Top 5 Plugins Every Local WordPress Site Needs for Success

1. Introduction

Whether you’re new to the local site building space or a seasoned professional, this post is for you. At BoldGrid, we noticed that people in the local site building space all tend to use the same plugins or tools. I want to share with you the top 5 plugins every local WordPress site needs for success! Not only that, but we’ve teamed up with two of those plugin developers to offer you some amazing discounts and maybe even a contest or two. Even if you are in the local guide space building industry, you’ll likely benefit from the following. Not only is the topic of the post useful, but you might snag a deal just for feedback in the comments. With that said, thanks in advance for sticking with me to get the 411 on what it takes to get a local business online in a successful way. Now let’s get started.

If you’re starting a local WordPress development business, you’ve likely researched what niche to serve, what to charge, and what local businesses truly need from a website. This is all incredibly important. If you need help with this part of your new venture, we have an amazing course you can take called Local SEO Blueprint. It’s a course we created for folks who would be building local sites. We’ve recently begun working on a similar course but for folks who will be doing sites for e-commerce. Stay tuned for more details. But aside from all of this important decision-making information, you should also be seriously considering what infrastructure to put in place for your new WordPress site building business. I might be a little partial to the following resources, but everything I am about to share with you is absolutely essential for local site building success!

2. Security Plugins

WP Activity Log: WordPress is an open-source content management system that offers a simple solution for creating and managing amazing digital content. Whether you set up WordPress to generate automated blogs, sell digital products online, or improve your company’s online presence, WordPress gives you plenty of cool stuff to enjoy. Unfortunately, WordPress is also popular with folks who are looking to take advantage of your amazing digital presence. According to statistics from Wordfence, all WordPress websites put together suffer around 90,000 attacks every minute. With WordPress plugins providing back-door access for 98% of these attacks, webmasters need to bolster and harden their security. This is why WP Activity Log should be part of your multisite security concerns.

10Web Security: Protect your site with a powerful firewall, core security scanner, uptime monitoring, 2-factor authentication, auto hardening, and a great deal more. 10Web uses intelligent algorithms to do all the hard work for you. With one-click setup options, setups so simple your Grandma could get it done.

iThemes Security Pro: Many web designers use the free iThemes Security plugin on every WordPress site they build. In fact, the same thing applies to professional WordPress security experts. How come? It can be an effective tool in defending your WordPress site against a long list of security threats. In fact, it’s so helpful that I think you’d be foolish not to install the iThemes plugin on your site. Heads up: They also offer a free version of this super plugin if you’re not quite ready to launch out on the pro version. iThemes Security Pro has an excess of outstanding features, contains a great deal of custom website settings, and gets continuously updated. Some of the additional features you’ll want to check out are things like Trusted Devices, User Action Logging, User Security Check, Password Discovering, and more. To completely grasp all that this security plugin offers, take a look at the Feature Comparison matrix by visiting iThemes website.

2.1. Firewall Plugin

In a world full of cyber threats, great plugin protection options are hard to come by. This is the main reason why Wordfence has become essential for over 3 million websites. With it, you get the latest firewall rules and malware signatures, giving you full protection. This allows users to schedule the time you perform a scan, change what gets done in a scan, or ignore or whitelist certain results. Speaking of scans, this plugin quickly finds and efficiently removes malware by comparing certain files to an updated database, ensuring fast and automatic updates of its threat defense feed, without any of the hassle. It even scans for web shells, malicious redirects, backdoors, trojans, errors and plenty more. With Wordfence, you get a wide selection of IP, malware and security alerts, which are delivered to users in real-time via high importance. All around, this plugin is essential for stopping cybercriminals before they even reach your site.

Securing your website is a top priority, as cyberattacks are no longer a matter of if, but when. The Wordfence Security – Firewall & Malware Scan plugin is the ultimate WordPress security plugin. It comes complete with a Web Application Firewall, Malware scanner and much more. This firewall plugin has a range of helpful security features, including IP Blacklisting with security alerts, login security to guard against brute force attacks, security incident recovery tools, blacklist IPs, and manage the firewall whitelist and security recommendations. It also offers a 2FA (Two Factor Authentication) login security option, making protecting your website, its visitors and your reputation even easier.

2.2. Malware Scanner Plugin

After setting up with a few custom options, a scan runs automatically every 6 hours. In the case of an upgraded plan, however, it runs every 30 minutes. This plugin also has a feature where an email would be sent to the user after it finishes scanning. The scanning may take up to a few hours, and the email could be a warning of “Cron is missing”. ManageWP provides options whether to ignore the security issue that is there on the website or to ignore the scan and clean up schedule. The Ignore option helps a user to avoid errors. Scanning results may take over an hour, but on the brighter side, the Managed Service provider can log out and get back when the scanning is completed. If having encountered a problem, the user can switch again to the main WordPress login page and then log in. The email alert builds good faith between the Managed Service provider and the client. The client eagerly waits for the email during the completed scanning process; it also gives comprehensive information and is quite critical to make a note of the details. This would provide a chance to address current issues promptly.

