Wordpress Plugins I Use with the Astra Theme!

Would you like to see what WordPress plugins I use on my website because they work beautifully together and this will save you hours of research?

Wordpress Plugins I Use with the Astra Theme!

What I'll do now is show you the inside of my actual plugins.

I've shown you the outside of the website and you can speed test any one page you want to see how fast it loads yourself.

You may want to read the first part of this blog post.

What I'll do now is get into more of the technical details on this to show you exactly which plugins I'm using.

I've got 35 active plugins on my website right now.

As a general rule, you want to minimize the number of plugins you are using because the more plugins you use, the more conflicts you can have.

What I can verify for you is that as of this time I'm running all of these and they work really well together.

There's a couple of things I'm tweaking on my website.

The good news is I've learned how to do all this myself even though I don't have any experience as a web developer, which means you can learn how to do this yourself.

For the theme, I've got the Astra Pro theme, which means I've got Astra as my theme, then I've upgraded it to the Pro version to get some additional features.

I've got this Astra Hooks plugin to customize hooks and I'm not sure if I actually need this.

I've got Astra Widgets to add more widgets.

One little plugin I got here, very helpful plugin for speeding up my pages load time is called Async JavaScript.

This is having an issue where the menu is loading super slow like 20 seconds on mobile and I'll figure out how to work with that. This helped get my page load time way down by essentially, as far as I could see, it allows the Java script to load separately.

It doesn't have to be synched in with the rest of the page load, which means the page can actually render a lot faster without having to go through all of the Java script first, which is giving me a lot faster page load time in Google and helps me get more search traffic.

That goes with Autoptimize and Autoptimize CriticalCSS.com Power-Up here.

The two of these together allow my website to load much faster in Google search and give me the ability to get users as my website is faster, I keep these users on my website for longer and get more search traffic from Google.

Here's the plugin bbPress that I'm using for forum software, I've inserted this plugin called Code Snippets.

Code Snippets is very helpful for making little changes to your website. For example, I look through on page speed testing and noticed that one of my fonts was taking a long time to load.

I throw in a code snippet change to help it load the font faster, which greatly speeds up the page load time.

This plugin I've got is called Design Upgrade Pro for LearnDash.

This helps me have a nicer looking course grid.

For some reason, LearnDash makes a default course grid really ugly, this one still has room for improvement, but it looks a lot better than doing it without the Design Upgrade Pro for LearnDash plugin.

Here are two plugins, Elementor and Elementor Pro.

This is what allows me to design these custom pages, which I can do almost anything with. There are so many different formats. These pages are all super responsive.

This is an example of a page with Elementor and the different elements on it.

Elementor has a ton of customization options.

LearnDash has a whole bunch of plugins.

What I like is that it directly integrates with bbPress, which means I've got it set up on my forums that not just anyone can go access my forums.

In order to use my forums, you have to buy something on my website, then use your account to post to my forums.

This allows me to not have to deal with spam because only customers can use my forums.

However, anyone can come read my forums, which is ideal for Google search.

Therefore, the LearnDash LMS - bbPress Integration plugin here allows me to have it so that anyone can just buy something on my website and immediately post on my forms, it's automatic.

LearnDash also has a WooCommerce integration where when you purchase in WooCommerce, it tells LearnDash that this person should have access to the course based on how I've set it up.

I track my Google analytics with MonsterInsights, which is very helpful to see exactly where my purchases are coming from.

Did it come from Google search or did it come from a social media referral?

Did it come from a certain website? Was it on a mobile device or a desktop computer?

MonsterInsights gives me that valuable Google analytics tracking in order to see deep down into the details of where I'm getting sales, that way I can optimize on it.

I use Perfmatters as a plugin to speed up my website.

WooCommerce puts scripts on every single page of my website for some reason, I guess in case I need to use WooCommerce on that page.

What I've done with Perfmatters, it disables WooCommerce scripts anywhere except on the pages where it's actually needed, which speeds up my whole website.

It also has a lot of other options on it that are helpful like I can run the Google Analytics locally on my website, which speeds up my website.

I use ShortPixel Image Optimizer to take the images I upload and shrink them, compress them, so that they load a lot faster.

Unfortunately, sometimes this means my images look a little pixelated or a little grainy.

However, I would take a bit of a pixelated image.

For example, on these course images and on the blog posts. If you go on the blog posts, I'd take a bit of a pixelated image and this is on desktop, which means it's most obvious on a 1920 by 1080 or theoretically a 4K monitor.

I'd take the little bit of pixelation over having something that loads significantly slower on devices, especially in parts of the world where bandwidth is not as abundant as it is where I live in the USA, it's very nice to have these smaller image files because you can clearly see what's going on in the images.

There are some little artifacts from compressing some of the images.

However, everything loads so much faster because of this. There are also settings I could and maybe I will bump it up, so it doesn't do as much compressing. You can control all that in ShortPixel.

I use Steempress to put my posts out to the Steem blockchain since I've already got a big following there and lots of votes, but you don't need to worry about that.

WooCommerce is the plugin I use to do my checkout experience.

For example, when you go up to the pricing page on my website and you decide you want to buy something, you then are in this WooCommerce.

Now, look at the WooCommerce shop itself. I don't actually feature this anywhere.

However, this is a default page. You can get an idea of all the products and services that are available on my website.

