Welcome back to part 2 of the 20 WordPress plugins you will need in 2024 series. I hope that you enjoyed Part 1, where you learned about some new and interesting plugins for managing your WordPress site, or sites, if you own more than one. Please take a few moments to read the first part in this series if you haven’t already. This second part will complete the list of plugins you’ll need for 2024.
Post to Google My Business by tyCoon media
Google has been trying to establish itself as the most dominant search engine for years (which it already did). Google My Business is one of the main ways that they are doing this. This listing is not only the first thing that people see when searching for your business, but it’s also the main way to interact and promote your business. You may have left reviews in a Google My Business page, but did you also know that you can now publish posts there? Most people don’t do this, because posting to multiple places is difficult. After you connect the plugin to your Google My Business Account, you will be able push the article that you have just written to Google with no extra effort.
Redirection - By John Godley
You should make sure the content is accessible if anyone (especially Google) clicks on an old link. You don’t want someone to get a 404 error (not found), when they are supposed to be able access content. It is best to automatically redirect users to the new content. It can be a bit intimidating to set up an htaccess and learn how to use it. You might not even have direct access to the file. You can create all of the 301s you need from your WordPress admin. It has a great feature called wildcard redirects. This allows you to rename your blog section with just one 301 instead of creating a redirect for every post.
SendGrid by SendGrid
The bottom line is that if you send email from your site, the last thing you want is for it to end up in someone’s spam folder just because your domain name is too young. Many people do not understand that your domain’s age has a great deal to do with how you are perceived when it comes to sending emails. You don’t need to set up and administer a mailserver, since you aren’t in the email industry (you have a site to run!) Sendgrid is a great service that takes the hassle out of sending emails through your WordPress website. SendGrid will ensure that your emails are delivered to the correct person. They also keep track of all emails sent, and can tell you whether there were any problems with delivery.
Simple Custom Post Order by Colorlib
Sometimes you need to put a square into a round-hole. It’s hard to tell how many times I wanted a particular post at the bottom of the list, or for a certain product to always appear on the top of search results. You will understand my pain if you’ve ever written a custom WordPress function to do this. It is not fun to parse and smash SQL to make WordPress behave the way you desire. Someone felt the pain even more than we did and took action. You can use Simple Custom Post Order to sort anything and everything you want and receive it in the order that you specify. This product will remain at the top of search results even if someone uses filters. The article that I wrote will be given all the credit it deserves if it remains first on our website (despite protests by co-workers and comrades).
Simple History by Par Thernstrom
It is important to know what’s happening behind the scenes of your WordPress website or Woocommerce store. It is important to know who updates what, what products are entered and what posts are published. You need to know this information quite often, especially when something bad happens and you have to reverse it. Simple History does exactly that. It keeps track of all the events on your website or store, with an easy-to-understand interface. You could tail and grep log files to try and find out all of this information, but who would want to do that? And how many people even understood what I was saying (hint… not many and I can’t blame them). We have a site to run, and we don’t want to waste time trying to guess what’s been happening.
Smush by WPMU DEV
Images are the number one cause of a slow, bloated website. If you think that your 500 mb a second cable connection is bad, imagine how much worse it would be for someone who visits your website on a mobile phone. Statistics show that the majority of people will leave your site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. I’d bet that this number is dropping every day. Your slow website doesn’t give your visitors instant satisfaction. There is nothing you can do other than firing up Photoshop to optimize each photo. It would be great if WordPress could automatically optimize your images after you upload them to your site. Smush is a plugin that will optimize or smush your existing photos to make them more accessible. The plugin will automatically process any new images and photos that you upload to your website. It means that when you upload the 4 megabyte cat photo from your camera, your visitors will receive the 250 kilobyte optimized version. They won’t have to wait a half-year for your site to appear.
String Locator by Clorith
Have you ever needed to locate a sentence or a piece of code in a particular file on your website? There is no efficient way to locate such a string using the command-line (look, I made another pun). Imagine opening each file in the WordPress installation directory, and looking at them all manually. That would be a complete waste of time. String Locator allows you to give it a search string and it will try to find it in the files that you specify. It will not only tell you which files the string is in, but also where it is in the file. There’s also a link so you won’t waste time. This plugin, combined with the Better Search Replace from Part 1, will allow you to find any string in your WordPress database or files.
Wordfence Security by Wordfence
You can expect someone to break into your WordPress site at some point. There are tons of automated hacking tools that try to break into WordPress websites. It’s nothing special about your site. WordPress is one of the most popular softwares for building websites, so hackers and bad actors are attracted to it. You can try to be a security expert and follow best practices in order to secure your website, but it will still remain vulnerable. You don’t believe me, do you? You probably didn’t realize that the URL can give you a list of every author who has ever posted on your website. You can find it by doing a Google Search. Install WordFence to lock down your website and prevent other hacking attempts. WordFence will not only prevent hacking attempts, but it also has a built-in malware and virus scan that will detect and clean up any affected files. The old security saying goes: “If you do your own security, you are already doing it incorrectly”
WP Nag Hide - By Milton Keynes Web Design
The word “annoyances”, or “notices”, is what I use to describe them. I will continue using this term throughout the rest of the article. Some are helpful, but not all. They are displayed in a way that is unfriendly and strains the eyes. Some are so annoying that even if you close them, they will come up again on the next page. Installing a plugin to block all of these messages is the best option. WP Nag Hide will remove ALL of these annoying messages, so you won’t see them. You can turn messages on or off for specific plugins. If you use a plugin that allows people to sign up for new appointments, it is important that you see those messages when you log in to the admin area. You can then whitelist this plugin to display these messages. This plugin will definitely save you a lot of time.
Yoast SEO by Team Yoast
SEO (Search Engine Optimization), is hard. This is why you hire us to assist you with your SEO needs. Yoast does the gruntwork that many people overlook when launching a new website. Sitemaps are generated and verified with Google. Yoast can also “green light” articles to make them more search engine friendly. It’s a good plugin for the basics, but it is not the only way to optimize a website. Visit our SEO services page and see what areas we provide. Give us a call, or contact us.
These articles should have helped you to recognize some of the most useful plugins available on the WordPress platform. Please let us know if you have any suggestions for other plugins to include on this list. We enjoy exploring the web and discovering what’s available.