Theme - Astra
When building a website, it is important to start with a theme that gives you the most functionality for defining typography, colours, headers and footers, and site global features, and performs well (does not have excessive embedded JavaScript that will slow performance). I have found that the Astra theme scores well in both of those areas, and it is my preferred theme for building websites.
Plugins
Plugins have many uses, ranging from helping you to build the website, through to providing specific functionality for your business or organisation. This article focuses on the base plugins that I regard as providing the best foundation for all my websites, without going into any specific business or process functionality. I also discuss page builders and SEO functionality in other articles.
Backend plugins
Following are the plugins that I use for almost every website. They look after all of the backend functionality that is required to keep the website secure and with good performance.
Security – Wordfence
I always start by securing the website, and the first plugin that I install is Wordfence – which stops hacking attempts a few different ways, including a firewall, blocking suspicious IP addresses and incorrect attempted logins. It also does a periodic scan of the installation for Malware, as well as any components of the website that need to be upgraded.
Backup & Restore - UpdraftPlus
If your site is ever hacked you will find that your site backup becomes essential as you bring the site back online after fixing the attack. The functionality of this backup tool is great – it saved me after a site that I was managing was hacked very badly.
DB and image optimisation
The performance of a website can be affected if you don’t compress both the database and images. I use Advanced Database Cleaner for database optimization - this plugin allows you to schedule regular DB compressions.
For image optimisation I use EWWW Image Optimizer - it is simple, and on client sites where clients have been loading lots of images it looks after image resizing (which can make a big difference if a client hasn't sized images correctly before loading them). I set the image sizing to max 1920px W x 1440px H, which I find results in images that have good resolution and load quickly. I also enable the EWWW lazy load feature.
The other plugin that is worth considering in this area is WP Optimizer. It contains both DB and image optimisation in a single plugin, and it has the added advantage of identifying orphaned tables in the DB (you have to buy the pro version of Advanced DB Cleaner to get that). However, it often clashes with other plugins (especially LiteSpeed Cache) and I have had server errors recently when I have tried to use it. So you can't always use it.
Cache
Every website needs to use a cache tool to improve performance, and there are lots of cache plugins available. I use LiteSpeed Cache as my default for sites using a LiteSpeed server - it allows you to apply specific rules to how you want to cache, and in particular exclude any pages that have problems if they are cached (e.g. a page that has inputs made by a customer)
Email SMTP
The default WordPress email settings often lead to deliverability problems because the default email protocol is PHP mail. This protocol only delivers email to an email address with the same domain as your website - so I always ensure that my Admin login uses the same domain as my website (but even then you can still get errors sometimes). So to ensure consistent email delivery you need to implement an SMTP mailer.
The most commonly used email plugin is WP SMTP - this allows you to choose which email service you are going to use (there are many free and subscription services available). The one that I use most often is SMTP2Go, which has a free subscription that allows you to send 1,000 emails per month. However, part of the installation requires that you go into your hosting/domain provider DNS settings to add some DNS records - so you need to have access to that either through cPanel, or your domain provider configuration.
Updates - Easy Updates Manager
Managing all of the updates for a website can be tedious, with new versions of plugins, themes and WP coming out regularly. The standard WP functionality allows you to enable auto-updates for WP and plugins, but not themes. In addition, after doing a restore with UpdraftPlus all auto-updates are disabled and cannot be reenabled. This plugin allows you to manage your update requirements from one place, including after a restore (which is essential for my site builds because I regularly build and test in a subdomain and then restore back to the top domain when the build is ready to go live).
Download the presentation
A presentation of this material is available here