As the name suggests, malware scanner plugins help in scanning the entirety of your website’s content, including the script, themes, and images, for any malware. These scanners can also implement security measures across the WordPress sites and block any known threats. Automated scanning plugins can run in the background without affecting the normal usage of your website and alert you when a scan should be performed due to a vulnerability. The free version is usually restrictive, while the premium options come with a variety of features such as custom security tweaks and blacklist checks.

3. SEO Plugins

To take it further, and you want your site to be found not just on the first 10 pages, but in the top 5 results, begin with the Yoast’s SEO plugin. Next, install Google’s Search Console which previously was called Webmaster tools. Here’s what it does – first, it gives you an idea how readers are using Google to find your site. How do they find you, which search phrases do they use? This is gold info because then you can make more of your content be geared towards that type of content – and those keywords. Secondly, it lets you check up on your website’s security, as well as speed and more. In the beginning, it sounds like a burden, all those emails it’s sending you, especially at 2 am in the morning, but trust me, they are essential. Lessons learned from Geiko the Lizard: You will gain so much from it – Sign in!

How are people finding you? I really hope it’s not by people driving by your office or store. Maybe you have marked your place on Google Places. It’s a great start, but you can take that further. In my previous post, I mentioned Yoast’s SEO plugin for tags and category pages. An important reminder – Yoast has a fine SEO plugin to use apart from the Jetpack plugin. Just like Jetpack, Yoast’s SEO plugin is a powerhouse that will help you elevate your site’s Google search game and make sure you get the most out of your SEO. If you’re not showing up on the search results in the first 10 pages of Google, chances are people can’t find your business on the web – (That is a shame).

3.1. SEO Optimization Plugin

Specifically, the plugin allows you to optimize each page and post on your website using a focus keyphrase which makes it easier for searchers to find you. The simple color-coded scanning system makes it easy to see which areas for improvement exist on your page. Simply pick a focus keyphrase that encapsulates your topic and add it to the ‘focus keyphrase’ box underneath the general settings which appear beneath the ‘edit’ post on your website page editor screen. Pages need not require a focus keyphrase for optimization. For the best results, enter your focus keyphrase in the meta description and slug. Each optimized page will display a snippet preview in a mobile and desktop view with a clear indication of changes required and improvements already made. Users can easily preview the edited result of their post with the ‘Google preview’ pop up below the snippet preview towards the middle of the page. And the best thing is, users will see the full version of this block in the free version of the plugin with any issues immediately highlighted at the beginning of the article and edited in real-time as required.

When it comes to WordPress plugins, the best ones for local websites are the ones that are easy to use. That’s why absolutely everyone can benefit from a great SEO plugin. With relatively few settings to learn and little customization required, an SEO plugin goes to work improving your site from the moment you enter your details. This WordPress plugin has 5+ million active installations because all of the settings are easy to customize and there are extensive help links throughout.

3.2. XML Sitemap Plugin

When you first install and activate Google XML Sitemaps, you will need to go to the settings to build your sitemap. The great thing about Google XML Sitemap plugin is you only need to turn it on and it will start generating the sitemap for the search engines, you don’t need to access another dashboard or anything to take this action, it will take effect immediately after you turn on this plugin. This is essential for every website and at stake, blogs are no exception and it’s the second thing you need to set up right after the robots.txt file. If you need further help regarding the best approach for successful search indexation of your website, consider discussing it with a digital marketing specialist.

XML Sitemap Plugin – Another important thing you’ll need to do quite early in your site’s launch is to build and submit an XML sitemap to Google and Bing to help your site get indexed quickly. Providing up-to-date sitemaps will help search engines understand how the site is organized while offering valuable content for your users and search engines. This is essential for every website and stake blogs and local business sites are no exception. We recommend plugins such as Google XML Sitemaps which will also be useful to inform search engines about changes to the site’s content. The plugin helps you and search engines better index your site.

3.3. Social Media Sharing Plugin

This powerful plugin is an all-in-one solution, from customization options to tracking how often posts have been shared. It includes buttons that are highly customizable, placement options for posts that have been shared, the ability to connect to various social media networks all over the world, and share count functions. Amplify your content and increase engagement by easily connecting social sharing buttons to over 200 global social networks. Users can use shortcode functions or a sharing widget to customize displays, and developers can take advantage of REST API functions and a JavaScript SDK. With AMP, it shares with social media users on their platforms where posts have shared, offering an expansion of market opportunities.

It’s important to connect and communicate with your customers on social media. Utilizing a social media sharing plugin is critical because it helps drive that social media engagement by automatically sharing new posts on your website via the more than 30 popular social media platforms supported. This can be an essential way to increase social media engagement, giving you more visibility and interaction from your customers on your website and beyond. By connecting social media profiles to your website, you also give an SEO boost, making it easier for potential customers to find your business online.

4. Performance Optimization Plugins

The GoDaddy Optimization Plugin for WordPress is also needed for it to provide the best optimization process. Although you can always go manually enter code and set a lot of the options located in the plugin menu, it helps to give others peace of mind since it will simply work magic on your site.

