Monica Pitts 0:01
Hello again. And welcome back to marketing with purpose. Now, last week, I promised you that I was going to bring in the big guns, meaning Tyler and Rebecca. They are my developers. And they design stuff too. I mean, but you guys do a lot of technical work over at MayeCreate. And they are going to tell us their favorite WordPress plugins. So you're going to like, open up the doors, lift up the hood and see inside the websites at MayeCreate. And we are going to talk to you about our favorite WordPress plugins, the ones that we feel like you absolutely have to have for your website. And then the ones that we think are like, really nice to have, right? Like the ones that we've figured out that really solve problems and make websites work. We'll tell you about those too. Okay, so first, I think you guys should introduce yourself. Let's start off with Tyler. Tyler is our lead developer and he was recently on our podcast with his wife, Christy, because they somehow work from home together, and don't kill each other. Tyler, tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah,
Tyler Ernst 1:07
I've, I'm Tyler. I'm, like she said, lead developer. I'm also one of the art directors. I also design things. Rebecca and I are kind of both lead designer at this point. It's kind of a little of everything. But basically, I always tell the spiel in our in our client meetings, if it goes through our office, I've probably touched it at some point. So that pretty much sums it up. I build a lot of stuff.
Monica Pitts 1:32
Now Tyler, you've been with me create since you were a grasshopper.
Tyler Ernst 1:37
Yeah, since 2012, when I graduated college, and didn't actually know how to write PHP at the time. And I'm now our lead developer. So I've done a lot of growing a lot of learning.
Monica Pitts 1:51
Well, and when we hired you on, our goal was for you to take over my role as lead developer, and you're so much better at it than I ever was. Because you're so incredibly systematic about the way that you code and I'm just kind of like, spaghetti. Well, stick. No, try again. Not awesome. And
Tyler Ernst 2:13
Rebecca tells me a lot. She's like, Oh, Tyler coded this, I get it. indents are important. Now,
Monica Pitts 2:22
Rebecca, is our like lead. I'm going to call your security officer because she keeps things safe. She keeps things up to date. She touches like everyone's website at least once a week. And she's also been with us since she was in college. Believe it or not. She wins the award of most awkward interview at MayeCreate. But just saying something. Rebecca, introduce yourself.
Speaker 1 2:50
Hi, I am Rebecca. Awkward is what I do. But outside of that, obviously, yes, I am the lead for our safe side program. And I'm definitely in every website every Monday. But also I lead a lot of our web development with Tyler. And if he doesn't touch it. I do know we've had a lot of fun. Definitely Tyler's basically taught me everything I know. And Monica taught me the rest. Know when a good time.
Monica Pitts 3:21
It's like a happy fest over here. Okay,
Tyler Ernst 3:24
I lovingly call Rebecca my external hard drive. If I can't remember it, then she knows that so.
Monica Pitts 3:35
Okay, so before we dig into all the plugins that we think people have to have, and the ones that we've found make life a heck of a lot easier when managing websites. I want to briefly touch on our plugin mentality because ours is not shared by every developer out there, though, guys. So we just went to a training for WordPress developers. And I felt like the more senior companies that were developing WordPress sites had the same theory on plugins that we do, don't you think?
Tyler Ernst 4:08
Yeah, it really did feel like a less is more mentality is starting to be like the common ground. And that was not the case for a long time. A lot of times it was like, if you can find a plug in like, does it just use it? That's the end of story.
Monica Pitts 4:21
Well, there's pros and cons to doing that. I guess the Pro to just finding a plug in that does it and using it would be that you don't have to figure out how to do it on your own. But what are the cons?
Unknown Speaker 4:36
I'd say definitely that what
Speaker 1 4:44
from a standpoint of plugins and less is more. It's definitely that when we have more plugins, you have much more vulnerability closer and closer to the sky is closer and closer to the sun so you don't want to go too high. With your number.
Monica Pitts 5:03
Yeah, I would agree with that like, because there's just creates more like little loopholes for people to get into an exploit a website. And it makes more work for you to keep the site safe, because you have to keep all those things updated. And you have to trust all the developers to keep it updated. And sometimes you don't. And then it breaks everything. When you update it. One lame,
Tyler Ernst 5:27
you also need to worry about does this plugin work with my current environment? And like, if you have a really fancy website that does a lot of stuff, you throw one plug in in there that doesn't isn't compatible. And suddenly, boom, oh, site doesn't work?
Monica Pitts 5:44
Yes, okay. And then I would say the other reason that we scale back on plugins is for load time purposes. It, man, I'm telling you, so friends, like, the less things your site has to load, the faster it's going to load. And even if you're not using features of that plugin on that page, it may very well still be loading pieces of that plugin on the page, asked me how I know. Totally learned it the hard way.
