Most self-hosted WordPress blog themes are great out of the box but better with a few great plugins.
There are thousands and thousands of plugins available that can give you extra functionality to your self-hosted WordPress website and blog. Below is a list of plugins that I recommend:
Yoast SEO – (#1 WordPress SEO Plugin) – Need some help with your search engine optimization? Need an SEO plugin that helps you reach for the stars? Yoast SEO is the original WordPress SEO plugin since 2008. Pro tip: Use Yoast SEO Premium to redirect deleted pages to new URLs.
Autoptimize – If you consider performance important, you really should use one of the many caching plugins to do page caching. Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, inject CSS in the page head by default (but can also defer), move and defers scripts to the footer, and minifies HTML. The “Extra” options allow you to optimize Google Fonts and images, async non-aggregated JavaScript, remove WordPress core emoji cruft, and more. As such, it can improve your site’s performance!
EWWW Image Optimizer – A plugin that increases your page speeds through image optimization. Increased page speeds can result in better search engine rankings and improved conversion rates (increased sales and signups). It will also save you storage space and bandwidth. While EWWW I.O. will automatically optimize new images you upload, it can also optimize all the images you have already uploaded and optionally convert them to the best file format. You can choose pixel-perfect compression or high compression options that are visually lossless.
Header Footer Code Manager – by 99 Robots is an easy interface to add snippets to the header or footer or above or below the content of your page. (This plugin is especially helpful because it allows you to add different post header and footer copy based on post categories or tags.)
Cache Enabler – A plugin that creates static HTML files and stores them on the server’s disk. The web server will deliver the static HTML file and avoid resource-intensive back-end processes (core, plugins, and database). This WordPress cache engine will improve the performance of your website.
Note: I am not affiliated with any of the above-recommended plugins, and I do not offer support for plugins. Please click through to plugin details and support links for any questions or support.
