The right plugins can greatly improve the efficiency and the look the functionality of your website. The wrong plugins can give you problems. As a general rule, only use plugins that are well reviewed are compatible with your theme and the well supported I only use free plugins, and these fall into three broad categories. These are security, SEO, and functionality. In the last video, I talked about the need for protecting your site from hackers. I use three plugins to protect all of my sites.

Wordfence has a free and the pro plan. The free plan provides quite a high level of protection straight out of the box with its own default settings. Got 100% protection against brute force attacks for example. The settings options are quite extensive, and they're best explored yourself using the word fence help service online. This is where they recommend optimal settings. Scrolling down to the bottom of the dashboard, you can see that this site has had hundreds of attacks every month.

Worldwide, the plugin blocks about 70 million attacks every single day. I use a separate plugin to guard against exe s s vulnerability attacks, which protects against code script manipulation. Note, we don't have to fully understand the precise nature of these attacks. The plugin is simply activated I'd forgotten. Lastly, as I'm building a niche site, depending on links to products that I affiliate to, I use an empty click jack plugin. Click jacking is when a hacker places an iframe over your page that is identical to it.

When a user clicks on your banner, it is redirected to the hackers site. ie the click has been hijacked. Now we move on to SEO and site speed is becoming more and more of a factor for Google search. The speed at which your site loads into a browser should be optimized. It makes sense for a service like Google, which tries to provide the best experience for its users to give preference To fast sites, a site that takes longer to load begins to lose visitors. 50% of all visitors simply don't wait for it to load once this time exceeds something like four seconds.

Using the following plugins, I increase my site load speed from 4.7 seconds to a little over one second, which is a significant improvement. Images take time to load and display. And normally, images are processed even if they are not displayed yet. The a three lazy load plugin holds back on the image rendering until the user scrolls down and views them. This saves the initial page load time. I have a similar plugin called lazy load for videos.

Does the same thing for YouTube embeds. A thumbnail image is displayed and the video code is only processed when the image is clicked. The plugin smush compresses the overall image size without reducing quality. This also improves PageSpeed WordPress fastest cache delivers a cached file of your posts and pages. This plugin alone should reduce your site load time by two to three seconds. Moving on to on page SEO.

The plugin called all in one SEO provides a way of writing a targeted description for your posts. This is the title and description that Google will display in search results. So a keyword rich text will help enormously. Meta Tag Manager allows the addition of meta tags, which are basically keywords. Meta Tags are not considered to be that important for Google Search anymore. But the main keywords that we enter in here can reinforce the overall tone of your post.

I usually add three or four main keywords. If it's overdone, and you add too many, it could be judged as keyword stuffing, which was common years ago, because in those days it worked. The rest of the site is fairly standard with additional plugins used that help with administrative tasks. It's worth mentioning others that are used to enhance the presentation of clickable banners directing a user to my affiliate offers. The sidebar has many uses, and is generally the place where we put a search bar, archived posts and categories. These places in the form of widgets it's a great area for one or two square banners.

But with normal functioning, there's a problem Normally when the user scrolls down to read the post, the banners are lost from view. I use a plugin called q2 w three fixed widget. This plugin holds the banners in place. Once activated, the widget containing the banner code can be selected as sticky. This means it will be on view the whole time when the user scrolls down the page. using another plugin called widget context, I can have several banners.

Each one laser targeted according to the post conference A box appears underneath the widget where you can select to the posts where the banners are displayed. It may be from time to time that we want to run a special promotion and place a banner or some text in every post on the site. As your site grows, this becomes quite a task. The plugin called ad inserter does this automatically. ads can be inserted at the top of a post at the bottom or even two, three or four paragraphs down. It's very flexible and saves a lot of time.

It's fast Becoming a requirement for Google that a website is labeled HTTPS, which means that it's secure. It has an SSL certificate. And in the next video, I'll show you how to install a free certificate for your site.