Tyler Ernst 6:19
Ironically enough, we use the plugin that showed us where things were being loaded. So
Monica Pitts 6:24
I know. And then we bought a plugin that allowed us to take the pieces of our code that we're loading out, and only load them on the pages where they were needed. Because that won't we like the MayeCreate site was like an F on GT metrics. And I loaded it up and I like almost cried, and then we spent like, multiple days figuring out what was going on. And it was just that we had all this crap in there that we didn't need to have in there. And, hey, everybody's gotta learn the hard way sometimes, right? It's fine. It's fine. We fixed it. It's better now. Sometimes. Okay, so must have plugins. All right. So Tyler. Okay, so Tyler is responsible for like the development on our main theme at MayeCreate. Because we don't buy a theme from someone else. We did that once upon a time. And that led to its own set of challenges. And we also had been building software way, way back in the day, which also led to me deleting lots and lots of things out of it, because it was incredibly bloated, and we didn't need it all. And one of the things that Tyler has to have to build a website that doesn't require a lot of plugins is our first must have plugin, which is
Tyler Ernst 7:43
ACF Pro.
Monica Pitts 7:47
Okay, so what does it do? So,
Tyler Ernst 7:50
what does it do? It does a lot. So advanced custom fields, is, if you've used it, you know, it's indispensable. It's at its core, it's just a plugin that gives you a visual representation of metadata fields. If you understand what I just said, then Bravo, good for you. But it, it can do all sorts of stuff, it can even create some post types. Now, I found out, which I'd rather do by hand. But that's maybe just an old man talking. But like, we use it for all sorts of stuff, we use it as our framework for our global options for the website. So like you, we use it to set what the logo is on the website, we have an image field and the site options, and you say, this is the logo. And then I have the code written in the in the theme, and it says, okay, and it pulls that image. It's great. And it's on the surface, it's like, you look at it, and you go, Okay, there's a text field, I can fill in that text and displays here. Cool. But when you start digging into it, you can do so much more than, like so much. You get into repeater fields, and you get into group fields, and you get into all sorts of other stuff that doesn't just so great.
Monica Pitts 9:08
So added to base, it allows us to add components to a website that keep it more organized, that make it load quickly, while still adding functionality and also make it easier for our clients to use because they're not having to jump all over the place to edit certain things. It keeps consistent formatting throughout the site, which is really important on certain elements that we use it on. We use it to build blocks. I mean, like it's incredible. It does all kinds of stuff. And so it is definitely a cornerstone of every website that we built. And friends like I like at that conference that we just went to I sat in on a talk about it and I like I haven't done any development work for like, what, six years. It's been a while or maybe I don't even know I don't even know how to do it. I can still write CSS though, most of the time. But the new interface on it makes it so someone without as much experience as Tyler really can build a really nice functioning theme on a website that loads quickly and is easy to use and update. So yeah,
Tyler Ernst 10:23
they're constantly updating, it's so great. There can't cache not fun, but you can't you can't overstate how good it is. It's so functional and Silverstone. It's great.
Speaker 1 10:37
Not to mention the amazing amount of documentation it has, like if you don't really know if you can use it, they will tell you exactly how to set it up. I mean, it's genuinely not hard.
Tyler Ernst 10:50
Yeah, it's one of the few situations where someone has a question is go just read the documentation, because it's going to explain it just as well as I can.
Monica Pitts 10:58
Now the next plug in on our must have list is one that Rebecca knows very, very well, and it had a hand in choosing, and she uses on every single website as director of security. Our chief security officer, Rebecca, which plugin do you say should lock down your WordPress site?
Speaker 1 11:20
Definitely defender Pro, we don't always need to use the pro version. But the pro version definitely has all of the things that I could possibly hope for in a security plugin. When we started using defender, we've definitely used it as a site needs immediate attention and an immediate fix. And we slowly learned how good it was. Compared to several other plugins like we've used several notable plugins like I themes, which became solid Central, we've used wordfence, we've used malcare. I think we use security very briefly. But defender as a whole has a very navigable UI. So I went in, and I immediately knew where I was what I needed to be able to do. And it listed the things that were important, like it wanted me to add some changes to, if someone tried to log in with admin, they would immediately get blocked or administrative, they immediately get blocked, because that's what you want to make sure, in terms of access to your site, if you know people are going to try and log in with something, lock it down. Not to mention, if they're logging it a bunch of times, you can lock it down. You can also lock things down to IP addresses or user agents, or if you need to whitelist some IPs. I mean, I have had such a great experience with this plugin. And it gives me zero anxiety to use it.
