I have over 15 years of experience in creating and managing WordPress based websites. Feel free to leverage this experience to help you identify the best wordpress plugins so that your website is accomplishing your goals!
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Website Hosting: SiteGround
Your website will be amazing, but you will want to start with a great foundation. You HAVE to host your website somewhere, and we recommend SiteGround. We host Efficient Solorpreneur at SiteGround because it is a solid and FAST hosting company.
- Free website migration
- Free SSL certificates
- Best in class hosting performance
SiteGround’s support is amazing. We host our businesses with SiteGround using the Grow Big plan. We trust SiteGround and we think you should as well.
Wordpress Theme: GeneratePress
Over the years I’ve used photography specific Wordpress themes to design my website. I’ve since stepped away for that, opting to pursue site performance. GeneratePress is one of the fastest Wordpress themes on the market today!
GeneratePress is:
- Very lean and customizable Wordpress theme.
- Fast, fast and did I mention it’s fast?
- Developed and supported by a great group of developers.
You can try GeneratePress for free via Wordpress.Org. However, I’m leveraging their Pro features which you can obtain via their GeneratePress Pro site.
Image Optimization: ShortPixel
Images on your website are visually appealing, but also a major culprit for slowing down your site. ShortPixel fixes this problem, quickly. We use this plugin here on Efficient Solopreneur as well as several other websites that we manage (including photography sites).
Here at Efficient Solopreneur we use ShortPixel to:
- Automatically resize images upon upload that perfectly fit our site.
- Optimize the image so that it loads much faster on the website.
- Serve our images on ShortPixel CDN to further increase our page load speeds.
The free account can help you test ShortPixel for yourself. We have their Large plan to meet the needs of the traffic at this site.
Website Caching: WP Rocket Cache
Speed Up your website with WP Rocket cache. I’m using a great website host. However, the vast majority of us are utilizing some form of shared hosting (Managed Wordpress hosting or otherwise). You will want to help your host speed things up using a caching plugin, and when it comes to ease of use + great performance, WP Rocket Cache is at the top of the list.
WP Rocket allows you to:
- Obtain file-based caching that works in conjunction with your host.
- Concatenate and minify your code (this speeds things up too).
- Optimize the use of Facebook pixel(s) and Google Analytics code.
WP Rocket is a premium Wordpress caching plugin. It’s without a doubt one of the best! I use WP Rocket on ALL of my sites.
Envira Gallery
Envira Gallery is the best responsive WordPress gallery plugin. Here are the features that make Envira Gallery the most powerful and user-friendly WordPress gallery plugin in the market.
Perfmatters allows you to:
- Responsive Mobile Friendly
- Deeplinking & Pagination
- Compatible with ShortPixel
Envira Gallery is a premium Wordpress gallery plugin. Well worth it for image heavy portfolio sites like mine.
Perfmatters
Slow WordPress sites have higher bounce rates and fewer conversions. The perfmatters plugin was created by webperf geeks to speed up your site!
Perfmatters allows you to:
- Disable unused scripts site-wide or per page.
- Remove unused capabilities that may slow down your site.
- Optimize the use of Google Analytics code (even better than WP Rocket).
Perfmatters is a premium Wordpress caching plugin. It’s like the frosting on an amazing cake.
