Over the past year of blogging ever since I converted the FiggiRiggi.com website to have it’s own domain, I gathered a tremendous knowledge about converting the basic information-based website into a blog site. By doing so, I had to learn the hard way to see which plugins were the best fit for my blog. After converting tom-stone.com and electro-marketing.com into other WordPress blog sites, I found that there were some common plugins that worked for all. Although here and there, I found some plugins were necessary to add depending on the function of the theme.
There is a transparency movement among the blogging industry to reveal how we made our blogs to help new bloggers catch on and grow their sites to success. I like that there are so many plugins available to help customize a site. To help you get a good picture of what you might want for your blog, I have created a list of the plugins that operate in the background of Figgi Riggi. I have spent countless hours picking out the best plugins and I think my list will help you leap forward instead of doing the extensive research that I performed. I periodically change out the plugins when I find better ones or a feature that I like and want to improve the site. So, check back once in a while and see what’s been changed on my list. Keep in mind that using too many activated plugins can slow down your site, so I recommend somewhere near 20. I realize that I’m not displaying a good example of the number of plugins. The reason for the long list is that this theme that I love comes with many conflicts with Google Webmaster Tools Console. Sometimes, you can simply hard-code your functions.php file in your child-theme instead of using a plugin.
This list was last updated on March 20, 2018. I am using the Beautiful Dawn Designs’ Serenity theme that contains some hard-coded functions.
My list of WordPress Plugins used to support Figgi Riggi
- Antispam Bee To target and prevent spam
- Accelerated Mobile Pages
- Ad Inserter
- AMP Plugin Manager
- Authors Page
- Auto Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
- Black Studio TinyMCE Widget
- Breadcrumb NavXT
- Broken Link Checker
- Child Theme Configurator
- Cookie Bar
- Contact Form 7
- Hide Title
- Link View
- WPForms Lite
- Pinterest Pin It Button On Image Hover And After Post & Page Content
- Quick Redirects
- Popup Maker WP
- Optin Forms
- Custom Meta Widget
- Easy Updates Manager Doesn’t always work, so I may remove it
- Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP)
- Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
- Google XML Sitemaps to automatically update your sitemap html file.
- Jetpack by WordPress.com various useful functions for your WordPress site
- MailChimp for WordPress A plugin that integrates your MailChimp newsletter account with forms
- Mailchimp Forms by Optin Cat
- Post Type Switcher
- Pretty Links is used for cloaking affiliate links
- Redirection
- Recent Posts Widget With Thumbnails Widget tool
- Social Warfare Places social networking buttons and has a built-in frame buster
- Under Construction illustration images with an under construction text
- UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore
- WP Add Custom CSS
- Wordfence Security Firewall protection to keep out brute force attacks. Can entire countries.
- WP SEO Structured Data Schema To help eliminate errors in Google Webmaster Tools
- WP Super Cache Clears the site cache on a scheduled basis
- WP-Optimize Cleans up the database on a regular basis
- Yoast SEO Tool to help a writer remain focused at building a high ranking in search engines