Ok, so this one is for all the wedding professionals who run their website with WordPress.
If you use Wix, Pixieset, Square Space or (god help you) GoDaddy, then I’m writing a post for you in a few weeks.
**SPOILER ALERT**
It’s bad news I’m afraid.
But let’s get back to WordPress.
It’s the world’s most popular website platform and powers a whopping
53% of the ENTIRE INTERNET!
WordPress is Awesome
WordPress is great for many reasons, the main one being that it’s open-source and ‘free’.
I say ‘free’ because it will cost you money for hosting, your time to set it up or if you hire a professional, it will cost you their fees as well. But it’s as close to free as you can get.
Another reason for its popularity is that you can customise it with Plugins and make it do pretty much anything you need it to.
Now that’s a blessing and a curse. There are currently over 55,000 plugins available.
With so much extensibility comes A LOT of confusion for most wedding professionals.
- What plugins do I need?
- Is plugin X compatible with plugin y?
- Do I have too many plugins installed?
- Do I need to pay for plugins?
- Do I even need plugins?
- ..
Don’t panic though. We’ve got you covered.
Out of the box, WordPress is great for a personal blog, but won’t cut it for your wedding business.
So we’re giving you a rundown of our 7 essential WordPress plugins for wedding businesses.
1) Yoast SEO
There are two big SEO plugins available; Yoast and All In One SEO Pack.
Personally, I find Yoast far more user-friendly and just easier to get the job done.
I’ll be covering the plugin in detail in a later post, but for now, their website is a great resource to get started with it.
2) Smush Image Compression and Optimization
As wedding professionals, especially wedding photographers, images are everything.
But uploading a 2,000px image straight from Lightroom will make your site slow to load and ruin your SEO.
The SmushIt plugin takes away that pain by resizing your images as you upload them and more importantly optimising them for web delivery.
So you can be sure they’ll be the right size and quality for any device.
I love this plugin because it just makes it all easy and it’s free!
If you want more features, you can get the Pro version and there are other plugins available. Most notably ShortPixel.
3) Wordfence
When you run over 50% of the websites on the internet, you become a target for the bad guys.
Enter, WordFence.
Think of it as the nightclub doorman for your website. It keeps the bad guys out and alerts you to anything dodgy happening on your site.
Simple.
4) Jetpack by WordPress
JetPack is a great plugin. It’s like a swiss army knife.
The main benefits for us wedding pros are that they host images on their CDN for free (geek speak for making them load faster = better SEO) and a few nice image gallery options.
5) W3 Total Cache
Ok, strap in, things are going to get geeky. I’ll try and keep it simple.
Think of your website like a Lego model you’ve built. It’s made up of lots of bricks (bits of text and images) and took you ages to put together.
Now imagine whenever someone visits your website, you had to build that Lego model while they sat waiting for it. Boring right?
Well, that’s what your website does for every visitor. As they land on your site, your server goes off the database and builds the page (Lego model) for them.
Every single page. Every single time.
The result? If you’re on a low-cost hosting package, your site will be slow and your SEO will suffer.
Page Caching is the equivalent of having your Lego model ready built and waiting to hand to each visitor whenever they turn up. Much quicker.
Look, just install the plugin and switch it on.
It will speed up your site and improve your SEO. K?
6) Pixel Your Site
This one just makes adding all the right tracking codes to your website super easy.
Not much more to say on this one other than we’ll cover all the different tracking options in later posts.
7) UpDraft Plus
As any good wedding photographer will know, always back up your work!
Your hosting provider might include backups as part of their package to you, but speaking from experience, what if their servers go down?
Your backup that’s sat with them isn’t much use while your site is down.
I always install a backup plugin and take a copy off the server into DropBox or Google Drive.
That way, should the worst ever happen, I can spin up an exact copy of my site with a new host in no time.
Incidentally, this plugin is great to help migrate your site if you ever move hosting providers.
Have we missed one?
Have we missed off an essential WordPress Plugin for wedding businesses?
Let us know in the comments below.
