Did you know a big chunk of the work I do is customizing and working with WordPress? I absolutely love creating websites in WordPress for my clients. One of the biggest problems I hear from people is that they want the ability to interact with their own website but they don’t know how to code and it is really intimidating. As a WordPress Developer, I want to empower people to feel comfortable updating and changing the content on their sites on their own. One of the ways I do this is set up the custom WordPress themes in such a way that once the initial set up is done, the client can really take ownership over the site without fear of breaking or not knowing how to work on it themselves.

Another great things about WordPress, besides giving people a feeling of ownership on their own site, is that it is open source. Which means that the original source code is made available for people to work on and modify in an effort to make things better for all. Yay for open source software! This creates a huge repository of ways to customize your WordPress site. I’ve come to find that there are some plugins that I just have to have when setting up WordPress sites for clients.

Yoast SEO

I find this plugin has really helped me understand what I need to do for SEO as well as walk me through the process really easy. I find it really takes the guess work out of wondering what you should do or forgetting any important SEO steps.

WP Supercache

This doesn’t really provide anything you are able to see but it helps your website stay fast by helping create an aggressive cache of your website.

Ninja Forms

This creates a simple easy to use to create forms for you to put on your website.

Analytify

This is a free way to integrate Google Analytics into the WordPress admin panel, I find that it is a good way to get a snapshot of the statistics but I still need to go to the Google Analytics to get really detailed information. But for most times the snapshot is all I need.

Login Logo

I operate several WordPress websites on my own my lifestyle blog Happy Apple, my photography business Pear & Honey Photography, and this website. All the login pages on these sites look the same until you install this plugin. It allows you to upload a branded image to the login page so you are able to visually verify which account you are logging into.