The Best Plugins

I want AlteredPapercraft.com to be as accessible as possible for my visitors. By activating this plugin, visitors to my site with visual challenges are provided tools to improve their interaction with my website.

Dealing with spam manually can take a lot of time and be a frustrating task. Given that, I choose to reactivate Akismet so that I don’t have to tackle any spam sent to my website manually. I also appreciate that it provides me with a report of all the spam it has addressed.

As I will continue to share podcast episodes on AlteredPapercraft.com, I need a plugin that allows me to embed those episodes within the site. Blubrry PowerPress served me well on the previous iteration of my site, so I opted to continue using it for this iteration.

I reactivated MonsterInsights because it provides a simple user interface on how visitors are finding and using AlteredPapercraft.com. Having this information can help me to grow my website by providing similar content to what is proving popular. It will also provide insight into how visitors are finding AlteredPapercraft.com so that I can possibly increase my presence/links in other similar Internet spaces.

The Jetpack plugin keeps my website secure with malware scans and spam protection and includes brute force protection and downtime/uptime monitoring for free. This plugin is very robust and offers many features that keep my website up and running, which is beneficial to both me as the owner and my visitors. Keeping my website secure means that it experiences less downtime and protects my visitors’ security. Jetpack also offers decreased load time so visitors can access AlteredPapercraft.com quickly and can engage with it sooner. Finally, Jetpack provides a dashboard of visitor statistics and integration with popular social media platforms, enabling me to increase the reach of my content and influence the type of content I include on my website.

The Login LockDown plugin tracks the IP address of failed login attempts and prevents further attempts once a certain threshold is reached. This is useful to prevent brute force password discovery and attacks. This is another plugin in my security arsenal that keeps my website up and available for my visitors, and keeps their passwords and information safe, as well as mine.

MetaSlider is a highly rated plugin that provides a WordPress block for adding an image slideshow to any page of my site. Sliders are a great way to grab a visitor’s attention and engage them with my website’s content. For that reason, I opted to reactivate MetaSlider.

The Otter plugin offers an incredible number of additional blocks that integrate so well with the Gutenberg editor WordPress already uses. I love the functionality and visual improvement these additional blocks offer to my visitors.

The presence of an SSL on a website gives visitors assurance that the site they are visiting is safe. Because of that, it is so important for my site to include it as well. Really Simple SSL also provides a dashboard of issues my site has and how I can fix them to make sure my site is more secure. This is beneficial to both me as the owner and my visitors, so they know my site is safe for them to visit, and I know my site won’t be taken down by an attacker.

I love having a plugin that takes care of backing up AlteredPapercraft.com on a regular basis for me so that I don’t have to do it manually. Updraft Plus is my preferred plugin for this purpose. Having at least one backup is important in case anything happens to my website that requires me to roll it back to a prior version before the issue occurred.

I opted to reactivate W3 Total Cache because it is highly rated and improves the load time and experience for visitors using my site. Websites that load slowly are frustrating for visitors and cause them to leave sites, which I don’t want to happen to visitors to AlteredPapercraft.com.

Having a shop on AlteredPapercraft.com, I chose to reactivate WooCommerce because it is possibly the most popular storefront plugin for WordPress websites and offers several benefits, such as payment processing and store analytics, making it literally a one-stop shop. The payment processing is helpful so that I don’t have to find another plugin to handle payments, and the store analytics can help me to determine which of my products are the most popular so that I know to keep those in stock and potentially add similar products.

I have complete confidence in the Wordfence Security plugin to keep my website safe from attackers and malware. I appreciate that it tracks so many things, such as potential attackers and outdated themes, that could create potential security risks. I also have it set up to email me whenever it comes across anything, so it keeps me thoroughly up to date on the health and safety of AlteredPapercraft.com.

I reactivated this plugin because I appreciate how a scroll up button helps me as a visitor of other sites to scroll back more quickly to the top of a long web page. Given how much I appreciate it, I can imagine my visitors will appreciate it as well.