For this episode of The Design Hustle Show, hosted by myself, Jeff Brown, I sat down with my friend and colleague, Jesse Nicoli, a front-end web developer and graphic designer who has design agency experience and is great at finding better, faster ways to do design tasks. We decided to talk about WordPress plugins and design resources that everyone should be using and why.

There are plugins that we think that every WordPress site should have and you should know how to get the best use out of them. Jesse explains what he likes and why he uses plugins like Yoast for SEO and Wordfence for website security. We also talked about services, like Google Analytics, that coincide with some of these plugins and why they are important. Jesse also shares some of his go-to design resources for graphics, images and more.

 

In this episode, Jesse and I talk about both free and premium WordPress plugins and design resources that not only make life easier, it can really help your site function better. Fed up with iStock Photo? Jesse has some suggestions on how to get quality imagery at a much more affordable cost. Before we end the episode, Jesse tells me his favorite lunch stop and what’s good there.

Here are some of the WordPress plugins and design resources that Jesse suggests using:

WORDPRESS PLUGINS

Yoast – An SEO plugin that helps optimize your website pages with keywords to help your site to be found in the search engines. Site: https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/

Wordfence – A security plugin that protects your site against brute force attacks, mailicous uploads, malware and more. Site: https://www.wordfence.com/

Contact Form 7 – A simple but solid contact form plugin. Site: https://contactform7.com/

Google Analytics by Monster Insights – Google Analytics plugin – you must have a Google Analytics account setup for this to work. Site: https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/

Super Cache (or W3 Total Cache) – A site caching plugin to help web pages to load faster. Site: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/ or https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/

WP Slider (Optional) – An optional slider for your website. Site: https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-slider-ssp/

Pop-Up Maker (Optional) – A cool, optional plugin to help make pop-ups for your site. Site: https://wordpress.org/plugins/popup-maker/

WP Post/Page Clone – A great plugin that simply clones posts and pages. Site: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-post-page-clone/

WP Limit Login Attempts – A simple but effective plugin that limits login attempts. Site: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-limit-login-attempts/

Plugin Vulnerabilities – A must-have plugin that identifies any plugin vulnerabilities in installed plugins. Site: https://wordpress.org/plugins/plugin-vulnerabilities/

WP Bakery Page Builder (Visual Composer) – A great plugin that allows you build your webpages using an easy-to-use UI. Cost: $45. Site: https://wpbakery.com/

DESIGN RESOURCES

Spoon Graphics – A great repository of graphics assets, tutorials and templates. Site: https://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/

Envato Market – A hub for templates, graphic elements, audio and video clips and more. https://envato.com

Audio Jungle – Part of Envato Market, Audio Jungle has a plethora of audio clips, royalty free music and sound affects. https://audiojungle.net/

Unsplash – A robust repository of high resolution images. https://unsplash.com

Morgue File – Another collection of free and paid images (pulling images from iStock, Shutterstock and Getty images) Site: https://morguefile.com

Pixabay – Pixabay is much like Unsplash, with several great high resolution images. Site: https://pixabay.com/en/

 

Thanks for checking out this episode of The Design Hustle Show. If you like the first episode, feel free to give us a review on iTunes (click here) and subscribe on iTunes, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Next time, I’ll be sitting down with friend and colleague Chris Busby and discussing enterprise level websites and how I enterprise level website project should go, so join us next time for that.

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