So, here it is you guys, list of all the plugins I use and a reason I have them.

A few members of my facebook group asked me this exact question so I decided to answer with a blog post. Why not, if I can help more people that way.

I’m not going to bother you with a long introduction to this post. Just a quick few words for those of you who are new here. Right now I am one year into blogging but only got more serious about it in 2019. Yeah well, someone has to practice consistency. Haha.

We all have 24 hours in a day but if you have more than one interest (I have like a million of things I wanna do) it’s difficult to manage time properly and you have to work hard to make everything work. It took some time but I’ve made it work, somehow.

This blog was created from scratch without any previous knowledge to fulfil my long lasting wish for writing, to earn extra money and to be location independent.

Oh, and I also moved to the UK this year, how crazy is that? A lot of things happened in a very short time. You’re welcome to stick around to see how things are going if you’re interested.

And now, let’s get to WordPress plugins.

Now, what about these WordPress plugins this post is actually about?

Currently I have exactly 19 plugins – 18 active and 1 inactive.

This is totally enough for me. At least until I some new ideas don’t come up for redesigning my blog or adding something new to the site. If I do decide to make any changes regarding my plugins, I’ll update this post as well.

Check out my other post – First 12 Things you should do after installing WordPress

Here are my plugins in order of uploading and activating them:

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is literally the number one WP plugin of all time. The name itself says it all (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization).

It improves your performance in search engines by optimizing your website. It has many awesome features like focus keyword testing, title and meta description support, changing post’t SEO title and meta description, google search result snippet previews, checking readibility of your post, and many other amazing features.

The free version has all of the above but if you go premium there’s many more. I use the free version for now because I don’t need more but I will be upgrading in a few months, as soon as I learn all I need to about SEO.

2. iThemes Security

This plugin secures and protects you WordPress website from attacks. Thousands of websites are being hacked each day and WordPress is an easy target for hackers because of easy passwords, vulnerable plugins and other reasons. Why waste your time and money if you can simply upload a security plugin right away.

3. UpdraftPlus

It’s the best backup plugin there is, atleast that’s what my trusted WP experts are saying, and the number of downloads speaks for itself. It’s a backup, restore and clone plugin. Your can lose everything because of user error, server crash, bad updates or hacking. Get your most popular backup plugin if you want to have a peace of mind.

4. Autoptimize

It makes optimizing your site really easy. It helps to speed up your site by aggregating, minifying and caching scripts and styles, injecting CSS in the page head by default, moving and defering scripts to the footer and minifying HTML. This is all a bit too technical for beginners and you don’t even need to know every bit of it, unless you’re a web developer but as a blogger you have to know how to speed up your website. And uploading this plugin might be a solution for you.

5. MOJO Marketplace (*not activated)

This plugin adds shortcodes, widgets, and themes to your WordPress site.

I can’t really remember why I have this plugin but I kept it anyways as an inactive plugin in case I find some use it in the near future.

6. WP Fastest Cache

Without any caching at all, visitors to your website would have to download your web pages every single time they visit. But thanks to modern browsers, browser caching ensures users returning to visit your web pages will be able to access your content faster.

Caching makes your website really fast. You need a caching plugin and there are a few great ones out there. I only happen to use WP Fastest cache because it was recommended to me by a WP expert I learned a lot from. But it’s not the only one nor do I say it’s definitely the best. You decide for yourself.

7. Really Simple SSL

Makes your site SSL proof. It automatically detects your settings and configures your website to run over https. 

8. Google Analytics for WP by MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights makes it “effortless” to properly connect your WordPress site with Google Analytics, so you can start making data-driven decisions to grow your business. Simply put, get the stats that matter inside your WordPress admin!

9. Antispam Bee

Antispam plugin with a sophisticated toolset for effective day to day comment and trackback spam-fighting. Built with data protection and privacy in mind.

10. Bloom

A simple, comprehensive and beautifully constructed email opt-in plugin built to help you quickly grow your mailing list. *It’s for Divi Theme users only.

11. Monarch

A social media plugin. Placing social icons, cutomizing the shape, size and placing social icons on your posts/pages. *For Divi Theme users only.

12. WPForms Lite

Beginner friendly WordPress contact form plugin. Use our Drag & Drop form builder to create your WordPress forms.

I’m not really using this plugin so maybe I’ll delete it eventually. But before deleting I still have to try it out and see how contact form looks like. Maybe I’ll love it and keep it. I just haven’t taken the time to test it yet. It’s probably not the smartest thing to have activated plugins you don’t even use but what can I say, it’s just one freakin’ plugin. And nobody’s perfect. Haha

13. Onesignal Push Notifications

Something I have but am still trying to figure out how exactly it works. You can see a notification bell on the left corner. And if you allow the notifications you’ll be directly notified after I publish a new post. And you can also unsubscribe any time you want.

Some say it’s way more efficient than email list. I still can’t say for sure if that’s true or not but I am willing to learn all about it.

14. Regenerate Thumbnail

Regenerates the thumbnails for one or more of your image uploads. Useful when changing their sizes or your theme. I uploaded this plugin because of previous post slider which displayed my featured images in different sizes which I obviously didn’t like and this plugin solved that issue. Now that I have a Responsive Posts Carousel, I don’t have any issues regarding image sizes so I don’t think I even need this plugin at the moment but I’m still keeping it.

Alex Mills was a young web developer who has written many WP plugins, including Regenerate Thumbnail. He sadly passed away in February 2019 due to leukemia. May he rest in peace. Let’s help to continue his legacy.

15. Smush

Reduces image file sizes, improves performance and boosts your SEO.

16. Pi Button

It is a plugin I use to add code to my pages which displays my Pinterest follow/profile/board widgets as you can see on this page. You can adjust the size of each widget.

17. Responsive Posts Carousel

This is something I searched for a long time before finding exactly what i wanted. I’ve tried similar plugins but they just wouldn’t do the job. As you can see on my homepage or on the bottom of every post, I have a post slider. I can adjust the number of displayed posts, colors, space between posts on a slider, speed, fonts, navigation tools and many other features.

I’m so happy to find this plugin!

18. Sticky Menu (or anything!) on scroll

I downloaded this plugin because I wanted to make a Pinterest widget (or maybe something else) in sidebar stand out and follow along as the readers scroll throught blog post. I hate any kind of pop-ups so this was a way to attract more people to see (and follow) my Pinterest profile.

Tell me honestly, do sticky widgets bother you, are they okay or is it that you don’t even notice them? I would really like to know what you think. Thanks!

19. Cmmntz

It’s my newest plugin and it happened because I wasn’t satisfied with how my comment section looked like. I learned about the Cmmntz plugin at the right moment and I’m still working on adjusting it in the most suitable way for my readers and me. It has some nice features but I’m still learning about it so I’ll let you know how that goes…

EDIT April 2019: I deleted CMMNTZ plugin because my comment section wasn’t looking good, it wasn’t not customizable in a way I would have wanted it. And the main reason I decided not to have it is because it required users to log in in order to display their real name. If they didn’t log into my site, they were shown as ‘guest’. I didn’t like that. At all. And it turned out my previous comment section was completely fine, I just didn’t know how to use it properly.