On today’s episode, we are going to talk about how to build a WordPress site with only free plugins right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast Episode No. 402. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and I’m excited to be here with you today because we’re gonna talk about how to build a “free” WordPress website. Granted, you need to have some sort of hosting for your website to actually be out there on the web, but we’re gonna talk about the plugins that you can make to make a fully functional site without having to spend any money to buy any premium plugin. I have quite a few announcements as I was off last week, and I have a plugin to share, so let’s go ahead and dive right in.

The first thing that I wanna share with you is that WordPress, a 4.9.8 Maintenance Release was released. I did allude to this in last week’s episode. I was just guessing that it would come out, and it actually did. It has a few fixes and some privacy things that have been changed, and the big thing was the Call Gutenberg callout, so it’s a big thing that shows up at your dashboard, and it talks about the new, modern publishing experiences coming soon. And so, you have the ability to install Gutenberg the plugin, and you have the option to install the Gutenberg Classic Editor, which is a plugin that will make your website or your WordPress site continue to work as it does in 4.9 when WordPress 5.0 comes out. Your hosting company may have already updated to 4.9.8, but if not, go ahead and get the latest version of WordPress so you’ll be all ready for when WordPress 5.0 comes out.

Speaking of Gutenberg, Gutenberg 3.5.0 has been released, and it just continues to polish some features, and it just adds a lot of things. And so, if you have clicked that button inside of WordPress 4.9.8, you’ll have the option when you download to get Gutenberg 3.5, which is the latest version. And so, they keep making it better and better, and if you haven’t heard of Gutenberg, I guess I should explain. Gutenberg is the new editor that’s coming with WordPress 5.0. It is a more JavaScript based editor, and it makes it very simple to add different types of blocks. Each piece of content is considered a block, so a video would be a block, a block quote would be a block, a list item would be a block. It’s really confusing the very first time that you use it.

You would say, “Oh, I want a content block,” and then you would add a couple paragraphs, and then usually each paragraph, any break in the text whether that be an image, or that be some sort of list items, or anything like that, that’s going to be in a separate block. And it it’s kind of like, “Oh, why do I need all these blocks?” But it’s just the way the new interface works, and then you can go, and you can click, and you can drag, and you can move those blocks from top to bottom, or just move them around your site and make your site use it to build your page or your post to make it exactly what you want it to look like.

Also, in Gutenberg related news, Yoast is giving a new try, or they’re fixing some things in Version 8.0 of the Yoast plugin, and they’re basically giving a small, little sneak peek of what the Gutenberg integration’s gonna look like via Yoast’s Twitter account. But basically, it is coming out on Tuesday, so it looks like the day that I’m recording this, it’s gonna come out. They’re rearranging and they’re fixing the layout, so it works much better with Gutenberg. Right now, all of the settings are right at the bottom, and it’s just not the best user interface, but they are doing some cool things. I know I’m excited to see what that looks like in the next week or so once that comes out, and I can get it installed on a test site. So, Yoast is getting ready for Gutenberg.

And another one that was in the news was Advanced Custom Fields is adding Gutenberg compatibility in Version 5.0 which is slated to happen in September. Advanced Custom Fields is a way to add custom post types to your website. It’s used on more than a million active installs, and developers have been really worried and concerned whether or not their custom fields would continue to work with clients’ websites when the new editor makes its debut. And it basically still will, but they’re just all pushed way to the bottom of the screen. It’s just an awkward attempt to have that compatibility, so they’ve worked through, and they are getting some things fixed early in September. So, just a couple weeks, and we can go ahead, and we can try those out, and I’m sure I’ll have news about that in the coming weeks as we go.

Another piece of news – again, I said there’s a lot of news that’s happening – was there’s an article on WPTavern.com, and it talks about the top 10 sessions from the WordCamp Europe 2018, which just happened a month or so ago. And the attendees surveys are in, and 90 percent of the 566 respondents say that they would recommend WordCamp again. And all of these people fill out this survey, and there was almost a half of the people – 49 percent – were attending WordCamp Europe for the first time, and 37 percent of those were actually attending their very first WordCamp and spoke about this overwhelmingly positive experience, a big affirmation for the organizing team and whatnot.

