WordPress Plugins You Can’t Live Without

I have recently discovered some very valuable plugins from WordPress that I thought I’d share. There are many more that deserve recognition but I will save those for another post.  If you have any plugins you like –  let me know in the comments.  Please include the name of the plugin and what you like about it, or include some of its features/benefits.

1. Yoast SEO Are you still using All in One SEO Pack? If so you are missing out on the ease and massive time saving features of this plugin. It’s extensive and offers more than just the ability to easily enter meta tags. Sitemap creation and submission, addition of social media profiles, and even confirmation of the website in Google Web Console are just some of the features available in this plugin.

2. iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) Excellent full solution to an ongoing and increasingly serious problem of website attacks. I just have to say “Thank You” It’s everything you’ve ever wanted in a security solution and more. Easy control panel and ip-address  information on who these scoundrels are.  Automatic blocking of suspicious ip’s , automatic backups …and like I said..more!

3. Velvet Blue Urls Anyone that has moved a site from a test domain to it’s main domain will appreciate the ability of this plugin to automatically scan your pages, posts, images, etc for test site urls and change them to the new domain url. Example:  http://www.testsite.com to http://www.domainname.com. It saves an incredible amount of time and frustration but beware, it may miss a few here and there.

4. Post Type Switcher While there seem to be a lot of plugins that have this functionality, I find this one particularly good because it is simple. No bells and whistles, and it does exactly what it says. Switch from a page to a post or a post to a page with the click of a button. It’s really that simple.

5. Optimize Database After Deleting Revisions Did you know that each time you make a change to a page no matter how small it may be, the old version is stored in the database. If your site is sluggish, or you are reaching maximum capacity on your server, this is all you need. Simply install it and it does the rest.