Monica Pitts 12:53
Which is saying something that's
Tyler Ernst 12:55
a riveting review is what
Speaker 1 13:00
I can actually say that we'll be probably moving forward with using it much, much more in the future as well, because it keeps audit logs of everything that happens. without issue. We recently had a site actually that went completely down. And it took a cumulative four hours to figure out why. But once we got in, we were able to figure out
Tyler Ernst 13:25
who did it exactly what time
Unknown Speaker 13:29
exactly what time exactly how and
Tyler Ernst 13:32
you know, what got the receipts, the receipts.
Speaker 1 13:35
And so you know, that's also very nice to have receipts. So yeah, definitely a big, big fan of defender and defender Pro.
Monica Pitts 13:48
So I would say the plugin that I use the most on websites, and one I actually just suggested for one of our consulting clients that we didn't build her website, she's just paying me to help her learn how to use it is cadence blocks, which is the our preferred guten block library, we have tried so many block libraries. And that was one of the reasons that the MayeCreate site was so slow once upon a time is because we didn't understand when we had seven different libraries installed, it was loading all the style sheets for all seven of the libraries for every single block even though we weren't using the block on that page. Ill Okay, so I'm at home and I should look up there. There's actually a plugin that will tell you which blocks are used on which plate page like a directory. That thing is cool. I should look that one up. Remember
Tyler Ernst 14:39
that one's called we talked about the other day actually. I too, like Payton's
Monica Pitts 14:43
blocks has come a really long way because there's just so much adjustability in each and every layout element and they're incredibly flexible. I can get them to look however I want to and if and I feel like the user interface for me is is pretty spot on. Because it's like, you know, little tabs, you click, you fill in your information, you tinker with it, and it and it gives me what I want. So I know that it's not like 100%, what you see is what you get, but it's pretty darn close. And now you can save like universal styles between the blocks. That's a really nice feature too. Because if you really like what you're doing, you can save it and then apply it to it will apply it to all the other blocks. Yeah, so cadences box, that's ours.
Tyler Ernst 15:30
The Universal styles is such a game changer, when they added that got it was so cool. Because it was like, if you had four different accordion blocks on a page, and you had to style each one separately, it was such such a, like bummer. And then they added that and it's like, oh, one click boom, whole page got it awesome. Well, and
Monica Pitts 15:52
they also have the ability to copy styles from one block to another. So I can just copy the styles from one block to another, which is awesome. But then there's the ability to literally be like, every accordion block on my website will look like this. And that's just, tada, thank you for saving me so much time, because like, I wouldn't be going through as the like art director on our page layouts and be like, the font is two points smaller on this one, the padding is like three pixels off, and it was. And this eliminates all of that. Okay, so another thing, and this is, this is another plugin type that you have to have. And we actually just ran into this the other day, because Google has new crap. Milk wrap, or Google, that they're just they're trying to do the best they can to lock down and make things extra secure. So they have their new consent policy. And I wish I could remember right off the top of my head what's called can Google can snap floop. Do you remember what it's called? Rebecca?
Speaker 1 17:06
I just refute refer to it as Google V two. Yeah,
Monica Pitts 17:12
but it's like they're consistent. Bigger. Yeah, regular way. So cookie pop ups right there thing. That's what we're saying you'd have a cookie pop up plugin. And you have to have one, at the very least to let people know that you're using cookies on your site. And you probably are, I don't know of any sites that don't use them doesn't make them bad. They're just using them. And if you want to use Google products, you have to tell people that you're using cookies, or else they can do stupid stuff. And so with this new policy, basically, they're saying like, Hey, if you don't tell people that you're using cookies, and you don't allow them to opt in, for the cookies, like they can choose not to have them or choose to have them, then we're just not really going to track your data the same way. And I think eventually what's going to happen is they're just not really going to share your site the same way kinda like they don't if you have a crappy site on mobile, they're just going to be like, Yeah, we're gonna show it show it the same way that okay, so Rebecca, what is the cookie popup plugin,
Speaker 1 18:16
we recently made a change which cookie popup we are using, and we have switched to compliance, both the free version and the pro version have a lot of things that you kind of need nowadays, like we just discussed with Google, the free version will actually completely just go through a wizard. And you'll just click through a couple of questionnaires asking like, are you in the United States or any other European country? And they'll actually list out? Do you need to follow certain rules for certain states? Like, what's the name for the California it doesn't really matter. But there's a couple of states that have very specific laws in place for cookie usage and data sharing. And it will actually customize its verbiage, and how it shows your opt out preferences and Privacy Policy, all around those laws. Not to mention, it'll also scan your site completely, and list out all the cookies and all of the third party plugins that use cookies, and they will add those to a premade opt in Preferences page for you. So people can actually do what they're supposed to be able to do nowadays, which is opt out individually in services. Luckily, it does not let you opt out of any of the cookies that you need functionally. So in terms of like a WordPress cookie, because unfortunately for a website to work, you do need cookies for like login purposes or shopping purchases, because if you don't keep those, then it won't remember you're logged in, or it won't remember what's in your cart. So I mean, it's definitely super easy to To use, it was very intimidating. Let me tell you it was intimidating because it is precise. But it was
Monica Pitts 20:06
more intimidating when we were trying to figure out how to do it without it.
