What is Wordpress
Simply put, Wordpress is an online website creation platform or tool to make websites.
Strictly speaking websites are made from computer code and did involve basic knowledge or programming language like HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor).
Some really smart people got together and created a tools called Wordpress which basically allowed you to make a website without any programming knowledge, which also includes all the latest standards and technology to have a very reliable, responsive and optimised website.
Wordpress was initially used and marketed to bloggers but is now the world leaders for most websites, CMS (Content Management Systems) and used by a lot of the most popular websites in the world.
Did I mention it’s also 100% free!
What is a Wordpress Plugin
Plugins make our online life so much easier.
Just say you wish to add extra features to your website. It would involve learning a program language and having to wrote that program within your website to make the function a reality.
Even for the best programmers this can be difficult and take a lot of time.
But not with plugin. Plugins are ready bits of computer code you can quickly add to any Wordpress website to make your new features a reality.
Contact Form 7
Just about every website needs a contact section, at least if your a business or organisation who wants your customers to connect with you directly.
The problem with openly displaying your email address on your website is spammers will eventually grab it and start spamming you.
The best thing you can do is add a contact for, where your email is not displayed and your users can just add their own message and hit submit.
Contact form 7 does the job very well and is packed with features and customisation.
Jet Pack – Site Stats
Jetpack is an official Wordpress plugin packed with useful features you can use on your website.
The most popular one is the “Site Stats”.
Site stats allows you to see how many people have been to your website, what days they come to your site and what pages they went to.
Its also very good because it can tell you how your customers found you, as in what pages referred them to you.
With this information you can tailor your website to meets the needs of your customers once you know who they are.
W3 Total Cache
Every time you or someone access your Wordpress website, a lot of thinking has to be done on your web server side to generate a webpage for your users to see and use.
A lot of the pages are static and do not change from person to person, so do not need to be rendered time and time again.
W3 Total Cache, in an essence creates a page one time that doesn’t need to be remade every single time, dramatically increasing the speed of your website loading; specially if there is a lot of code being generated each time.
That’s just scratching the surface. It also does a lot more but that is its main feature.
Wordfence Security
Yes, even your website needs its own security.
Wordfence is a free Wordpress antivirus for your website which protects your site and users from viruses and attacks.
People will try and attack your websites for all sorts of reasons. Whether it be to take you down or inject your site with ads to advertise your to your customers, there are many threats out there to your website.
I particularly like Wordfence because it also comes with a Firewall and periodically scans your sites and also tells you of any changes.
You can block people by IP address or just saying you are getting a lot of login attempts from a particular country, you can block the whole country.
There are additional features which come at a cost but the free version is probably good enough.
Yoast SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimsation and is the process of setting your website up a certain way search engines like Google will like it and hopefully give your site preference in the search engine results over other similar websites.
Search Engine Optimsation isn’t easy and requires a lot of knowledge and work.
Yoast SEO makes the whole process a lot easier and helps you optimise your website to get the best exposure.
Nobody knows entirely how search engines rank your website but there are some time tested strategies which just make sense you should use.
As these practices change so does Yoast SEO.
