Exploring Essential WordPress Plugins and Core Web Vitals Optimization as a Christian Blogger

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the sea of WordPress plugins, unsure which are crucial and which are just slowing down your website? I am here to guide you through the confusing terrain of plugins in this discussion. We'll explore the essential plugins like Kismet and Astra Pro and the ones you can totally skip. We'll also demystify the concept of Gutenberg block editor and how it reduces the need for extra plugins. Plus, get a handle on privacy regulations with the Cookie Notice Compliance plugin.

But there's more to a successful WordPress site than just efficient plugins. We'll also dive into the process of optimizing your site for Core Web Vitals, a key step in improving your website's performance. Hear my personal recommendations for plugins that increase functionality and efficiency, like Spectra, WP Rocket, and Short Pixel. We'll also take a hard look at popular plugins like Monster Insights, Jetpack, and Divi or Elementor, and discuss why they might not be necessary for your site. It's all about finding the right tools for your specific needs, and I'm here to help you do just that. Join me in this enlightening discussion and let’s make your WordPress site work to its full potential.

If you are interested in taking your digital discipleship to the next level through blogging, YouTube, social media, and/or online Bible study groups, be sure to join my private FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/kingdombloggers
You can also follow me on YouTube where you will find a variety of helpful tutorials for navigating each of these important platforms: https://www.youtube.com/@KingdomBloggers

Transcript

LeeAnn Fox: 0:02

Welcome to the Kingdom Influencers podcast, where our mission is to get more Jesus online. This podcast will equip and empower ministry leaders as well as regular everyday Christians to take the message of Jesus Christ throughout the digital realm. I'm your host, LeeAnn Fox, digital Ministry Coach and the creator of the Kingdom Bloggers Ministry, and I am so excited and honored to be a part of this journey with you. Let's get started. Everyone Leanne here from Kingdom Bloggers. So today I want to talk a bit about plugins for WordPress site. This is one of the questions I get asked a lot when I'm helping people build out their sites is what plugins do I absolutely need and which ones do I not need? So I'm going to kind of break down some of the ones that I would say are pretty necessary, most of which are free. Then I'm going to kind of dive into some that may be necessary, depending, but then some that are like, hey, you really do not need these. At the end of the day, it's important to understand that your plugins, every plugin that you add to your website, adds like weight and can slow down your site. It's kind of like with your computer and things like that when you have just too many apps running your computer slows down right the processor. It doesn't have the energy to make everything work at once and things programs that you do want to use seem to work much slower. So having as few plugins as possible is very, very important. This impacts your core web vitals, which is important for being able to rank for Google to be happy with your site, but also there's just a lot of stuff you just don't need and a lot of times there are plugins that were created to do a function that you could just do manually. And the great thing is, now that we have Gutenberg block editor for WordPress, a lot of the things that you had to know code like CSS and things like that for under the classic editor, you don't need to know that stuff anymore. Actually, it gives you sort of spaces to do the things and it makes it so much easier. So there's a lot of plugins you may have actually needed in the past, but now that we have the block editor and more updated themes and things like that, you just don't need all of these extra plugins.

LeeAnn Fox: 2:08

So let's kind of. I'm going to go down the list of ones that I have on one of my sites and most of them. I have three sites. If you don't know, one of them is way, way older and it has a lot more stuff on it, so there are a few extra plugins I have on that one. But for my other two sites it's the bare minimum that you actually need to have a functioning website, and I'm going to go kind of in alphabetical order. That way, if you are following along and looking at your own plugins dashboard, you can kind of you know see as I'm going through them.

LeeAnn Fox: 2:34

The first one I'm going to mention is called a kismet. Now this one typically at least, it used to come preinstalled on a lot of themes that you would buy. Now themes have changed a lot in the last couple of years. Many of the way they were created before they're not created that way anymore, and so less is better. A kismet is one that you actually do want to keep. Now they do have a free version, so you know when you install it you can go with the free plan, but there is a paid upgrade as well.

LeeAnn Fox: 3:00

Now a kismet is helping to block all those ridiculous spam comments that you get. You go check it. So this is if you have comments enabled on your website. Some people don't have it, but if you do have comments enabled, this will help minimize any of the. I mean, you read them and you're just like, oh my gosh, that's who would write that. Well, it's a bot. You can sort of scan the whole internet looking for doorways to enter stuff, but sometimes you're really graphic and you know borderline X rated and you obviously don't want that stuff showing up on your website, and so the kismet sort of blocks it. Also, it sends it to a filter that you can preview before actually allowing it to be visible on your site. Now I do want to say, like a detour here, with commenting If you haven't enabled, I highly recommend that you set the settings in comment so that you have to approve each one before it displays on your site. This is sort of another added measure of protection. So you definitely want to have a kismet installed.

