All right, so in this video, we went through the theme itself and how to customize and add a new one,
got to do kind of the same thing now with plug ins.
So plug ins were a very similar way.
And then just add functionality to your website.
And no matter what theme you're using, you can switch your theme back and forth.
Your plug ins will always stay on.
So let's take a look at what some of those are now.
And let's show you some of the ones that I would recommend, like I show you how to set them up as well.
So if I go over here on the left hand side of plug ins, works the same way as most of the other flat
areas here where you can see it says install plug ins, we can add new or we can edit them.
So we're going to work on just taking a look at just what's comes preinstalled into WordPress.
So by default, at least as of I don't even know how long.
Many, many years now, they have always had these two plug ins.
And really.
Hello, darling.
I never use it was kind of, I don't think kind of a joke.
By the way, I think the developers of WordPress originally where it'll give a random hello daily quote
from the play to.
Throw out the back end of the website here, really, I kind of go in and just delete that for the most
part, it's never had an update.
As far as I know, it really poses no threat, but it just kind of no reason to really have it.
Now, estimates that's actually a great plug that's going to help prevent some of the spam coming to
your blog when you have comments available for people.
There are a lot of spammers who are going to want to get in there and get their links in there and do
different things.
I would highly suggest going ahead and activating that and then registering for it.
So the way that you do that is once you have a plugin installed, I have to do is click on activate
and each plugin is going to work a little bit differently here as far as how it works.
But once you activated, a lot of times you're going to see now the option to either deactivate or go
into the settings.
So for this one, we can go into the settings and take a look.
And this one's asking you basically to register.
What you're going to do is you can register for kismet and you basically give them your information
about your websites and your email.
And it's going to ask you to donate a certain amount of money and you can choose anywhere from zero
to, I think, like a thousand dollars or something crazy like that.
Now, if you have more than one website, I would suggest doing the paid version so you can have a couple
of different cookies.
McKees If you have a site that's actually making money, they recommend they think they basically say
that you are supposed to pay for it.
If your site is making money, if you just have a generic blog, then you can get away with a free one.
Kind of up to you is kind of on the honor system is a great plugin.
So I definitely support them.
I do pay for a multi license every year.
So it definitely works and I appreciate the services that they provide.
So basically you can go in and just go ahead and register.
You get your API kind of walk you through all the steps here.
But that's a good one to definitely start out with this, especially if you plan on having comments
on your website.
If you don't, you will start to see a lot of comments coming through, a ton, a ton of spam, and
you're going to get overwhelmed by it because like, I finally get to register for this.
So for all my blogs, I always have this one again.
I don't like being paid to say this.
You can see it's actually part of WordPress.
They have a preinstalled in there.
Definitely good one to have.
But again, don't feel obligated to activate it or pay for it, but it's well worth the money.
So let's go back over to plugins over here and we can add new.
And they're going to show you a couple of the big ones or the more popular ones, but just like the
themes, we can go and search the WordPress database for all different plugins and we can add some really
cool functionality to our website.
And they you can search for a couple different ways here.
Again, it pulls up this change from time to time.
You can see a Christmas up.
Here is one of the primary ones.
You can install jetpack.
That's a really good one.
We can take a look at that one baby press, which is a bulletin board, if you want, like the old days
of the Internet when people were using bulletin boards a lot, they still use them here.
So good for forums and things like that.
But Buddy Press where you can have basically like a multi community website that's kind of cool and
you can create your own little social media kind of website.
Gutenberg that was one of the things that we saw me first logged in to here.
They're asking to people to install.
That's kind of be part of the new version of WordPress.
I believe a lot of people aren't liking it.
Some are.
Sometimes it just takes a little bit of a learning curve, but whatever.
So some of the ones I like to install myself and you can either search by keyword or by the actual plugin
name itself here is back up.
WP stands for backup WordPress.
And what that's going to do is make a backup of your copy and you can schedule your backups to happen
daily, weekly, monthly.
However, often you can back up just the files, just the database or both.
Now there's always going to be times when you're going to want to maybe possibly have to refer to a
old version of your website.
Let's say your website gets hacked or maybe you make some kind of mistake in your pages and you have
to revert to something that you deleted by mistake.
There's also times, too, where maybe you update a plugin plugin updates come out all the time.
I'm always updating those.
There's always new versions, new features, new things that they are doing to improve from being hacked,
things like that that you want to update those plugins.
And every once in a great while, there's a plug in that just just conflicts with everything else on
the website and kind of shuts it down or causes really funky coding going on.
And you may have to go revert to an old version of the plugin.
So I'll download a backup of the website, put the old plug in back in, and that's a very, very helpful
to have.
So for this one, let's go ahead and install this and then what's it and start to get one more button
and a push to activate it.
So it's either install and just keep it or activate it and actually use it so you can see you want to
have an active plug in here.
It actually turns blue.
So I know which ones are active, which ones are not.
And with backup WordPress, this is the one that I was saying that's the only thing I usually go into
tools for and it's going to go over backups.
So this one's really simple to use.
There are other options.
Again, this is I'm not being paid to say any of this stuff.
This is just the one, the plug ins that I use most often.
You can see this is free.
So, again, I'm not going to get anything for it.
