Tag: WordPress plugins

Plugins spring cleaning

I’ve done a little spring cleaning of some plugins installed and activated on this site.  You shouldn’t notice much of a difference, except, maybe, fewer quirks and issues.  Here are some of the plugins that were removed:

  • Smart YouTube Pro – it was only used in a couple of posts for easier embedding of YouTube playlists.  Since I installed and used this plugin, WordPress got much better at embedding videos, so I don’t need it anymore.
  • Smart 404 – I think I used it with one of the previous themes on this site, but I can’t even remember last time I saw it working.  The 404 page of the current theme features a search form, which I think is good enough.
  • PayPal Donations – this was an experiment I tried ages and ages ago.  No need for this at all for quite some time now.
  • Related Posts By Tags – I used this with one of the previous themes, but it’s been ages since, and I think even the plugin is discontinued now.
  • Social – the plugin has been discontinued and the functionality was moved to JetPack.  I had this one disabled for quite some time now.
  • WP-Polls – this was yet another experiment I tried years ago.  There were a few polls with a few votes, which prevented me from removing this plugin.  But today I thought I’d do a compromise.  I replaced all polls with the screenshot of voting results for the purposes of data preservation. :)  Now I don’t need the plugin anymore and it’s gone.

That’s 6 plugins fewer – not bad.  Especially considering that some of them were quite heavy on the rendering side of things, and they were inserting useless CSS and JavaScript assets into every page of this site.  I think I should do it more often.

The Ultimate WordPress Security Guide – Step by Step (2017)

WPBeginner, a website for beginner guides to WordPress, has published an updated and comprehensive guide to WordPress security – “The Ultimate WordPress Security Guide – Step by Step (2017)“.  Most of the things are well known to seasoned WordPress users – keep things updated, use strong passwords, remove unnecessary plugins, make sure to pick the right hosting, add security enhancing plugins, etc.  But it’s a good place to start for  people who are not too technical and those who don’t think about security implications of having a publicly accessible website on a daily basis.

There are plenty of questions, answers, simple explanations, and links to other resources in the article.  So even if you are an experienced WordPress user, you might find a useful thing or two in there.

You might also want to checkout my earlier blog posts:

WordPress : Supercharge your ecommerce

Supercharge your ecommerce is a collection of reviews of some of the best ecommerce plugins for WordPress.  It covers a variety of options from the most famous like WooCommerce to some less known ones.  Here’s a list of of what’s reviewed:

 

 

WordPress Plugin : Image Processing Queue

As described in “Introducing WP Image Processing Queue – On‑the‑Fly Image Processing Done Right“, Image Processing Queue plugin tries to solve several issues with On-The-Fly Image Processing (OTFIP) in WordPress.  Some of the things that it improves are:

  • Response times for pages with non-yet generated thumbnails.
  • Server CPU spikes for pages which use a lot of images on sites with a lot of configured thumbnail sizes (49? really? WOW! I don’t think I’ve seen more than 10 in the wild, which is still a lot).
  • Server disk space issues caused by removed images and leftover thumbnails.

This is a very useful direction and I hope all the necessary bits will make it into the WordPress core.  But even for those who don’t use WordPress, the whole discussion and implementation are a handy reference.

WordPress Plugin : WP-CFM – manage and deploy WordPress configuration changes

WP-CFM is a WordPress plugin which helps to manage and deploy WordPress configuration changes between different sites.  I haven’t tried it myself yet, but it looks super useful as it allows to separate the configuration options from the content, both of which are stored in the database.  The cherry on top here is the support for WP-CLI, command line interface to WordPress, which is frequently employed for automatically deploying WordPress to different servers and environments.

I have a feeling this plugin will be making its way into our project-template-wordpress setup pretty soon.