By default, WooCommerce has landing pages like this.

I prefer to use Elementor to make pretty landing pages.

Then when you click on it, I have another plugin I use that skips directly to the checkout process, which is called WooCommerce Direct Checkout.

This plugin is so clutch because it's so much easier to customize the WooCommerce experience. Instead of people having to click on a cart page and go to checkout, which is so awkward, this direct checkout page makes it super simple.

There's just a credit card field or a PayPal field.

There's this, I've read the website's terms and conditions, first and last name, email address. It's super fast, and if you're an existing customer, you can log in here.

This is so much faster than what it looks like otherwise and the WooCommerce Direct Checkout makes that possible, and you also need the Pro version for that.

When you want to use PayPal and Stripe in any other WooCommerce gateways, you just get a plugin and that puts it in for you.

I highly recommend you use as many gateways as you need to, to give people the option to pay different ways.

I love that in WooCommerce I can accept subscriptions both with Stripe and with PayPal, which is really nice.

For example, on some other solutions like Teachable or Thinkific it's only available with Stripe. It's nice to have that PayPal option.

With the WooCommerce Subscriptions plug in, I can take subscriptions.

For example, the $19.95 a month is done with this subscriptions plugin where it sets up that repeating charge.

I've also got Zapier integrated where I can automatically get a text message every single time somebody orders on my website. That way, my customer service team and I, can be ready to respond and help out that person right away.

I have WP YouTube Lyte, which is responsible for these video thumbnails. If you notice on my blog posts, this is not an actual YouTube embed.

This is just a thumbnail of the video with a little YouTube button, and when you click it, it does not actually even play the video, but what it does is pull the video embed.

The nice part is that it drastically speeds up the loading time.

My whole website generally was loading way slower because YouTube embeds take a long time to load. In fact, the YouTube embeds were taking more energy for the browser to load than my entire rest of the page was because of how YouTube has it set up.

Thus, I've got these that WP YouTube Lyte, which allows me to just make it so much faster to load videos.

I also use WPForms, which I've discovered is kind of unnecessary with Elementor Pro.

However, I still have it since I paid, and I may get some more customization with my forms or I may drop it.

I've also got Yoast SEO Premium because that helps me get in a site XML site map up to Google. Any new pages I put in my website, Google's easily got them, all the new forum posts, Yoast SEO is on top of that as well.

These are the active plugins on my website that I use to run it and what you can see is all of this stuff plays nicely. Everything works pretty well on my website except right now it is taking a long time to load the menu, I will take a look at that and see if there's a little setting I can change.

On the inactive plugins, I'll show you the plugins that I've used before and I'm not using right now.

Sometimes my WordPress dashboard goes a little slow because I've got all these things in there that I've disabled. It was going a lot slower and I disabled some of the plugins to see which ones would speed up the most.

If you want to edit the menu, Admin Menu Editor helps.

One thing you can do to speed your WordPress website up also is to use this Advanced Database Cleaner to clean out some of the plugins because when you install them, they don't do a real uninstalling. They just delete a little bit and you've got all this garbage leftover.

When you have been installing and uninstalling plugins for six years on your website, this can add up. I don't need this active right now, however, I haven't deleted it yet.

I was using the Ezoic integration, which you can use to earn ad revenue and integrate your AdSense, maximize your earnings, and speed up your website with the Site Speed Accelerator.

I did a video and a blog post on that before.

I've chosen not to use it because I've got such a research setup that already works for me that the Ezoic integration was taking away from my ability to customize my own website and get things working.

However, I would recommend if you want an easier solution than doing all these plugins, just use the Ezoic Site Speed Accelerator.

Jetpack by WordPress.com comes generally with WooCommerce, I don't need that.

Login Security Solution can be nice.

However, if you use things like Zapier to automatically publish your posts that can mess it up. I may turn this back on if I want to use it at some point.

I was using Pixel Caffeine in order to do the Facebook pixel on my website. However, I don't do any Facebook ads and this was significantly slowing down my page load time, therefore I took that off.

I had a WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration, which was not working, so we're going to go ahead and delete that. You also have the WooCommerce Services, that was not necessary either.

I had this WP External Links plugin that was helping me put "no follow" on all my links. However it stopped working, maybe it'll be updated and work.

I was also hiding the login before with WPS Hide Login, although I don't need this plugin anymore because the newer plugins have the ability to do that.

Unfortunately for using something like Zapier automatically, if you hide the login, that stuff doesn't work.

Thus, these are some of the old plugins I was using, and these are the new plugins I am currently using. You can see it's all working for me really well on my website.

I'm grateful I'm consistently getting new people in at Jerry banfield.com/university that are joining at all levels and all my content direct back to this all over the place, which helps me to have a safe and reliable business every day online.

This helps you know where to find me all the time and exactly how to have interactions with me instead of posting in all these different places and wishing I would respond and wondering why I don't.

I've got it all set up in one place and you can see it's all working very well.

Thank you for taking a tour with me of my website and seeing exactly all the stuff I'm using to run my business.

I hope this tour has been useful for you.

I love you.

You’re awesome.

I appreciate the chance to serve you today and I will see you again soon.

Love,
Jerry Banfield

Edits from video transcript by Michel Gerard.

Originally published at https://jerrybanfield.com.