The Tools You Need to Make Your WordPress Site Powerful

Let’s talk about how can boost your WP site’s performance and make it a great experience for users, a fantastic way to make money blogging, professional virtual home for your brand, and more.

If you haven’t started a blog yet, check out my FREE course that will walk you through the steps.

Enroll in The Passive Income Blog Boss.

Here’s what you need to succeed on your journey:

Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate.

Hosting

To get a real site (wordpress.com is not self-hosted and you don’t have full control over it, so wordpress.org is the solution), you’ll also need to use the help of a hosting company.

They are the ones who’ll make sure your site is always up and running and loads fast. Your site’s data is stored with them too.

Just as you need a place to live, so does your site need a host.

Using this metaphor, your domain name would be your home address.

So, the choices are many, of course. I’m using WPX Hosting for Let’s Reach Success and my site never experiences downtime and performs great.

They are a reliable hosting provider and I won’t change them.

Here’s my tutorial on how to start a blog with WPX Hosting.

Another option is CloudWays. It’s a managed cloud hosting platform that takes care of all the technical stuff for you. They also have a generous affiliate program, which is a nice bonus for bloggers who want to recommend great tools. They also have a great affiliate program.

Theme

Once you’ve got a WordPress.org site installed with your own domain name, your next step is choosing a theme.

The WordPress theme directory offers thousands of choices for free. All look extremely good, and none of that was possible decades ago when everyone needed to use html and css to create a basic page and design templates for their websites.

Now, however, it’s all a matter of clicking a button and giving your site a whole new look.

You could make it look like a magazine, news blog, a portfolio site, or just use a one-page template to present your business.

While getting a free theme is alright in the beginning, when you’re still getting to know everything that goes together with owning a WordPress website, a premium one is what you’ll get your hands on eventually.

The main reason is simple. Cleaner code is guaranteed, and that’s yet another factor Google uses when deciding if a site should be ranked high and if a domain deserves to be given more authority.

Plugins

The 5 Commandments of Effective Web Design

After going through the steps above, your WordPress site is now up and running, visible in search engines, and you can even start writing some posts on it.

But to make the most of what the open-source platform offers, you’ll need to install some plugins.

Now, the possibilities here are almost endless. These little helpers are what can help you turn your site into a membership program, add a store, place social media buttons, put ads to start making money, optimize it even further without touching anything after installing this piece of software, and so much more.

And all that is done without writing a line of code, as smart and hard-working developers have already done that and shared their products with the world for free.

Here are some to consider (the rest depends on the features you want your site to have):

Wordfence – #1 security plugin for your WordPress site.

You might need to play a little with the settings, as it’s got many options. I even got locked out of my own dashboard due to making it too secure.

It will scan your site frequently, give you reports, block IPs that try to sign in your site as an admin, etc.

Social Warfare – add social media buttons anywhere in your pages.

You want to give your visitors and readers a super easy way to share your content with their audiences, and that plugin is one of the most popular ones. Click here to learn more about Social Warfare.

WPtouch Mobile – make your site mobile-friendly.

use wptouch mobile plugin for your wordpress site

Chances are, you’ll get half of your visitors through mobile devices. And that percentage is getting higher every day. In fact, as Semrush found, mobile visits were 81% higher than desktop.

So you want to give them a unique experience.

What works for a desktop doesn’t really feel nice on a smaller screen.

They shouldn’t need to zoom in to click a button, or scroll too much to see key information.

A plugin like WPtouch Mobile can let you have a separate theme for mobile users, another menu, and all types of other options.

Cache plugin

Caching is the process of data being stored on your website, after each page request a visitor makes. A cache is a temporary storage area.

The 2 types of caching are browser (the user does that), and server.

To make your site faster and boost performance, though, you’ll need a plugin for that.

When caching is turned on, not too much information is saved on your site and it’s easier for anyone, anywhere in the world to open each page in less than a few seconds. It works because you skip server load and your site now shows cached copies of pages to people.

Here are 5 of the best caching plugins.

I’m currently using LiteSpeed Cache.

WP-Optimize

I use this one to remove anything unnecessary from the WordPress database.

In my case, with a ton of content and constantly adding new pages and updating existing ones, it means having tens of revisions saved in the database. There’s also post drafts, and all these take up space.

With this plugin is’t a matter of clicking ‘Run optimization’ to clean them.

Yoast SEO

This is without doubt the #1 SEO WordPress plugin.

I won’t go into details what SEO is and why you need it on your WordPress site, as that’s a huge topic. But here are some free options this tool has prepared for you:

Verify your site with Google and other major webmaster tools;

Decide what pages to index and what to not let Google crawl;

Create an XML sitemap;

Add your social profiles so that search engines associate them with your site;

Add Open Graph for Facebook, Twitter Cards, co