Before your WordPress website is live, there are a couple of basic plugins you need to install on your website,
With plugins, you can improve your overall site user experience, optimize for search engines, make it virtually appealing, secure your website, etc.
Plugins make creating a beautiful affiliate website a walk in the park without knowing any line of code.
There are thousands of WordPress Plugins, but you don’t need to install, all of them or you risk hurting your website.
Key takeaways:
If you have been asking questions like what are WordPress Plugins? You are definitely in the right place.
So let’s get started.
What are WordPress plugins?
Plugins are software that extends the functionality of your WordPress website.
You can simply go to a section called plugins from your WordPress Dashboard and search for the particular Plugin you’re looking for.
With different Plugins, you can do different types of things and have different kinds of functionalities,
But we’ll be talking about essential every important Plugins that every affiliate website that comes online must have.
To optimize our website, we’re going to be installing a WordPress Plugin for SEO called Rank Math,
We’ll also install a Plugin called Defender, which is one of the best WordPress Plugins for security,
And a Plugin that enables you to optimize and reduce the size of your images and much more.
Some of the Plugins you’ll use all the time, like Rank Math,
Some run in the background making sure everything is in order, while some you can check from time to time.
Pretty Links
The first Plugin we’ll be looking at in this training is Pretty Links.
To install Pretty Links, you go to the WordPress Plugins directory in your Dashboard and search for Pretty Links, install and activate.
Pretty Links is a free WordPress Plugin that turns long, ugly affiliate links into clickable, shareable, clean, beautiful links.
As shown in the image below, we can use it to turn the long link into a short Link that contains our domain.
Once you have shortened the link, you can place it on your website, emails, or even platforms that don’t allow affiliate links.
Defender
Of course, everybody wants to keep their website secured and free from hackers and spammers,
To do that, you need a good security Plugin,
And here, we will be going over one of the best security Plugin, Defender.
This Plugin helps block attempts from bot attacks and other types of cyber attacks, which happen more often than we even think.
These kinds of attacks, when not prevented, can cause you to lose your website or cost you thousands of dollars to fix.
Although there are other good alternatives like Wordfence, we love and highly recommend the Defender.
Table Of Content Plus (TOC+)
We will looking at a table of content Plugin called Table Of Content Plus,
And this Plugin is straightforward to set up.
And what you’re doing here is, setting up exactly how the table of content will look in your Posts or Pages.
Next, you can change the text that shows up at the top of your table of content,
You can either leave it as a table of contents or change it to something you like, something unique to your brand or website.
The choice is yours.
But we always leave it as a Table of Content on all our websites.
Also, from the image above, you can set the visibility of the Table of Contents,
You can either make it visible to the reader or show a button that allows the reader to click on it to see the table of contents if they want to see it.
We hide the Table of Content, giving the reader a choice because sometimes when you show it, some people don’t pay attention to it,
But when you hide it, it’s more likely that they will pay more attention to it.
Next, you’re going to follow the settings as we did in the image below to show hierarchy, use a numbered list, and also change the appearance,
You have like five different choices of colors you can choose.
Facebook For WordPress
Facebook for WordPress is an Analytics tool that helps you measure the effectiveness of your advertising,
And also track people who come to your website and are on Facebook.
When you install these Plugins, it helps you to know the actions people are taking on your website.
And also have a good understanding of your target audience and their demographics.
To activate, you will add your Pixel ID code, which will help track your site visitors.
Social Warfare
This following Plugin is essential to build a community or growing your audience fast.
The Social Warfare Plugin makes it easy for you to integrate Social Sharing functionality into your WordPress website.
This functionality enables your existing audience, who loves your content, to be able to share the content on different social media platforms.
And in the image below, you can see exactly how it looks.
You can drag and drop different social networks that you want to use,
You can either show how many shares the post has or not.
It allows you to choose where you want it to be positioned. You can either position it above or below your content,
Or you can choose to position it only on your Posts and Pages. It all depends on you.
In the floating share buttons section, you can click on the floating share buttons,
It makes your share buttons stick on the Page even when someone scrolls down and helps increase your shares.
ShortPixel
After installing the social welfare, the next Plugin you want to install is called ShortPixel.
ShortPixel is an easy-to-use lightweight install-and-forget-about-it Image Optimization Plugin that compresses all your past images and PDF documents with a single click.
New images are automatically resized and optimized on-the-fly in the background.
The speed of your new affiliate website is essential to rank on Google,
Having lots of big-size images on your website increases the time it takes to load your website, affecting the user experience and your ranking,
And that’s where ShortPixel comes in.
It automatically compresses and resizes your images, which helps your website load much faster.
There are free and paid versions, but we always recommend you go for the paid version,
Because for only $9.99, you can optimize over 10,000 images, which is crazy.
It’s going to last for a very, very long time.
There are also many other Image Optimization Plugins, but we recommend ShortPixel every time because we think it is the best and the coolest.
It’s straightforward It’set up,
You must request the API key from the settings, add your email, and click the request key.
Then they will email you the API key, and you put it into the API key section in the general settings, as you can see in the image below.
You need to uncheck the remove exit.
In the future training post, we’ll show Optimization strategy, you can use to rank your images on search engines.
Autoptimize
Next, we have Autoptimize,
It is the best Plugin to speed up your website, and it’s free.
It focuses on optimizing your site’s code, such as CSS, JavaScript, etc.
You might be non-techy, so you don’t need to worry about this works. You just have to install it.
With time, as your knowledge as an affiliate marketer continues to grow, you will understand it much better.
And if you have a problem, you can easily find someone to take care of it.
W3 Total Cache
For the Optimization, you need a Caching Plugin; for this, you can use W3 Total Cache.
It improves the overall speed of your site by Caching multiple elements on your Pages,
Because we have already activated Autoptimize, we don’t need to run all the in the W3 Total Cache.
As shown in the image above, just tick off the enable box.
Conclusion
Now, you have the most CRUCIAL WordPress Plugins list you must install on your website.
As you already know, each of these Plugins performs a specific and vital job on your website and must be kept active.
Go ahead and take action because you’re farther in your journey toward building a beautiful WordPress website.
If you’re still confusedyou’re what are WordPress Plugins, let us know in the comment section below!
