Summary

These plugins are mainly for pretty much every WP website. I also delved into Gutenberg and page builders, so that will hopefully be useful specifically for portfolio website.

The less plugins, the better

WP plugins are tricky, it’s code that has control over your whole website, they can screw it up real quick and you might not even know it. They also create tables in your database and deleting the plugins, doesn’t necessarily mean that the tables got deleted too.

There is a billion of them and the best option to see, if they do what you want, is to install them. But the worst thing you can do, is to start installing plugins like crazy. Ideally, you would create some copy of your website, test them out and then install only what you really need on your production site.

People also often install plugins for some minor design or functionality changes, that could be achieved by three lines of code. So, try to check, if what you desire, can’t be achieved by just adding some code. You can ask some AI, or maybe you have a friend who understands this stuff.

Security plugins

Do not have a public website on WordPress, without a security plugin. You will get hacked, sooner or later and getting rid of it is really painful. Google will know and it will stop showing your website, you might endanger your users, it’s just horrible.

Unfortunately, security plugins are tricky, and they can rarely put your whole website down. Ideally, get access to your FTP and be ready to delete the plugin (in the folder wp-content/plugins), in case that happens.

I personally use All in one security. Since I started using it, I never had an issue. Also, Wordfence should be pretty good too, also never had an issue, if that was installed.

SEO plugins

If you want your website to be discoverable by Google, you do NOT want Google to just grab some random stuff from your website and show it in the search. So, install either Yoast SEO or RankMath and set up how your website will look in the search. It’s done in the single page editing, so go to your homepage and edit it there.

Simple History plugin

I love Simple History, especially if you are taking care of a website with more than one user, you really want this. It gives you a list of everything that has been done on the website. So after somebody deletes half of the content, you have a proof, it was them. Also, you can see, how many damn “people” were trying to log in into your WP and hack you. Hopefully, you might take your security after that more seriously, I certainly did.

Backup plugins

There are several ways of creating a backup with WP. The best is probably to do it manually, copy everything from your FTP and dump your database. If you can’t do that, you can use a plugin. I personally use Duplicator, it’s awesome. The only issue there is when your website is larger than 500MB, you will have to get the premium version. I have also seen UpdraftPlus, but I have no experience with that.

Image optimization plugins

Ideally, you will optimize all your images ahead, before uploading them to WP, use WebP image format. But if you are lazy or if there are multiple users, and you want to make sure, that they will not start uploading images straight from their fancy cameras, you want to install a plugin, that will optimize the images for you. I personally use Imsanity, it’s been reliable since I started using it many years ago. Unfortunately, it doesn’t use the webp. I have also seen somebody recommending CompressX, but no experience there so far.

Gutenberg enhancement plugin

Unfortunately, the default Gutenberg blocks are often quite limiting. And also unfortunately, making the blocks from a programming perspective is super annoying, it’s all done in the language React, which is complicated and if there’s a mistake, the whole thing just stops working.

So I try to mostly just adjust what is already there by some custom CSS, because if use some third party code, you could never be sure, that it will work tomorrow. There is one exception and I can’t really imagine making anything without it and that is Flexible spacer block. The default Spacer doesn’t allow you to set the space depending on the view screen, so if you want some bigger space on desktops, but smaller on mobile, you are screwed, therefore, the Flexible spacer is such a bliss.

I have also briefly checked the Twentig plugin, that adds ton of stuff to Gutenberg, but don’t quote me on this.

What not to use, unless you have to

Page builders

Back in the days, there was a classic editor. That was like making websites in MS Word, it was terrible. That’s when all the popular page builders started, so that people could actually create something, without much coding skills. But since Gutenberg, those days are over. Yes, Gutenberg might be a little annoying at the start, but in the end, all page builders are. So, unless you have to for some reason, try not to use any page builders.

Cache plugins

Cache plugins are supposed to make your website faster. Most of them probably don’t do much harm, but I think, that if you have a good well-coded theme, like this one – minimalio.org/free-theme, you don’t actually need it and your website will be fast enough, if your hosting is good enough. If you really want to get into speed performance, you want to check out Cloudflare, it’s little hard to set up, you have to deal with domain DNS, but it’s mostly free, and it’s the best option when it comes to speed. But I think it’s mostly an overkill.