These are just the ones that I recommend.
There are other backup plug ins.
There are ones that do the more cool features and use what you feel is comfortable you're comfortable
with if you're just getting started.
This may be a good area to start with.
And then if you're still looking for added features, you can go and explore with other plug ins and
just see what else is out there and play around with them.
But for this one I like I can say I can go into here and I'll always change the settings.
I go into settings first and I'll say what I want to back up, want to do the database, just the files
or both.
And I'll just say both and then schedule.
You can either schedule it automatically happen or once a week, once a month.
You can see all of your options here or just manually only.
So only when you want to manually go in and make an update.
So if this is a blog that you're not in very often, maybe just statistical manual and any time before
you go and make any kind of updates to the website, you just manually make a backup of it.
If it is something that you're working on all the time, you don't even want to have to think about
it, just schedule and have it do once or twice a week and say, hey, just for like two or three versions
of it.
So it's not just overwhelming your server and just having a ton of files on that server, just have
it just like two or three Dansk and delete the old ones, keep the new ones and you're all set when
you had done.
You can hit it, run now it'll make a backup of your websites.
And again, just kind of having this nice little package that you can download or keep right there on
the server.
Great.
Plug in another one I would highly recommend and I'll go back to plug ins and add new is going to be
Yoast, and that is for your SVO.
And it's going to do a couple different things for you here.
And we're going to get into SEO a little bit later on in this series.
But right now, I would say, go ahead, install yose.
Am going to activate that now, what that's going to do is a couple different things for us and we're
not going to touch on what it's doing for the most part right now.
I'll look into some of the advanced features later on when we get started.
Got that install.
I'm going to go over the posts.
I'm going to add new.
And what you're going to see that's a little bit different this time is below the blog post are going
to see this Yoast option down here.
What this is going to let you do is actually customize how your post appears as if it were in the search
engines.
Now, as of right now, you'll see that this is a very has no title.
So it's just coming up with the domain name.
So if you're in Google, you would notice it looks almost just like this.
So let's say.
So in Google, it may show up as this is my first post online marketing concepts, so I might be a good
title and then the actual you are the link, they would go to it.
That display is fine.
But now I've got no copy down here for that little snippet that a little bit of information below the
post or the Google search results so I can go in and edit what that is.
I can modify.
This is the best post.
Ever.
OK, now what you want to see here is that you're getting this orange bar right now until that reaches
kind of a green area.
It's not the best optimized blog posts met a description that you can have.
And you can see this is what you would see if you did a Google search and that showed up.
You'd want to have a little bit more information drawing users into your article.
So you'd want to kind of continue to write more and more and more until you saw this turn.
Green dots, not saying that that's the best copy, but it's saying that that is the optimal length
for a description that people are going to want to see to possibly click on your post.
Now, if you do too much, see, going to start to turn orange again.
Now sign up.
You've gone too far.
So that's Google only allows so many words and characters before it cuts it off.
So just have just the right amount in there, find out what that is and have a very good description.
It doesn't have to be exactly what's in your post, but it should be should be point something very
similar to that that's going to make readers want to commit.
Some other things you can do is you can go down the side over here.
You can have when you link this link into Facebook, you can have what the title looks like in Facebook.
So maybe slightly different.
You can also pull in a different image for Facebook, some different things that you can use for SEO
purposes.
Again, we'll get into more of the details of your SEO later on.
But for right now, know that that's what that does.
And that's a great plugin.
There are other ones that do this and do it just as well, maybe better, maybe has other bells and
whistles on it.
This is the one mostly used by most bloggers and is very popular.
The other thing it does appear you can see that these two got put up here were saying the readability
of this needs improvement and the SEO just non-existent.
So we'll get into all that stuff a little bit later on here.
All right, so I've been talking a lot about security and commenting and things like that, one of the
plug in that I would definitely recommend is going to be if we're going to add new, leave that post.
It's going to be a program or a plug in called a word fence, and what this does is really locks down
your blog and does a lot of cool things actually.
It also will do a scan for malware and viruses, which is a very important I've used to fix hacked sites
before.
The version right now that we can download is free, but then they can also there is a paid version
that can do a lot of extra things that are very cool and definitely worth the money.
I think I have that for one website.
I don't have it for all my websites most.
I just run the free version of it.
But this is a great, great plug in as far as helping to control hacking and just really securing your
website.
So we've activated the and still thinking they're activating that now.
It's going to take a little bit to do because it does do so much.
So over here on the left hand side of your C word fence has its own option within the dashboard here.
You will want to kind of maybe kind of tweak it out a little bit here and ask you for your name and
information to get into, to save, to notify you of any kind of alerts or things that come up with
it.
Go ahead and enter that information.
But again, by default, it'll actually lock down your site pretty well.
For the most part, you can go into the firewall and you can start to fine tune that.
You can also go into the scan or it's going to scan your website for everything from outdated plug ins
to code that looks like it might be malicious on your website.
A lot of great options here out of the box.
It runs perfectly, but you can then go in and really fine tune it.
So those are some of the main plugins that I would use just for any kind of websites.
In the next video, we'll go through a couple that I would use for blogging and just, you know, more
specifically for blogging.
So stay tuned.