Once you’ve decided WordPress is the way to do things, you may become overwhelmed with all the plugins and features available. Don’t worry! You aren’t the only one questioning what to set up and which things are right for you. Switching over to a highly functioning site with accommodations available for every little detail you could possibly incorporate is a lot to take in. To help out, we here at IGV have compiled a list of the best WordPress features you should check out while updating your site. Here they are!
Have you ever been hacked or are you worried about being hacked in the future? Well, no need to stress because WordFence Security can protect your content as well as your mental state when it comes to any of your website worries. This plugin is the most downloaded security feature for WordPress sites. This is credited as the most credible and best protection to-date for websites.
This is how you get to know the facts! Who is viewing what? How long are people on my site? How many people visit my site in ‘X’ amount of time? Do I have a high bounce rate? With the Google Analytics code embedded to the back-end of your site, all the answers you need to know are at your fingertips. All these details come in really handy when you’re trying to decide on advertising, or need to outsource your marketing needs. A company or employee is able to access your Google Analytics, with your permission and granted access, to pull data and dig into the nitty gritty.
Have you ever lost all of your contacts when you get a new cell phone or forgot to store everything to your cloud before updating? It’s frustrating when you have to ask people to provide you with their name and phone number all over again, right? That’s why WordPress has an email address encoder plugin. This is another spot to store all your contacts in the events of your information being wiped out or lost. Now, we aren’t saying this is likely to happen, but given the amount of security your website has available, you never know who could hack into it or toggle with specific information. It’s always good to have a plan B. Better safe than sorry!
This site is a suggestion to help reduce the load time of your site. Most photos these days are large in size and need reduced. If they are too big, this takes the site much longer to load, and many impatient people are going to bounce. If you have great images and want to use them on your site, upload them to tinypng.com, download the new file size and re-upload it to your site in place of what already exists. This will make things run quicker for your website visitors!
You know those goofy letter-number combinations you have to enter in order to continue from a certain page on a website, or you have to select all the tiles with the car in them? This is what a Google RECAPTCHA does on your website to prevent any fake accounts or spam from coming through. Often times, people implement these into their websites so there aren’t any ‘fake’ customers. These are usually placed on pages where you are asked to fill out a form or enter credit card information as the websites way of double checking that you are sincerely inquiring about a product or service.
Hopefully, these five things have narrowed down some of the essentials you will need to get started with your WordPress site. If you have any questions about installations or updates, please feel free to call our office or submit a live chat request and we can help you out to the best of our ability!