But they’ve organized the top 10 sessions, which have been curated by the attendees who responded to the survey. Some of the top 10 include the Keynote and Question and Answer session by Matt Mullenweg. There’s a talk on SEO by Joost. There’s a few talks on Gutenberg and the Progressive WordPress Themes and what’s to come in 2019. We’ve got JavaScript and APIs, we’ve got Inclusive Design, and we’ve got Autonomy of a Block: how the Gutenberg patterns work and what defines a block. And so, there’s links in the article over on WPTavern. It’s linked in the show notes for Episode No. 402. But if you’re interested in watching some of those sessions from the past WordCamp Europe, I recommend doing that and checking out some of these top 10.

And then lastly in the news, I wanna talk about WordPress.com, and they partnered with Pexels to offer a free stock photo library inside of WordPress.com and Jetpack-enabled sites. And so, this is something that you can do from your WordPress site if you’re using WordPress.com or any site connected with Jetpack. But basically, you can go to the Medias area where you would add a Media item, and you click on the down arrow, and you go to Free Photo Library is what it’s called. And then you can go in, you can type a search, and you can find all kinds of images that are built right in, and they are licensed to be used on websites, and so it’s really cool.

If you’re a photographer, you can share your images with Pexels, and other people can use your images and whatnot, but it has been overwhelmingly positive so far, and WordPress users have already downloaded more than a million images since the library was introduced just a few weeks ago. So, that’s something if you need images – I know that I’m always looking for images, and I’ve got a few places that I look for stock images for the header of each of my podcast episodes, but I’m definitely gonna check out this and see if there’s images int here that would make a good fit for a show notes for YourWebsiteEngineer.com.

Moving on into the “Is there a plugin for that” section, I wanna talk about one. It’s a neat one that I haven’t seen before, and it’s called a WordPress Easy Login. And this is a plugin that will remember the username of each user who logged into your sites. Usernames are stored in the browser and displayed with you visit the default login page of the website using the same browser. It’s a very useful plugin when you have users who have many accounts on the same site. So, this is a way to think about this. If you’ve ever logged into mail.google.com, and then you have that dropdown list of all of your logins that you’ve logged in with, whether it’s your personal or your business account, or one of the hundreds of email addresses that you have, then, visually, this is kind of what it looks like. It gives you the ability to pick which username you wanna log into, and then you add your password, and then you can log right in.

It’s a pretty nifty little plugin. It just got released here on the WordPress Repository, so it doesn’t have a lot of active installs, but if this is something that you may be using or maybe there’s a website that’s got a handful of people to login, and they don’t wanna have to remember what their username is, they just wanna remember their password, then this may be a perfect plugin for them. It is called WP Easy Login, and it’s made by the team at 5um17. So, you can find that in the show notes or you can search for WP Easy Login on the WordPress Repository.

Today we’re gonna talk about different plugins and free versions of these plugins that will work absolutely well on your website and not have you to spend money on buying plugins. Premium plugins are definitely worth the cost. Usually, that comes with some sort of support, it comes with the ongoing updates and maintenance of these plugins, and a lot of the plugins use – I’m thinking WooCommerce. That’s a good one. That’s a paid one that comes with support. Backup Buddy is another one that comes to mind that you pay for service and support. But WooCommerce is one that it’s like this is adding something, an extra feature to your website that it wouldn’t normally have.

But today, what I wanna talk about, just kind of a standard plain Jane website, maybe a website for a small business, maybe for a personal profile, a website that’s maybe a personal blog, or there’s lots of different choices out there. There’s a lot of different basic websites – even like a restaurant. A restaurant website could use these plugins that we’re gonna talk about today and not really have any problems and not necessarily need any additional specialized plugins that are premium plugins. So, I kinda got to thinking about this when I was thinking about YourWebsiteEngineer.com, and primarily, almost all of my plugins are completely free.

