7.1 Conclusion

Hello, and welcome back to this Tuts press course on essential WordPress plugins. In this past ago, so I'm going to recap on what you've learned and go over what we've covered in the course. So in this course, I introduced you to six plugins that you can use to make your site run more smoothly and more powerfully. The first plugin that we installed was a backup plugin. And that was the Updraft Plus plugin. So we installed the free version of that plugin. We then use the settings for the plugin to automate backups and run them automatically every week. So once we've done that, we then looked installing a security plugin so that our site would be as secure as possible. We installed the Wordfence plugin. Again, we use the free version of the plugin. Which does have a premium version if you want extra features and extra support. So we set up our firewall, we ran a scan, and we detected an issue which we then fixed. And I showed you how you can set it up to automatically notify you whenever there's a problem on your site. So once we've done security, we then looked at performance. So we installed the WP-optimize plugin which has got its settings here. Then once again, we installed the free version and you can install a premium version if you want extra features. So we use the WP-optimize plugin to optimize our database to compress our images, and also to set up caching if it's not already provided by your hosting provider. So that will make your site run more quickly. Once we done that, we moved on to looking at SEO. So we looked at two alternative SEO plugins. The most popular WordPress SEO plugin is yoast, but it has caused controversy recently. So I also looked at an alternative plugin called the SEO framework. Now with yoast, I showed you how you can use its traffic light system to improve your content on your site. With the SEO framework plugin, there's quite a lot you can do with the free version. But if you want to add that extra, what it calls focus on the content of your pages and how well optimized they offer SEO. Yo need to pay for a premium plan with the plugin and install an extension. And the we finally moved on to installing the Jetpack plugin. Now Jetpack links to WordPress.com and this essentially gives you all of the features of WordPress.com or at least some of them with yourself hosted site. And which of those features you get depends on which ones you activate, and also on what plan you decide to go for. So if you upgrade to a paid plan, you could replace all of these other plugins with Jetpack. So those are the essential plugins that I believe every WordPress site should have. If you install at least a selection of these, you will have a site that runs fast, that gets new visitors via SEO that is secure, that is backed up. And that will win you new business. I hope you found this course useful, thanks for watching.