W3 Total Cache is a performance optimization plugin that is used to improve the speed of your site by doing things like caching pages that don’t often change, minifying HTML and CSS, and deferring JavaScript. Anything that helps to offload some work from your server when it comes to telling the browser how to render your front end can help with performance so that your server can focus on processing comments, interacting with site members, and creating new content.

You need a performance optimization plugin to help improve load times and interactivity. The two performance optimization plugins I have listed here work especially well for large sites. They help you keep up with the competition while maintaining peace of mind.

In addition to SEO, the one thing we all care about when it comes to our WordPress sites is performance. How fast is it loading? Is it fast enough to get the job done? Will visitors stick around long enough to scroll through a page or click a link?

4.1. Caching Plugin

First, use a caching plugin. And second, ensure you’ve gone into settings and clear your site’s cache every time needed. If you make a content update and do not understand why your changes haven’t appeared on the site, this can be why. When you finish the update, you may forget to refresh the site’s cache. Either do this manually or set up a reminder with a tool like Boomerang to ensure nothing gets through the cracks.

A good caching plugin should be on every single WordPress site you build. End of story. They can make a huge difference in the speed of your site and the experience of your clients. There are tons of caching plugins on the market, but the two powerhouses are W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. In general, W3 Total Cache is more powerful but a little harder to use. WP Super Cache is a little less powerful but is easier for your clients to understand and use. Both are good options. It’s also important to make sure that your caching plugin has settings that work easily with WordPress Multisite – after making past mistakes, we believe WP Super Cache is the best bet for that reason.

4.2. Image Compression Plugin

There are 3 levels of image compression for every site’s needs: Lossy, Glossy, and Lossless. The glossy compression deliberately discards non-essential information to reduce the image’s file size without losing quality. Lossless Compression modifies an image’s file size without changing the image’s features. If a webmaster elects this option, images will retain their original appearance. The “Apply settings to also compress WP Retina 2X thumbnails” will automatically compress generated thumbnails used by themes from WP Retina 2X. The WooCommerce compatibility automatically adds the images and thumbnail sizes included in a product webpage. The original image can be replaced with a ShortPixel optimized image or a backup original to ensure images maintain their recognizable shapes. Media Versary compaction is a method of analyzing an image at its original height and width dimensions.

ShortPixel’s Image Compression Plugin is an image management service that provides optimized media for websites. It offers image compression for JPEGs, PNGs, PDFs, and GIFs. The tool has several features to assist in generating the best images, no matter the website. Among many features to create the best WP images for every website are: Bulk Optimization. ShortPixel PDF Compression offers a unique solution for handling a website’s PDFs. ShortPixel Page Builder Compatibility generates powerful content quickly, easily, and effectively. Image compression reduces the file sizes for upload, a key step in improving a webpage’s load time. The original images can be auto-resized using ShortPixel’s Cloud and the ReSmush.it method. The “Original preserving” option puts a copy of the original image in the WordPress media library for SEO optimization.

4.3. Lazy Load Plugin

This is where lazy loading comes into play. Instead of loading all of your images on a single page at one time, the browser will defer some of them until the rest of your content has been taken care of. When the user gets closer to the images, they will be loaded continuously as they come near. OceanWP offers this important function as a built-in feature to optimize your site speed. The Undertable Lazy Load plugin is a great solution that is not overly technical. Once you activate it, you’ll be able to choose the content that isn’t to be lazy loaded and that’s all there is to it.

Anyone who deals with search engine optimization knows the value of having fast page load times. Google themselves have said that page load times are a factor in where your site ranks for many years now. If you need help optimizing images, consider using services that will compress the images for you. If they’re not properly formatted, images can be quite large, which can be a resource drain on your site. Additionally, every single photo is counted as a file request, which can slow things down even further.

5. Contact Form Plugin

If you want to grow a local WordPress business, you need to provide a high level of support. Good customer service is something your clients can offer to their clients, what better way to provide support than implementing the best Contact Form plugin to stay in touch with their website visitors. Here’s to the small guy, the local businesses who might not have walls of cubicles with staff waiting to answer phones or manage support email. When you need help with a product or service, someone responds quickly, makes you feel important, and does everything you need to get your issue resolved. And when your issue is resolved, you go about your day, pleased with the service you received.

Contact Form Plugin Chances are pretty high you’re familiar with WPForms already, and if you aren’t, it’s easy to get started. Grab the free Contact Form version from the WordPress.org plugin repository, install and activate it, and follow the on-screen instructions to create a new form. Using the drag-and-drop form builder is a breeze even if you’ve never used it. Simply export and import the form from client sites to your own staging area or create a “blank” template for projects. The sky’s the limit with HTML blocks, Smart Tags, and the plugin’s many addons.

Your local small business clients need a way to keep in touch. What’s more, they need a way that sort of levels the playing field – something that makes them seem just as professional as the national competitors who have dedicated staff to keep tabs on email or answer the phone.

Excited to explore wonders? Step in and encounter what truly makes us exceptional!

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