The ones that I do actually have to pay for, one of them is the Smart Podcast Player, and that one is by Pat Flynn. That is the one that displays the podcast on my site, and I ended up getting in on that when that was a Beta, and I paid a one-time $49.00 fee or something to get that podcast, but then all of the rest of them are completely free plugins that I’m using on my website, and it completely works, and it has all the functionality that I need. So, that’s what I wanted to talk about today and kind of just dive into some of these plugins. The first one is – and these are not really in any particular order. I mean, they’re just kinda the ones that they came to me on the top of my head as I was putting the notes together for this podcast.

But the first one is Jetpack, and there’s more than 50,000 plugins. And I always tell people if you’re gonna install one plugin, the Jetpack plugin is the one to go. And it is something that a lot of people might say that it’s a bloated plugin, it’s got a lot of extra stuff in it. Well, it’s been completely rewritten. It does a wonderful job, and all of the features that are built in that I use, I absolutely love. Just speaking of Jetpack, the few things that I like Jetpack for is the Photon, which will turn all of my images on my website, and it will serve them from WordPress.com servers, and then it will make my site load faster, and it will optimize those images on the fly, and so they will be the right size for the image that they’re being looked at, so I really like that. I really like the Monitor feature.

And so, Monitor is a great one to just monitor your website. It pings your website every five minutes, and if your website’s down, it’ll send you an email, and then when your website’s back up, it’ll send you another email. And so, you can look, and you can get a real quick glimpse of, “Oh, hey, this is how long my website’s been down. It’s been down a lot over the past week.” Well, then that’s probably a good trigger to talk to your host and try to figure out what might be going on on that side of things. So, that’s the first one: Jetpack.

There’s tons of modules inside. There’s 30-some different switches that you can turn on, and you can turn off. You can have things automatically post to social accounts. You can turn on all kinds of things. So, Jetpack is one that I think that you can get away with the free version. There’s a couple paid versions of Jetpack, but if you just have the free version of Jetpack, you’re gonna get a lot of bang for your buck for that one plugin.

Another one – and I’ve alluded to it, or I’ve talked a little bit about it in the show earlier about Yoast SEO. There’s Yoast SEO, there’s WP SEO. Either one of those are free, but they give you the ability to make your website rank higher on search engines. And it doesn’t have to be complex. The only thing that I don’t like about Yoast is it updates everyday it seems like. They’re always pushing updates out, and you’re always outdated. And so, that’s something that you wanna think about when you’re setting up your website. You wanna just make sure that Yoast is always updated because they’re always adding features, they’re always adding new things to your website.

But the cool thing about Yoast is it gives you this little snippet at the bottom, and it shows you what the snippet would look like in a Google search ranking, and you can change the meta description, you can see what the URL is, you can change the title, you can do all of that. And so, you can see that, but then also, in addition to that, you have the ability to look at an analysis, and it shows you what your keyword density is and images on your page if they have the alt tag and the focus keyword.

And so, you basically have three different levels. You have green, orange, and red. And if it’s red, that means the density, it’s very, very low. There’s something that needs to be improved. The orange one means you’re okay. You should probably do a few things to improve it or correct it. And then the last one is green, and those are all good, and that means that you’re ready to go. That’s a little bit about Yoast.

Another one that I recommend is called Akismet, and this is all about spam [inaudible] [00:12:53] or blocking spam from your website. And this is one that gets installed on every website, and you can actually go, and you can activate it completely for free. It does recommend there is a subscription type. They recommend you pay some money for it if you’re using it for a business site, but in general, you can go, and you can get an API key for completely free, and you can get it set up on your site, and you can work through configuring it. And once it’s done, then you won’t see any spam comments on your website. It is amazing. I haven’t had any spam comments on YourWebsiteEngineer.com for many, many years, which I owe all of that to the power of Akismet.

