One of the great things about using WordPress is the access to the 3rd party plugin’s large ecosystem.
At the time of writing, there are approximately 60,000 free plugins available in the WordPress Plugin Directory alone.
We all know about Million+ installs like Access, Contact Form 7 and Yoast SEO. In this article I am looking at some unknown plugins.
It is worth noting that if you are a RabHost WordPress Hosting customer you do not need the plugin:
- Minify your CSS/JS
- Combine multiple CSS/JS files
- Connect to a CDN
- Take backups
- Set-up caching
- Optimize images
- Lazy load images
- Block traffic by country or IP address
- Create WordPress staging environments
You can do all this from within your RabHost control panel without dragging your website’s page load times in any way. With that in mind, I haven’t included plugins that duplicate them. If you are not a RabHost customer, take a look at our WordPress Hosting.
One final note: Not every plugin listed below will be relevant or relevant to your usage. Really think about the value they are going to bring to your site. Each new plugin you add to your site will naturally slow down your page load times a bit.
Blackhole for Bad Bots
The Black Hole plugin helps prevent bots from accessing your website. This saves valuable bandwidth and server resources for your real guests. It also prevents your analytics reporting from being artificially inflated.
Shortcodes Ultimate
Lots of themes come with back-in short codes, so why bother with the plugin? Personally, I don’t like being locked into a theme’s short codes that break if I go to a new theme. Using plugins that work on all themes negates this issue.
Redirection
Quickly and easily redirect and manage information without any Apache or Nginx information. You will also receive 404 error reporting.
In addition, you can redirect based on terms such as whether the user is logged in or not, their browser, referrer and more.
Asset CleanUp: Page Speed Booster
Most theme scripts and plugins are enabled to run on every page / post of your website, even if they are not used on those pages, such as contact form plugins.
Loading .CSS and .JS of each plugin will naturally slow down your site. Asset Cleanup scans your page and detects all loaded assets.
Using a series of toggles, you can then select CSS / JS that don’t need to be loaded, and reduce the number of scripts on each page.
Duplicate Page
It does what it says it will do, and it can be a great time saver. Duplicate your pages and posts in one click.
The duplicate page will also retain the status of the page / post ie draft, private, public, or pending.
Easy remove item menu
Removing weird stuff from your menu is not a big tax in WordPress. Managing and removing dozens is a chore.
This plugin adds an “x” button to delete an item and an “xx” to delete an item and all its sub-items. A time (and intellect) savior.
WP-Sweep
Your WordPress database can grow faster than unused data, which can start slowing down your site.
WP-Sweep will delete reviews, auto drafts, deleted comments, junk comments, deleted comments and more.
Code Snippets
There are two benefits to this plugin. First of all, this means that you do not need to edit the function.php file to run code snippets on your site.
Secondly, it comes with a toggle option to disable Gutenberg and all the code that normally loads in the background, regardless of whether you are using it or not.
This is great if you are using a site builder like Element or Visual Composer instead.
Really Simple SSL
If your website does not have SSL certificate assignment, and you want to set up one (you get them for free with RabHost WordPress Hosting), use ‘Really Simple SSL’.
This makes the move much easier, and will automatically configure your website to run on https.
WPS Hide Login
Password security is as strong as it gets. Choose a short or easy-to-guess password, and you’ll have a better chance of being hacked by scripts that search for ‘/ wp-login’ and try their luck by guessing the password.
WPS Hide Login lets you easily and securely convert the URL of the login form page into anything.
For added security, pair it with “Google Authenticator” and get 2FA in your login page.
It’s important to make sure you protect your site, so we’ve just published a comprehensive guide to all things WordPress Security. Find out what steps you can take to prevent security breaches and how to reduce the risk of hackers.
What have we missed?
Are there any lesser known WordPress plugins that you want to share? Leave a comment below.