Tyler Ernst 20:09
Oh, you're trying to figure out initially Yeah. Remember back in
Monica Pitts 20:13
like, 2019 When we were doing it without it. And we were doing it all manually. And we had to figure out I mean, even just figuring out what cookies were being fired on a website was like, a gigantic hunt and peck game like it was just like, Whoa, I hadn't seen that was what I meant not hunt, and peck, Z.
Speaker 1 20:33
It was and it was a lot of reading, because if you found a cookie through like, inspect, we'd have to individually look up on like, Cookie pedia I think is the name of the website, individually review each cookie for our clients to make sure like, is this bad? Do we can we keep this is this? What is it? Do?
Tyler Ernst 20:53
We we got real knowledgeable about cookies real fast.
Unknown Speaker 21:00
But this definitely makes me feel safer with this plugin. Well,
Monica Pitts 21:03
and you can also install your Google Analytics in through compliance as well, because Google Analytics is one of those big triggers like it does. It says it used could you use this cookieless tracking now but like, why would it not allow tracking if it uses cookie was tracking? And let's let's not get into the conspiracy theory of how Google is actually tracking your activity.
Tyler Ernst 21:35
Go ahead talk that at that WordPress training we went to actually asked in one of the chats. So like because they were talking about Google and going through the list and all that stuff? And how like, the suppose the thing was that you're supposed to go completely cookieless nouns like that doesn't make sense from a functionality standpoint, like Rebecca said, like, how do I stay logged in? That's how it works. There is not a another, that or this. It's that's how it works. And someone in the chat actually cleared it up for me a lot. They're like, No, the fine print is besides functional cookies. So basically, you have to have an excuse to have everything.
Monica Pitts 22:17
Very be a really fun user experience to shop and put things in the cart but not have anything stay in the cart. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. So which, which, hey, leads me to our next plugin, because once upon a time, we build a donation website that how many nonprofits took donations the first year 60?
Tyler Ernst 22:41
Was it 60, I thought was more like I thought was in the 40 range. Okay,
Monica Pitts 22:45
either way, there wasn't a shopping cart, like interactivity on this donation site, you had to donate to each and every organization separately using an email form. Yeah, then we switched it up and made it into a shopping cart. The next year, we learned our lesson, but it was just to chat test the viability of the setup right.
Tyler Ernst 23:09
11 years ago, that's fine.
Monica Pitts 23:12
And we feel like every single website needs to have a Form Builder. Now, having said that, Cadence blocks does have the ability to build forms, and one of their blocks. I don't play with it though, because we use another form plugin, because it is the big bad mamma jamma of forms and it can make a lot of things happen like we've made it do backflips. Which one is it? Tyler? Which one do we love?
Tyler Ernst 23:39
mytable we've used we use formidable for. Honestly, I don't know how long as long as I've been at MayeCreate so almost 12 years because I think we started using it like right after I got hired. And we've been using it. Okay, we've been using it for so long. We have the Pro license for unlimited sites for a flat rate that we paid once. And that's not a thing. I'm pretty sure they don't like us because of that. Because it's definitely a yearly model. Now it's a lot more expensive yearly. So we we got in we got in real early. But yeah, it's it's indispensable. How much stuff formidable does we've made, I made a mulch calculator. Once with it. I've made rain gauge calculators with like the amount of interactivity you can do with the conditional logic and the default fields. You can pull values from other for form fields into the other fields and make calculations with it. You can pull values from entries that that particular user has logged to display graph. It's just it's so functional and integrates with so much stuff that like if you're going to use a plug in to build forms, what you really should be doing Instead of doing it by hand these days, just more security better, security better. It's just better for security. But yeah, if you're going to use a Form Builder plug in, like, formidable is the way to go. A lot of people use, I'll touch on it, a lot of people use Gravity Forms, that's a pretty popular one. If you're used to Gravity Forms, I've used it, it functions about the same, it's just the, the less popular kid in high school of the table. But in my in my opinion, the better the quicker functioning one is out as well.
