Note: Content might be outdated!
Thorsten asked, so here is the current state of the plugins running on this website, as well as a couple of notes on general plugin territories like security, performance, SEO, and marketing/social proof. TL;DR: It’s been raining for days, what can you do. 😉
A total of 31 30 plugins are currently active on GlückPress.
I am a strong believer in separation of concerns, and I learned my actions and filters back when working with Inpsyde, so I usually code up yet another small plugin when in need, rather than dumping stuff in the functions.php of my custom theme.
Without further ado, here’s my list:
- Aged Content Message, maintained by me
- Antispam Bee, maintained by pluginkollektiv
- BackWPup, maintained by Inspyde
- Broken Link Checker, maintained by Vladimir Prelovac
- Comment Moderation by Word Count, maintained by me
- Custom Site Icon Sizes, maintained by Florian Brinkmann
- DEWP Planet Feed, maintained by people from de.wordpress.org
- GitHub Updater, maintained by Andy Fragen
- Google XML Sitemaps, maintained by Arne Brachhold
- Imagify Image Optimizer, maintained by WP Media
- oEmbed Gist, maintained by Takayuki Miyauchi
- Public Post Preview, maintained by Dominik Schilling
- Publish Confirm, maintained by pluginkollektiv
- Remove /blog Slug, maintained by WebDevStudios
- SpeakerDeck oEmbeds, maintained by Brad Parbs
- Stringintelligenz, maintained by me
- SyntaxHighlighter Evolved, maintained by Alex Mills
- The Bilingual Categories Hack, maintained by me
- Trim Spam Comment Text, maintained by me
User Switching, maintained by John Blackbourn- Widget CSS Classes, maintained by C.M. Kendrick
- WP Rocket, maintained by WP Media
- WP Rocket | External Script Handler, maintained by WP Rocket Support
- WP Rocket | Redirect HTTP to HTTPS, maintained by WP Rocket Support
- wpSEO, maintained by Soeren Eisenschmidt
- – 31. Five more custom plugins I haven’t published anywhere and probably would feel embarrassed to do so.
Security
My site never got hacked, and I intend to keep it that way. However, I don’t use any security plugin. If I would, I’d give SecuPress a spin which I had the pleasure testing multiple times at work.
As far as comment spam can be considered a security issue, Antispam Bee has kept this blog clean since 2011.
Performance
Working for the provider of a popular caching plugin, I am obviously biased in terms of which plugin to use to speed up my site.
If you don’t feel comfortable investing $39 for a fantastic caching solution, you should probably try Autoptimize. It does not cache pages like WP Rocket, but in terms of file optimisation it is really good.
These days I limit my use of images to real content and consider “featured” images (“post thumbnails”) a waste of time and bandwidth – unless they are crafted with extra dedication, like for example the custom illustrations at the HelpScout blog.
For the images I use, Imagify does a tremendous job of crunching them down upon upload.
Like WP Rocket, Imagify is a product of the people I work with at WP Media, so I’m biased recommending it, but hey, no affiliate links on this blog. 🙂
Other than these two, a lightweight theme, no random stock photography as featured images, no ad networks, and no API requests to Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and basically no tracking are my recipe for fairly fast loading times.
SEO
I use the SEO plugin I use for a single functionality it provides and will probably ditch it soon.
Since this blog is not trying to sell anything, I don’t think I’m going to need another SEO plugin after wpSEO (which used to be great).
Social proof, marketing, pop-overs, ads
GTFO. 🙂 Don’t need, don’t use.
So this is it. If you’re interested in which plugins some pretty rad WordPress developers use on their sites, I recommend Thorsten’s post and the ones he lists at the end of the people who followed his lovely challenge.
Hey Caspar,
thanks a lot for joining in on the fun! 🙂
Nice plugin list, with some overlaps between yours and either mine or Hans-Helge’s or Tom’s.
I just installed Broken Link Checker, which I had in the back of the back of my mind for a longer time already. Thanks for reminding me. Why install it? I tend to link to lots of (hopefully useful) references in the Wild Wild Web when writing (somewhat) technical posts or tutorials. If these external resources ever became unuseful then, … there’s no use in having them. So I’d like to be made aware of this to either update or remove a link.
Cheers,
Thorsten
P.S.: Thou shalt not have (things like) User Switching running on production…! 😉
P.P.S.: I hope he/she will get active in and around Berlin soon. 🙂
That’s very true, and I can’t even remember why I had left it active. Turned it off now. 😉