For my portfolio website I have chosen ‘Business Point Theme’ as a base. However, I have used various plugins to enhance my chosen theme feature and improve the functionality of my site.
These are my choice of plugins I have used for my website:
Elementor:
It is used as a page builder for the design of your website. After updating to WordPress 5.0, the new default WordPress editor for posts and pages has changed from the Classic Editor to a new Block style editor.
The Block Editor (called the WordPress Gutenberg Editor) is an entirely new way to edit posts and page content.
However, The Elementor Website builder pinpoint style and spacing control over your designs and allows WordPress users to create and edit websites by employing the drag and drop technique, with a built-in responsive mode supports responsive mobile-friendly design, allowing you to build web pages that work great on any device.
It can make instant page edits from the frontend of your site, so it gives you a front end view of your site while editing.and it also has a high-speed performance which makes it easy to build
Essential Addons for Elementor:
Provide you with some helpful tools added to our Elementor which enables you to get more widgets.
Really Simple SSL:
HTTPS is an encrypted communication protocol which is essentially a more secure way of browsing the web since you get a private channel directly between your browser and the web server.If a site is using HTTPS, you will see a little padlock icon will displays in the address field.
Yoast SEO:
Yoast SEO is the most favourite and downloaded WordPress SEO plugin of millions of users worldwide. It does Optimize your site for search engines and helps your content rank high in Google searches and therefore attract traffic.
It has helped websites worldwide to rank higher in search engines. It improves your WordPress SEO and help you to write better content and have a fully optimised WordPress site.
It allows SEO title, meta description, and meta keywords to be added to every single page and post of the website. It also provides insight as where you need to improve your website specifically in terms of using the right content and keywords in order to achieve a better ranking in google search.
Google XML Site:
It creates XML sitemaps which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your site and therefore improve your site SEO. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.
The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally, it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
However, I decided not to use Google XML Site plugin and remove it from my site as Google XML might cause issues when used in conjunction with Yoast SEO. Both Yoast SEO and Google XML Sitemaps can create XML sitemaps. Therefore, having two XML sitemaps is not beneficial for search engines and might slow down my site.
Monserinsights:
It is the most popular and the most complete Google Analytics plugin for WordPress which is and powerful and easy to use. It is used to connect your WordPress site with Google Analytics, so you can start making data-driven decisions to grow your business. The best part is that MonsterInsights comes with a Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress that shows you actionable analytics reports right inside your WordPress dashboard. Other options would be Analitify and
What Google Analytics is:
Google Analytics track and analyse your website traffic or visitors of your website which help grow your website with digital marketing. It enables you to see how many visitors come to your website, where they are coming from, which country, how long they stay or spend on your website, how they interact with the content of your website and which pages they visit or click most and which pages they bounce off most, how they find your website and when is the pick hour of your website with high traffic and who visits your website and more info in regards to their age, gender and lot of important data.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool helps you to increase your website visitors and improve your website through providing the statistics and data of your website visitors as it let you view statistics to learn more about your website’s visitors and your most popular content.
Akismet Anti-Spam:
It is indeed the best way to protect your blog from spam as it enables you to filter comments for your blog and so prevent spammers on your website. What it does is to check your comments and contact form submissions against global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content.
It’s important to filter comments as search engines don’t like if you have spam in your website as there’s a chance that the page will be flagged as spam by search engines and your site will get penalized.
Wordfence:
Wordfence is the most comprehensive WordPress security solution available helps to spot and block malicious traffic. It includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that were built from the ground up to protect WordPress. Our Threat Defense Feed arms Wordfence with the newest firewall rules, malware signatures and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your website safe.
Jetpack:
is a plugin suite which combines essential WordPress features into one large plugin. It is an all-in-one plugin with tools for security, SEO, and social media marketing and engagement.
UpdraftPlus:
It is the most popular free WordPress backup plugin available on the internet. It is used to keep a backup of your website. It is used by more than 2 million websites.
It allows you to create a complete backup of your WordPress site and store it on the cloud or download to your computer.
This plugin supports scheduled backups as well as on-demand backups. You also have the option to choose which files you want to backup.
It can automatically upload your backups to Dropbox, Google Drive, S3, Rackspace, FTP, SFTP, email, and several other cloud storage services. Besides backing up each WordPress website, UpdraftPlus also allows you to easily restore backups directly from your WordPress admin panel.
It is recommended to back up your site regularly.
Akeeba Backup:
It creates a full backup of your site data in a single archive which can be restored on any host, on any WordPress or Joomla server.
Plugins for Caching (Wpoptimize/ Autoptimize):
Caching helps to enhance your site performance by reducing the webpage load times and increasing the website speed which all contribute to improve user experience of your site visitors. What caching does is to generate the page just once and then serve that pre-generated result to each new visitor who wants to see it and makes your blog load way faster.As to create a good user experience for your site, the web pages needs to load under 1.5 seconds and in order to achieve that it can be done by improving server, caching every aspect of the site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. There are two great options compare with others Caching plugins.
Wpoptimize:
It does clean database, compress images and caches pages. It is database optimization plugins, WordPress stores all of the site’s data in a database, that can get cluttered over time, with a lot of temporary data building up without being properly deleted which they can contribute to longer loading times.Wordpress keep an archive of everything and every modification done. Caching plugins in general control how data deliver from database to the browsers and send the compressed data to browser for it to uncompress. Wpoptimize does clean and polish the site. So, it is not only about the page loading but also about how smooth and easy the data transfers from database.
Autoptimize:
It is also another good option. It speeds up your website by optimizing JS, CSS, images (incl. lazy-load), HTML and Google Fonts, asyncing JS, removing emoji cruft and more.
WPforms
One of thebest WordPress contact form plugins. Drag & Drop online form builder that helps you create beautiful contact forms with just a few clicks. WPForms’ contact forms are also highly optimized for web and server performance.
Another great option is Contact Form 7.
Contact Form 7:
It allows you to create contact forms. It can manage multiple contact forms. It also can customize contact forms and the mail contents with simple mark-up.
Keyword tool:
It provides keyword suggestions related to your topic to improve the visibility of your content in search. By entering your focus keyword and you can quickly discover related keyword opportunities.
After generating the keyword list, you can select the keywords that are most interesting and group them into keyword groups.
Mailchimp for WP
It is one of the best marketing tools which allows site visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. It is free for lists up to 2000 subscribers which has made it the best email marketing service.