Monica Pitts 25:36
And if you don't use a decent form builder, then you don't have the ability to do things like save all the entries into your database and be able to get to them later, you won't be able to collect payments. You won't I mean, like people can sign like you can make. There's online signatures included in these. Like, I could go on and on about the things that we do with it. Like another
Tyler Ernst 26:06
thing we just started doing. It generates PDFs Now it didn't use. And it's actually pretty functional flight once you like, even right out the box, it was like, okay, yeah, this actually makes a lot of sense. And it works. Cool. Great. Well,
Monica Pitts 26:20
and it'll integrate with a, like a Google sheet. So if someone submits an entry, it'll automatically add a row to the Google Sheet with the information in there, which I know you're like, Okay, well, Monica, it saves it in the database, why can't you just go look at it, there's something about it, man. I get it. I use Zapier to connect it to air table for most of what we do, just because air table allows me to really interact with the data in a much easier way than just looking at it in our database. But it's cool. It's real cool.
Tyler Ernst 26:54
And, and their support forum is great too, like there, I would say of, I would say ACF and formidable. I know those are two that I covered. But I would say ACF and formidable among all the other plugins, their support is great. Like they're, they're the ones that if I go to him, and I'm like, Hey, I'm having this problem. They'll either flat out be like, well, it doesn't do that. Good luck, which is fair. Or they'll be like, we've heard of that once. Here's a thread from four years ago that someone else asked this question. They kind of found an answer. Good luck, or, or they're just like, oh, yeah, that's easy. Here you go. And they're always they're always helpful as well, I should say.
Monica Pitts 27:36
I think the only drawback with like, the way that we use formidable, like on our personal
[email protected] Is that because it has to talk to so many different things. Like while it submitting the submission can take a while to go through like for example, it could it's like uploading a picture, it's it's talking with Zapier, it's adding it to you know, it's sending emails, telling people that the submission was made. And so when that happens, you know, is that it's also adding things to Active Campaign, which is our email marketing software. So there's like all these activities happening like as the form is submitting and being triggered by it that it does kind of slow down the admit time. Yeah. Which makes me hurt sometimes. And then I make Rebecca look at it, and then something else happens. And we have to go troubleshoot that. Okay, moving on to the next thing. Okay, so we want our websites load fast, we've been talking about how not using tons of plugins can help your website load fast. And I think the other way that people can really make sure to like one thing that they can absolutely control with the loading of their website is how big their images are. I can't tell you the number of people that upload enormous images to their website, and it takes forever to load and it just stucks now, this plugin that Rebecca is going to tell you about is not going to replace negligence. Negligence as in not resizing your images to approximately the correct size before you upload them to your site will not fix this problem. But this next plugin can help you even more if you already resized some of your images.
Speaker 1 29:23
Our next plugin is smush or smush. Pro, it is actually from the same people who make defender and defender Pro. Technically, you're right it does not replace negligence. But it is so functional that it will resize incredibly large images and you can set it to resize like say I put one that's my screen size like 1920 by 1080. It will resize it to something even smaller than that. whatever width and height they say it should be, it will also automatically squish, squish any plugin or not plugin image that I upload, it will make sure that it is either ultra super or two other ones that I can't quite remember, because I always use it, you do not lose any kind of quality, but it will strip the metadata, it will lazy load for you, it will resize it will, it will make sure you have a pretty website without all the load time, especially when you're serving to people like we have a lot of clients that serve in areas that are farmland, not a lot of internet bandwidth, which really sucks if you want to have a nice website. So making sure that you are optimize, to make sure you get to all of your clients is kind of just mandatory, or at least good courtesy.
Monica Pitts 31:06
It is well and Google actually like takes your load time into account with ranking your website. And so that's part of it. But then you also have the fact that if people don't stick around on your website, because it's taking too long to load, then that's a signal to Google that you suck. So there's all kinds of ways that this fast loading website formula like, like plays into your search engine optimization, and which that basically affects your bottom line. Right? If people can't find you, then you can't meet new people and get more business. And I think that the thing that I find is that people either don't have a plugin like this installed, or they're uploading an image, and they're placing an image in the page, but they don't choose the correct size of image to place in the page. So they'll just place an image. And it'll be the biggest size of the image can be but the but because of the way that they've put it in the page, or like drag the corner up to resize it, it's just like contained via CSS basically, to be smaller. And that's where like, I don't think so much is going to fix that for you. It will have optimized that gigantic ol image, it's your responsibility to pick the image that is the closest size, it's much as created to the one that you're trying to button. You're right.
Tyler Ernst 32:32
This is your friendly reminder, websites only read 72 DPI screens or 72 dpi. You don't need a print ready file on your website.
