UPDATE: I removed Elementor from this site since this article was orignally posted.
To date I’ve mentioned the Elementor, Elementor Pro, and Essential Addons for Elementor plugins that I’ve installed at the WP Inn.
I thought you might be interested in which other plugins I use here too.
Affiliate Marketing Plugins
The plugins that I would say belong in this group are the following.
- All in One Schema Rich Snippets
- Header, Footer and Post Injections
- Table of Contents Plus
- Ultimate Nofollow
- Yoast SEO
Now, you might use some of these yourself, even if you’re not into affiliate marketing. (If you don’t know what that is, you’re definitely not into it.) But for the most part, the only reason I have them here or would consider using them is to get certain pages of my site onto the first page of Google’s search results for specific search terms (aka keywords).
I haven’t even started to use All in One Schema Rich Snippets here yet because the course mentioned above hasn’t presented it in detail yet.
UPDATE: I have started using the Schema plugin. You can get access to the course mentioned here.
Header, Footer and Post Injections, while it can have many uses, is one I just use to connect my site to Google Tag Manager.
Table of Contents Plus is kinda nifty, but it certainly isn’t needed for many sites. With it, you can automatically insert a table of contents into your articles, based on the subheadings that you use. This plugin doesn’t seem to be supported by its creator anymore. If that bothers you and you’re looking for such a plugin, I would suggest Easy Table of Contents instead.
UPDATE: I decided to replace TOC+ with Easy Table of Contents. It works exactly the same way but looks more compact.
Yoast SEO is about Search Engine Optimization. So this is really specific to affiliate marketing and getting your pages to rank high in Google’s search results.
Security Plugins
Many websites use a plugin called Akismet Anti-Spam to handle unwanted comments that spammers make on articles you publish. Technically, you’re supposed to pay something for using it, if you’re making money from your site. The amount you pay is up to you. I’m sure many site owner choose the $0.00 option.
There is another plugin called Anti-spam (by webvitaly) that is almost as popular and seems to do just as good of a job at keeping the spammers at bay. Whether you make money with your site or not, it wouldn’t hurt to install this one to save yourself the trouble of deciding whether or not a comment is really spam or not.
These days – unfortunately – adding a layer of security to your (WordPress) site is a must. The definitive plugin for doing so is Wordfence Security. It has a multitude of options for keeping the bad guys out. (It has even more if you upgrade to; that is, pay for the Premium version.) It includes a Firewall, in addition to the more standard blocking features.
Utility Plugins
Having a terms of service and a privacy policy are also features that are necessary on your site these days. A good plugin for adding these pages is WP AutoTerms. With this plugin, you can easily create a Terms and Conditions page and a Privacy Policy page for your site. These pages are pre-made for you, but you can edit them as needed according to the specific needs of your site.
If you want a contact form on your site, you could get Contact Form 7, but I prefer WPForms Lite. Either is fine, but the last I heard, Contact Form 7 added a line of unneeded code to every page on your site. That’s not really a huge deal and they may have changed this by now, but I still like the other plugin better.
Do you have other plugins you consider essential for everyone to use?