WP Super Cache is another one that would be on my list. It’s made by Automattic, and it is a free plugin. I don’t actually use any caching plugins on my website. I just use a good host. I’m using Pressable for YourWebsiteEngineer.com, and they do all the caching, and so I don’t really worry about caching. But if you’re interested in caching certain pages or making your website even a little bit faster, then that’s what the WP Super Cache plugin is all about.

The next one on my list is Ninja Forms or Contact Form 7, either of those, or even using the forms built into Jetpack, any of those will give you the ability to create a form on your website, allow people to submit things via the form, and then you can reply, and you can manage those contacts or get back in touch with those folks via the contact form, or via email, or however you set up your form. The Ninja Forms is really cool. It has some of the Power of Gravity forms, and if you just need a very simple form – maybe your name, contact information and whatnot, what the message is about – then Ninja Forms works really, really well. Contact Form 7 is one that’s been out there for years. It’s a little bit more cumbersome to setup and configure, but once you do, then it’s off to the races, and you get those email notifications as well when somebody submits a request through your website.

The next one on my list – and there’s a bunch of them out there, but I picked one – the Elementor Page Builder. You don’t necessarily need a page builder, and maybe with Gutenberg coming in the next version, we won’t need any page builders at all – who knows. But unless you want to program, and write some code, and figure out HTML and maybe some CSS, then the Elementor Page Builder is going to be a perfect thing for you. You can build your pages with sections, and modules, and widgets. There’s a lot of things that you can do. I’ve watched a demo on Elementor. It looks really cool, but I’ve never actually used it myself. But if you need something like that, then Elementor is going to be a good plugin for you.

The Monster Insights Google Analytics for WordPress, that is going to be the plugin that I recommend for Google Analytics. If you need some way to track the people that are coming to your website, then Monster Insights is going to be perfect for that. There’s links in the show notes for all of these that you can get to very, very quickly in case you need them.

Then we need to back up our website, and there’s lots of backup plugins. My go-to recommendation for free ones is BackWPup, and that’s a free one. It allows you to backup, and you can send it to Dropbox, or you can send it to Amazon S3, and you can control where all of your content goes and all those backups. You don’t wanna backup on your server. You wanna push those elsewhere, and so BackWPup is really good with that.

If you want to have a podcast or some sort of way to display audio, like audio players will automatically be displayed when an MP3 file or an MP3 link is added to a post or a page, but if you want something a little bit nicer, there’s PowerPress. PowerPress is a good one, and there’s a few other ones that are out there, but I’ve been a PowerPress user for many years. I’ve used that in the past, and it works really well to get a player on your website.

And then lastly, as I look through my list of plugins that’s on my website, YourWebsiteEngineer.com, the one that I see is iThemes Security, and this is probably one that I should’ve talked about earlier in the episode, but this is one that is really good in the fact that it helps you make your website harder to hack into. And basically, it does that by showing you a checklist, and it shows you all of the things that you may or may not be doing correctly on your WordPress site. And so, you can go into the iThemes settings, and you basically can go, and you can turn on different modules. There’s the recommended ones, there’s the advanced ones, and you can configure the settings. You can check and see what you need. Some of them are pro features that you can pay for, but the free version has a lot of features that are built right in, and there’s no payment needed whatsoever.

So, those are the plugins I wanted to share. I have almost all of those running on YourWebsiteEngineer.com. I don’t have hardly any others. Some are a little bit more specialized, but for the most part, I’m using free plugins in my setup, and the site works extremely well. It does exactly what I need it to. Again, if you have some sort of custom functionality that you need, you need to add a store, you need to add some sort of shopping cart, you need to accept money in some way, or shape, or form – there’s other reasons why you would need a pay plugin, but you can run a full-fledged site without paying any money for plugins on your website.

So, that’s what I wanna talk about here in Episode No. 402. Next week we’ll talk more WordPress, and maybe we’ll know more about Gutenberg, and maybe when that launch phase is for WordPress 5.0. But until then, take care, and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.