We’ve written about plugins several times before, suggesting 3 plugins to use on your site, offering 3 options for e-commerce plugins, detailing how to install a plugin, and more. But recommendations only go so far, and when it comes down to it, you might want to know what plugins we actually use. Let’s take a peek behind the curtain as we list of the plugins we use with a rundown of what each one does.
Akismet
Akismet is great for preventing spam on your website. Even though we don’t use the built-in WordPress commenting system — and you can learn more about what we use instead below — it doesn’t hurt to have Akismet installed anyway to keep spammers from trying to access your site’s comments through link spoofing.
Bloom
We use Bloom to add a box at the bottom of each post with an email opt-in. You can see an example at the bottom of this post.
Duplicate Post
This plugin does exactly what the title suggests — it provides an easy way to duplicate a post or page on your site. It’s especially handy for when we create course material, because each page in the course follows a similar format that we can easily clone.
Facebook Comments
This plugin allows you to use Facebook’s commenting system on your website. Unfortunately, the plugin has been discontinued, but we will continue to use it as long as it functions properly.
Jetpack
Jetpack adds several features to your website. We use their social sharing buttons (you’ll see them at the bottom of this post), site stats, and brute force attack protection.
Latest Post Redirect
We developed our latest plugin because we saw a need for it on our own site, so you’ll find it installed here! We use Latest Post Redirect to redirect the URL mpwrdesign.com/latest to our most recent content. You can find that link used in the menu at the top of the page, and it also shows up as our Instagram profile link most of the time.
No Self Pings
This plugin serves a simple but useful purpose. It prevents you from being notified when you link to your own content. It’s nice to know when someone else links to your site, but you typically know when you’ve done it yourself!
Publish to Apple News
We use this plugin to share our new content to Apple News automatically. For more information on how this works, check out our Apple News tutorial.
Really Simple SSL
If you have a security certificate on your website, this plugin redirects traffic from HTTP links to HTTPS links and ensures your site is properly configured to serve encrypted content. Read more about how to transition to HTTPS in our tutorial.
Redirection
This simple plugin allows you to create redirect links on your site. We use it for several links, like redirecting mpwrdesign.com/learnwp to our Learn WordPress course. This is especially handy for sharing links on Twitter when the link is visible, or if you want someone to memorize a link on your site.
WooCommerce
We use WooCommerce to sell all our products. Learn more about e-commerce products in our e-commerce plugin comparison.
WooCommerce Memberships
We use the WooCommerce Memberships add-on to manage our courses and exclusive course content.
Wordfence Security
A good security plugin is a must to ensure your site doesn’t get hacked. We use Wordfence for ours but we also compared several other options in our security tips.
Yoast SEO
We use Yoast to manage the way the content on our site displays on search engines. To learn more about how to best optimize your content for search engines, check out our SEO tips.
Which plugins do you use? Let us know in the comments.