Monica Pitts 32:45
Think there's so much fun. Okay, so for me, um, I think the next plugin that I would suggest people install would be Yoast. And we recently upgraded to Yoast SEO, like the pro version. And if you want your website to be found, it's going to be your best friend it like literally like my, the client I was referring to earlier that I suggested they put cadence blocks in their website. I also suggested that they put Yoast in their website. And she doesn't build websites for a living. She needed no training at all to use it. It is like color coded. It's like, it will show you what areas you screwed up on for SEO, and it will give you suggestions on how to fix it. And then when you fix it, it gives you a green arrow or a green light, boom. It's like playing a game. They have gamified SEO. So I think they won. And the other thing I really like about it is whenever you change the URL or you delete a page, it automatically creates a redirect for you, which is very good practice. If you are just deleting pages on your site and not creating redirects, then you're kind of making a mess for Google because it doesn't know where to send people. It just sends them to a 404 error page, then that's not any good. But if you don't install Yoast, because you don't care about SEO, we do use another plugin called redirection which you can create your own redirects. There you go. And it works great. So there you are. Alright, so then. Okay, so we just we were just talking about SEO. So Rebecca, the last thing that we need for SEO, what is it and seeing it SEO, search engine optimization showing up on Google? Hopefully you guys know what that is? I think you do. Take it away, Rebecca.
Speaker 1 34:36
One thing you definitely lead to make sure that you are showing up in searches is a sitemap. Now there are a lot of options that we've played with and making sure that we get a sitemap built for our websites, but one that we've recently kind of stuck with the most and one that has just out of the box always consistent is sitemap by best Websoft That's kind of hard to say. But like I said, right out of the box, you turn it on, it creates your sitemap, but then then it has options. And you can create a separate Sitemap For Videos for images, and a couple of other things that I haven't quite tested. But you can also make sure that like, I don't want to include this specific post type, because it's just for users. I don't want to serve that in a search engine. But I do want this post type over there, you can like individually, click which things you want to include, which is super important for things like user websites, like I kind of mentioned, and a couple of other like, very individual situations. But mostly, yeah, out of the box already works. And it's free. What more could you really want
Tyler Ernst 35:54
to the two best qualifiers for a good plugin, regularly
Monica Pitts 35:58
updated? Lots of downloads. And
Speaker 1 36:04
like all the plugins today, most of the things that we're suggesting, are secure. And very rarely, if ever, I don't think I've actually seen most of these on any kind of vulnerabilities list, which is what you want in a plug.
Tyler Ernst 36:17
Well, and if they are, then they're responsible developers, like we said, at the top of the podcast. Yeah, they're responsible developers, and they're like, hey, hotfix, you need to update your plug in right now. Yes, which is a whole other rabbit hole of like, keeping your site's here, which I think we have a podcast on. That's important.
Monica Pitts 36:33
Well, we don't have how Rebecca does it, but we do have tips for people. Yeah. And explain to people why hackers hack we do have, we definitely have plugins, we definitely have podcasts about those. And then like, once you have that Sitemap Generator plugin installed, and you have it configured the way that you want it, then you would head on over to the Search Console, like Google Search Console, and then you can submit your sitemap to Google. And then Google will have a record that tells it every single time that you add something to your site, and then it will make sure and index it and start showing it to viewers. It's not that it's not going to find your website on its own. That it will, but it's going to happen faster and more consistently, if you serve it the sitemap so that's why we want to have our sitemap generator. Okay, so I'm going to very quickly just read back through those and then we will get into the nice to have plugins really quick. So the first one is ACF Pro, to extend the use of your website and make it load faster, use less plugins. The second is a security plugin, we use defender third is a guten block library. We use cadence blocks. Fourth would be a cookie pop up, or which also ours comes with a Google Analytics, integration. So that's compliance. You need a Form Builder, we use formidable image optimizer, we use smush. You need something that's going to redirect and help you out with your SEO, we use Yoast for SEO and redirection or we just use the redirection plugin. And then last but not least, you need a sitemap generator. And we use sitemap by best Websoft. Okay, and friends. There are links to all of these plugins on our website mayecreate.com. There's a link to it in the like podcast description and in the show notes. It's, it's there. It's go. Okay, okay, nice to have plugins, we won't go into these quite as in depth as the other ones, I think, really, what we need to let you know is like what situation do you need to consider a plugin like this? Okay, so Tyler ends up building lots of websites that have users, like, members only section in them. And he has some plugins that he really likes for those. Tyler, tell us about those?
Tyler Ernst 38:56
Yeah, so there's two main ones that are indispensable for those situations. There's inactive logout and user switch. And it's user switch your switcher maybe. But basically, user switching, that's what it is. So there's the inactive logout. It's real simple. You set a timer. And once someone hasn't done any other website for that long, it logs him out. does what it says on the tin, and does it really well? And it's super lightweight.
