If you are upgrading or updating your web presence, or if you are researching the various options available these days, you’ve no doubt come across the most popular, widely used and versatile platform – WordPress.

WordPress was originally created and designed to help build and meet all the needs of the blogger who is in need of a professional, high functioning, top-notch website, easily accessible from anywhere to quickly add or remove content once set-up properly.

They look great, they perform great! More recently, the WordPress folks have also been focussing on optimising WordPress for podcasters as well, making it an ideal choice for all content creators.

WordPress is versatile, endlessly customizable and truly a great choice for pretty much ANY type of website ideas or visions you may have.

WordPress makes this abundance of variety and customization possible and available to users of its platform through the use of what are called WordPress plugins.

So, what the heck is a WordPress plugin?

A WordPress plugin is very much like an app on your phone, because you can think of a plugin like a small program and an add-on feature which is built for and allows for a specific function or set of functions you need on your website.

The web technician or web designer researches, downloads and installs each plugin needed, individually, depending on what you need the site to do for you and for its visitors.

For instance, if you want to sell something online, like your art, you might choose to install and use a shopping cart plugin, or maybe a fully functioning more robust ecommerce plugin. There are plenty of choices to meet anyone’s needs.

Let’s say you want to teach people Spanish, or yoga, or provide specialized classes which only paid members can access, then a completely different set of plugins would be needed to accomplish this.

But it’s all do-able! — because WordPress is so popular and widely used, plugins have been developed for nearly every type of function you might want on the front end or the back end of your website.

Once a plugin is no longer needed or being used, it should be deleted. This must be done manually and shouldn’t be put off since it can compromise the security of your website and/or the way it performs, or doesn’t.

WordPress Plugins We Recommend

There are a LOT of plugins you can choose from. While there are many plugins that serve a specific purpose, here are a few main ones that we use and recommend.

• Imagify – image optimizer (free & paid)
• Anti-spam by Cleantalk – eliminate 99% of spam. I really like this one!
• SEOPress – add your titles, meta description and keywords to most pages and posts (free & paid). Yoast is a popular SEO plugin, I just didn’t care for it that much.
• FluentForms Pro is a premium form builder that is versatile in every way. A free option is Forminator.
• FluentCRM – This is hands down the best email marketing program I’ve used. There is no separate platform you need because this is a plugin for your WordPress website. NO LIMITS ON SUBSCRIBERS EITHER! ? One yearly subscription and you’re all set.
• WP Rocket – a caching and performance plugin that improves speed
• WP Vivid is our backup plugin we use and it’s affiliated with MainWP where we manage all our websites. There are a few you can choose from.
• We use some Divi specific plugins such as Monarch and Divi ToolBox. I also love CSS Hero. This plugin allows you to add CSS code without having to know CSS. I do know quite a bit of CSS, but this is a lovely tool that makes my designs move a little faster.

Read the full article on building your website from scratch.