WordPress plugins on this website

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:

1. Aged Content Message, maintained by me
2. Antispam Bee, maintained by pluginkollektiv
3. BackWPup, maintained by Inspyde
4. Broken Link Checker, maintained by Vladimir Prelovac
5. Comment Moderation by Word Count, maintained by me
6. Custom Site Icon Sizes, maintained by Florian Brinkmann
7. DEWP Planet Feed, maintained by people from de.wordpress.org
8. GitHub Updater, maintained by Andy Fragen
9. Google XML Sitemaps, maintained by Arne Brachhold
10. Imagify Image Optimizer, maintained by WP Media
11. oEmbed Gist, maintained by Takayuki Miyauchi
12. Public Post Preview, maintained by Dominik Schilling
13. Publish Confirm, maintained by pluginkollektiv
14. Remove /blog Slug, maintained by WebDevStudios
15. SpeakerDeck oEmbeds, maintained by Brad Parbs
16. Stringintelligenz, maintained by me
17. SyntaxHighlighter Evolved, maintained by Alex Mills
18. The Bilingual Categories Hack, maintained by me
19. Trim Spam Comment Text, maintained by me
20. User Switching, maintained by John Blackbourn
21. Widget CSS Classes, maintained by C.M. Kendrick
22. WP Rocket, maintained by WP Media
23. WP Rocket | External Script Handler, maintained by WP Rocket Support
24. WP Rocket | Redirect HTTP to HTTPS, maintained by WP Rocket Support
25. wpSEO, maintained by Soeren Eisenschmidt
26. – 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.

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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.