Monica Pitts 39:26
Safety. Yeah, right. Safety Advisor
Unknown Speaker 39:28
over here. Yes. So if
Monica Pitts 39:31
people logged in forever,
Tyler Ernst 39:32
yeah, if you've got a site with, you know, I would say even in the more than 15 user range, you don't want anyone leaving that site open and just sitting there. So yeah, it sets a timer logs them out. It's great. And then, from a more tech side from like, Dev support side user switching is another plugin that I use constant Li, as you let you go into the user section of WordPress and switch to another user, so if you have an admin user, which if you're going to the user section you do. And you have someone that says, I'm having trouble with X feature on the website, and you look at as an admin, it's like, well, it's working as an admin. But there's a customer or a subscriber, you can go to their user, and you can switch to view the website as them without having to know their password without having all that stuff. It just displays the site as if you're logged in as that user. And from a from a dev standpoint, that's indispensable. It's so good.
Monica Pitts 40:36
I've used it a ton of times, so many times, and I end up using it, believe it or not to make the user guides for the people who are like for the members that are using the website. Does that make sense? Because I'll have to log in as one of them to be able to explore and figure out how I would tell them to use the site. So I think it's really awesome. And it's easy to switch back to. So yeah, that's good. The
Tyler Ernst 41:01
only the only downside of user switching is sometimes if you actually click View as site view, as logged out, or something is one of the options. That kind of it's not fun, because suddenly it takes away the option to switch back and you're like, What do I do now? You're just you're stuck there.
Monica Pitts 41:19
But you're logged in, but you're logged out? Yeah. And it
Tyler Ernst 41:23
takes away the toolbar, you know, normally, it adds a little like link in the bottom corner that hovers it's like switch back to, for whatever reason, and it might not do that anymore. I haven't done it in forever. It used to not put that link there. We feud is logged out it just gone. You're just like, okay, so you gotta log in. It's like you're already logged in. It's like, I'm not though. Yeah, it's that part's not fun, otherwise, great plugin.
Monica Pitts 41:50
So the next plugin, we ended up using a lot on resource driven websites. So if we have a client, who has a lot of resources that they want people to be able to filter, search, re organize, like from the, from the public side of the site. Well, I mean, where else do we use? This guy's mostly for resources? Right? Yeah.
Tyler Ernst 42:19
Mostly for like, big, big post sections. Yeah.
Monica Pitts 42:24
So if you have a resource library, you will like this sucker. Oh,
Tyler Ernst 42:29
have you talked about to use it for like Team posts and stuff?
Unknown Speaker 42:34
No, with it recently, so
Monica Pitts 42:35
I can talk about it. Okay, tell me about it. Rebecca. search
Speaker 1 42:38
and filter pro is actually really nice. Because we are able to use it for a multitude of things. Yes, we use it mostly for resources. But we've used it for keeping certain data together. I think we've used it for some user stuff. But what's really cool is that it is integrated integrative, is that a word? It integrates with all of the custom post types that we create. Because we don't like that we don't really use plugins for things that we can do inside of the website. So creating a post type is something that we just do ourselves. And so it'll pull in things like taxonomy, it'll pull in the categories, it'll pull in ACF fields that we have, and it just calculates all that down into a very easily styleable. Way. And then so you can have like, oh, Tyler, what do we have? We did one recently.
Tyler Ernst 43:37
tree ring. Yeah, we've done we've done to where you can add, we don't where you can sort by the category, we've done it to where you can search by metadata fields. So like Rebecca was saying about integrating with ACF. And you can even has a checkbox built in and says this is an ACF field, like that's how to integrate ACF is in everything. This is this is an ACF field, and it'll update that field with more options as more options are added in the ACF fields. So good.
Monica Pitts 44:06
Well, and so as an example, friends, like, obviously, there's a native post type inside of WordPress, it's your blog. It's good. It's called post, when you log into the backend of WordPress, there's a thing it's called post. That's what it is. That's your blog page, right? And then let's say that you want to also have a resources section and you want to have a blog. Well, oftentimes, we separate those, because they might not need to be together. And when they're together, it can be very confusing and overwhelming to the user. Because you have to check more boxes to get them to show up on the right parts of the site. And I mean, but there's only one search bar searching through everything in the site. And so then you can layer it with search and filter pro and you can say, hey, I only want you to filter through this stuff for just the Resources section or I only want you to sort and filter for the stuff that's in the blog section and it makes it like very rope asked in that way to help people find what they're looking for, like in your website. And yeah, yeah. search
Tyler Ernst 45:07
and filter Pro is a, a a forum plugin, disguised as a functionality organ, is what it comes down to. But it's great.