LeeAnn Fox: 3:53

Now the next couple of ones I'm going to mention. These are specific to the Astra Pro theme. So if you have Astra Pro, then you will want to have these plugins installed. Astra hooks the Astra Pro plugin itself. So if you can use Astra the theme by itself, but in order to have all the cool fancy functions you got to buy the pro and so this is a plugin. And then with that pro version, there are some other plugins that come with that that act to the functionality of your pro version Astra widgets anything basically with Astra in front of it that came with the Astra program. You would want to have those. The Astra hook is basically where you will add any of your tracking codes, like your Google analytics code, your Pinterest tracking code, anything that says add this code to your head tag. That's what the hooks plugin is for. If you're on cadence, you will actually install a headers and footers plugin or a code snippets plugin either one of those, because there's not like a special one just for cadence.

LeeAnn Fox: 4:49

All right, moving on, the next one you will need is a Cookie Notice Compliant. So this is where you visit a website and you have that little pop-up that comes up and says this website collects cookies you accept or decline. You do need to have one of those on your site to be compliant for privacy and all of that stuff. There are plenty of ones out there. I use one called Cookie Notice and Compliance and the and is like the and sign for GDPRCCPA, and it is by huemanityco, but that's just one of many like that's. I don't know if that one's any better than any other, so you can just install them and see, if you like, how they display on your site, but you do have to have one. I am only using a free version. The next one that I have is the Gross Social by Mediavine. So basically, this is your social sharing plugin. You do want to have a social sharing plugin. Not all of them are created equal. There are plenty of free ones out there, but a lot of them tend to have a lot of heavy coding on them which can impact your core web vitals. I use the Gross Social by Mediavine pretty inexpensive and it works really, really well.

LeeAnn Fox: 5:50

The next thing would be Rank Math. Some of you may use Yoast. This is your SEO plugin. You do need one if you're on WordPress, but I do want to caution you. You only need the free version. Yoast is always trying to get you to upgrade for all kinds of reasons. You absolutely do not need the paid version, the premium version, of Yoast. Nor do you need the premium or paid version of Rank Math. Whichever one that you use, all you need is the free one, and I say this as someone who's site gets about 120,000 visitors a month. So that is me saying you don't need to pay to be able to rank. And if you want to learn more about that, of course watch some of my other videos.

LeeAnn Fox: 6:29

Okay, moving on Short Pixel, so this is your image compression optimizer plugin. With the, you know, instead of web core vitals about two years ago, image compression and optimization is very, very important. Most of the free image compression tools that you may have used in the past simply do not do what they need to do to get your site passing from an image perspective. So I do. There are very few plugins that I recommend that you have to pay for. Short Pixel is one of them. It's very, very important. There are some other ones out there, I'm sure, that are equally as good, that are paid, but I have not found any free ones that actually do the job.

LeeAnn Fox: 7:08

The next one would be Spectra. So Spectra is a plugin that increases functionality of the Gutenberg block. So basically, it takes the blocks that are part of Gutenberg right. Gutenberg is a block editor. It enables you to make them look cooler, so it just expands the function of them, and so I recommended it is built for Gutenberg. It used to be called like ultimate add-ons for Gutenberg or something like that. It was like this long name that was really hard to remember, and about a year or so ago they changed the name to Spectra. So if you want to have increased functionality, then now I'm not saying you have to have this plugin, but if you're wanting to make your site do and look cool and all that, then this plugin would be helpful.

LeeAnn Fox: 7:45

And then the final one that I have on my site is WP Rocket. This is your caching plugin. This is the most vital thing to keep your site passing core web vitals. So again, I mentioned, I only recommend a few plugins that you pay for. Short pixel is one and WP Rocket is the other. This is it's just crucial for you to be able to pass and keep your site optimized in a way that makes Google happy. So those are literally that's all I have on my site.

LeeAnn Fox: 8:10

Y'all Like that's it my kingdom site. I do have a few others. I well, I lied. I do have one more on this site, but it's for my She-Need-It ads. Most of you are not to that point, so therefore you don't need that and I only need it because the ad revenue company requires it. Beyond that, anything else that you have. If you have an older theme and when I say older I mean like two years or older you bought it before all this web core vital stuff came out.

LeeAnn Fox: 8:34

A lot of those older themes came pre-installed with like a whole variety of plugins You're like well it's here, I guess I need it. The truth is, you don't need most of them. One of the most common ones that you might see is the Monster Insights or Google Analytics dashboard for WordPress, gadwp. But Monster Insights is most common one. I think now there's a Google site kit that is kind of more common. I personally do not recommend either of these.

LeeAnn Fox: 9:01

The Monster Insights one is used for installing your Google Analytics tracking code, but again, it's a plugin and the only purpose of this plugin is to install the code. But you don't need a plugin to do that. Like with Astra, what? Okay, I like the Astro Hooks plugin, but it's built into your heading, it's built into the theme itself, but it's not just for Google Analytics. The Astro Hooks or headers and footers plugins, slash code snippets that is where you will put everything. I have helped some people with sites in the past and they would have the monster insight for Google Analytics, and then they would have another plugin for the Pinterest tracking code, and then another plugin for some other tracking code, and now you got three plugins like that's just way too much. And so the code snippets, the Astro Hooks, the headers and footers plugin, whichever again, whichever theme you're using, that is a one stop plugin. Like every code snippet that you would need to add to your site would be added in the block provided by that plugin. And so I've seen monster insights fail before. I've seen it cause conflicts with other plugins.

