. This provided an opportunity to review each and determine whether or not it was valuable to reactivate them.
Many of the plugins focused on security, performance, and accessibility. So, most of the plugins that were related to those areas were reactivated. These included:
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP for WordPress) – this plugin is designed to help make the site faster especially for those users on mobile devices. Since this particular site is travel-oriented, it should be expected that many users would use their phones or other mobile devices – often at the moment they are traveling.
- Accessibility by UserWay – accessibility to all users is incredibly important, and this plugin allows you to test out different accessibility features on the site to review how others may experience the site.
- Akismet Anti-Spam – this security and performance plugin helps protect against spam, nothing will ruin a site’s experience quicker than spammers posting comments or flooding inboxes with trash,
- Google Analytics – this allows you to review various metrics as they relate to your site visitors and can provide essential information on how they interact with different the different components and sections.
- Jetpack – is a WordPress essential and crucial to help ensure security, performance, and site backup.
- Login Lockdown -another plug in that focuses on security in order to prevent hackers or spammers from gaining access to the site.
- Really Simple SSL – this allows your site to run with secure encryption providing an additional layer of security.
- Updraft Plus – makes it easy to backup the site and can be scheduled to backup and download those files automatically.
- W3 Total Cache – this plugin is all about performance and increases the speed in the site run and reducing the load times, a must for a travel site with users on the go.
- Wordfence Security – an another security plugin, Wordfence helps to protect the site against malware and other malicious activities.
- WP Activity Log – is a performance and security plugin. It helps monitor and keep track of any potential issues before they become an issue.
Another important element to consider when using plugins is how they increase the functionality and design of the site. So, in addition to security, performance, and accessibility – these plugins were reactivated because they added additional functionality to the site:
- Elementor – is a plugin that allows for more features, customizations, and functions when designing a page.
- Gutenberg Blocks and Template Library by Otter – provides additional customizations and features to make editing posts and pages very easy.
- Master Slider – adds an quick and easy (yet still professional) image slider to any page. I had tried some other image gallery widgets and plugins previously – this was the best of them all.
- Seriously Simple Podcasting – made creating and posting a podcast seriously simple.
- Simple Social Buttons – this plugin adds social media buttons of your choosing to your posts and pages.
- SiteOrigin CSS – this plugin has the potential to be useful and I kept it, although I did not use it as much as I’d like. It allows you to look at the underlying CSS of a page which can be very useful in attempts to customize a WordPress theme.
- WooCommerce – this was most likely my favorite plugin in terms of functionality. Setting up a store with products, shopping carts, checkout, payments, and shipping was incredibly easy to use. I was very impressed with how professional looking the store and process felt. Anyone can take this plugin and create their own online store easily.