Speaker 1 45:15
Can I touch on a plugin that we add in conjunction with it? Yeah, we actually have started using relevancy with it as well. Yes. One thing that search and filter doesn't really do well is let you search through things that are within the posts, and not just the metadata itself. So we've added relevancy, which makes the search optimization for your content, so much more fluid. And so those two things together are just such a powerhouse. It
Tyler Ernst 45:47
actually, like extends the default WordPress search bar. Like how powerful it is. Yeah. So it for like some really nerdy in depth on how WordPress search works. WordPress search technically only searches one table in the database and searches post titles, and relevancy, let you say, actually, WordPress search uses should search all these tables, and you can pick which table is so like vastly expand search and filter pro. So you can just have one search bar and just search for whatever it works like Google, like you would think a search bar should work type of thing. It's
Monica Pitts 46:29
smarter. Yeah. Okay, go. And it reads everything. Because most of the time, it's just reading through like the titles of the posts. So if your keyword isn't in the title, then it's not finding it. But when it can go through the whole post, then it can find it for you. Like
Tyler Ernst 46:45
that, like that. This, this nice to have section is Monica translating our Tech Talk into digestible information. Appreciate it.
Monica Pitts 46:54
Oh, you guys and your tech awesome. I'm pretending to be my husband and watching his eyes glaze over as he doesn't understand anything. Okay, so last but not least, when you are like rebuilding your WordPress site, starting it over from scratch. Sometimes you just need to suck information out of it. Suck. That's a really nice word Monica, good verb, good verb. It is like the built in export feature is not everything that we want it to be most of the time. So we found another one. Tyler, I think you need to tell us about this one.
Tyler Ernst 47:37
Okay, it's WP all export, they also have WP all import. And we technically use both depending on the situation. But the problem with the built in WordPress exporter is it just kind of spits all the information out. And you can't pick what you want. And you can't pick the parts. And you can't and sometimes doesn't get everything they'll export, you can pick a particular post type, like we were talking about earlier with post and resource and all that. And you can even get an extension that you can pick users, which is great. But you can pick a particular set of data. And then you can pick the particular fields from the database that you want with that data. So that's let's say you're moving all your posts, but really, you're going to rewrite the content. And you just really want to get all the names in there so that you have everything in there. You can just export the title and the slug and import that into your site. And it's great. And the user interface is all drag and drop. You don't have to like write a script to tell it what to do. It's great. It's so quick.
Monica Pitts 48:39
Is this the same one that we can use with WooCommerce? Yeah,
Tyler Ernst 48:43
I use it on a couple years, actually, this year to export all the orders because I was like, I just want these fields of the orders, not like all the crazy database fields that are encoded that we don't actually need for any data. Well, correction, where's my asterisk? But you do need it for the site to function. We don't need it looking at the data as much as
Monica Pitts 49:08
well. And what can happen sometimes do if you just export it with the normal exporter, especially if it's coming out of WooCommerce is you would think, Oh yeah, everything that has to do with this record is all going to be in this one row. I can just delete the columns that I don't want. It's all going to be okay. You got to think again. Sometimes it's in two or three rows in random columns. And it's all pretending that the same product and you're like how does this make any sense to anything like It's like contrary to every thought about database building and yet that is the way that it exports it and so you have a sucks.
Tyler Ernst 49:49
Instead, sometimes the raw export just exports it will and there's not that same you're talking about you can export as a CSV with the APL export WordPress exports as an XML file So you don't know what you're doing there. You can't really read it as a normal human. You have to just import it and hope it works.
Monica Pitts 50:09
Okay, well, hopefully, we have like, giving you some ideas about the plugins that you need some plugins that you might want to test out on your next site build, and not bored you to death with all of our tech talk, but you can tell that we love talking about tech, and it's so much fun to us. So um, thank you so much for hanging out with us. And thank you, Tyler and Rebecca for taking the time to educate all of us about these plugins. Before you hop off of the podcast, I want to encourage you to subscribe because then you'll learn all about our next episode, it will be dropped right into your your phone while that's where it's going to show up and tell you when our next episode comes out. Next week, we're going to talk about the four C content marketing method that won't take up all your time with guest Sarah block. Yeah, so we're going big picture again, friends. Kind of like I feel like we rotate one week we're like super detailed. And then the next week we get big picture again. So we're going big picture. Sarah is going to tell us how to actually market our businesses with a super small team without taking forever to get it done. Yeah, definitely something that anybody can learn and grow from. So thank you so much again for your time today. And until next time, go forth and mark it with purpose.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
