When it comes to an amazing open-source system like WordPress, developers are constantly creating new & innovative plugins to make one of the best Website development platforms out there even better!

With over 500 WordPress websites built up to date, Pearl White knows which plugins work best for your site to help improve its usability. Here is a list of our TOP 5 MOST ESSENTIAL plugins when launching a new site:

Top 5 WordPress plugins:

 

SECURITY

The clear cut winner for the security plugin is Wordfence.  The Wordfence WordPress security plugin provides free enterprise-class WordPress security, protecting your website from hacks and malware. When it comes to security Wordfence nailed it. They allow you to enable auto updates for this plugins so it’s constantly loaded with the latest knowledge against hackers. There’s nothing worse than a customer coming to your website and seeing some infected malware going across your site! It’s just bad for business and for your company’s reputation.

 

SPEED

With many great speed optimization plugins out there, our favorite plugin hands down would be WP FASTEST CACHE.  This free plugin (there is a premium version) allows you to optimize the speed of the website but using a series of techniques such as enabling different caching, merging CSS and JS files, minifying your HTML, Gzip and many more. When it comes down to it, would you stay on a site that’s barely loading for you? The average patience of someone browsing the internet in 2018 is extremely low – we want our information and we want it fast.

 

IMAGES

Speed optimization is not the only key aspect to making a site load beautifully. If our clients accidentally upload a high res 300 DPI 10MB file to their website, it will surely slow it down! This is why we incorporate WP-SMUSH plugin. This plugin enabled image optimization on the website which shall Automatically optimize and resize every image in any directory on your WordPress or Multisite on upload.

 

SEO

Clear cut winner for an SEO plugin would be YOAST SEO.  Rated as the #1 SEO plugin world wide, yoast promises to Get more visitors from Google and Bing, Attract more visitors from social media & Increase your readers’ engagement. WordPress being pretty SEO friendly out of the box, yoast SEO boosts up it’s SEO potential significantly. We know how important SEO is for a website so we ensure we install only the best plugin for our clients.

 

Visual Editors

WordPress has changed quite a bit over the past few years. We used to use ACF (advanced custom fields) to allow our clients to control different aspects of the page but not anymore. Using a built in visual editor, allows our clients to easily modify their pages or create new ones using a simple easy to use building block type builder. Although its a short toss up between Visual Composer & Fusion builder. The quickness of fusion builder just has us sold. You can easily Visually drag and drop content to create beautiful pages.