LeeAnn Fox: 10:03

Now one of the things people tell me is like well, I like having it there because then, when I open my WordPress dashboard, I get a snapshot of my traffic, and while that may seem like a good thing, it's actually not. If you are constantly seeing the fluctuations of your traffic on a day to day, many times a day, basis, it can actually distract you quite a bit, because there are gonna be normal fluctuations. And so I have a policy and I share it with my students, and most of them agree checking it once a month so you get a bigger picture view, but not seeing it every time you log in. You're like, oh my gosh, my traffic went down or oh yay and you. Just, it's very distracting and that's literally the only benefit of having the plugin is seeing that graph there, and so I just I don't recommend it at all.

LeeAnn Fox: 10:45

Another plugin that seems to be common pre-installed is the Jetpack plugin. That is probably one of the heaviest plugins and it came pre-installed on almost every WordPress site pre two years ago and I think it still comes with. If you're on WordPresscom, like hosted by WordPress, they install it very, very heavy and, honestly, there's really no benefit. There's no fruitfulness that comes from using it. It has the social sharing buttons included and it connects them to for WordPress users to be able to follow your site. But even without the plugin, if they're a WordPress user and they follow your site, they're gonna get notified inside WordPress anyway. But I highly recommend that you get rid of that plugin because it is very, very heavy and there's other plugins that can do the functions.

LeeAnn Fox: 11:31

Having a security plugin. That might be another one you want. If you do use a security plugin, I would recommend WordPress. It's very good, there is a free version, but beyond that, jetpack is just not a really good plugin to have. Beyond that, if you're using Divi or Elementor, of course you would have plugins for those. As most of you know, I do not recommend Divi or Elementor. Those are builders, which means that as a lot of CSS and coding onto your site which makes it heavier. And so if you're blog, if you use Divi or Elementor something like that to maybe create sales pages, maybe I could see doing that. But your homepage, and definitely not your actual blog post, should be created directly in the Gutenberg blog editor without any extra builders, because everything you add again adds time to the load and that can impact your core web vitals.

LeeAnn Fox: 12:23

Other things balloon widgets for Instagram feed shows up on your blog. That's all non-necessary. It adds extra weight to your site. People go to your site to read the blog post, not to see. If they wanna look at your Instagram, just put a follow me on Instagram button. Let them view your Instagram on Instagram. The blog is meant for them to read, not look at all your pictures and videos and stuff. That's about it.

LeeAnn Fox: 12:47

I mean I'm sure there's probably some other plugins If you have a commerce, like you're doing sales and things like that. Some people use WooCommerce and Shopify, so obviously those have plugins associated with them. I personally do not use them because, again, they are heavy. You can create a beautiful storefront inside WordPress with the blog and then connect it to your products on Etsy or some other place, but that's just my personal opinion. So if you are using either of those, you would have those plugins as well, but beyond that, that's it, y'all. There are really very, very few those first ones I mentioned at the beginning of this. That's all I have, and two of my site have those exact same, exact ones, plus, of course, the She-Media for the ad revenue, but beyond that, I don't add anything else.

LeeAnn Fox: 13:29

Keep your site as simple and lightweight as possible. That's gonna increase the optimized speed for it, which makes Google happy for Webcore Vital purposes, and it also can add a lot of load time for mobile viewing, and Google does prioritize mobile viewing, and so you want everything on mobile to be as fast and seamless as possible. I hope this helps someone. I know, like I said, I get a lot of questions about this, but they're really y'all. Keep it simple. Keep it to the bare minimum If there are.

LeeAnn Fox: 13:59

If you have multiple plugins that do somewhat the same feature, like I was mentioning about the tracking codes find a single plugin that can do all of it and that way you can get rid of a few of them. If you can do something manually on your site, then do it. Don't get a plugin to do it for you. I have seen, especially recently with a lot of the updates that have happened, where certain plugins just cause all kinds of issues. I actually had one, even with the few that I do have, I installed the update for you know it always has updates. I installed it and then it was causing conflict with another plugin that I had, and I had to wait for that plugin to install its updates so the two of them could be compatible together, and so the fewer of them that you do have on your site, the less likely you are to have these issues. But again, you could still have them.

LeeAnn Fox: 14:45

All right, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us this week. Be sure to come again for our next episode, where we continue diving into all things digital discipleship. If you haven't already, be sure to follow us here on the podcast and leave a review. Let us know what you think. Share it with a friend. Our goal here is to build digital disciples everywhere. Remember, if you are not using the internet to influence others towards Jesus, the enemy will surely use it to influence them away from him. All right, everyone. God bless and have a great week. Bye-bye.