on December 22nd, 2022
New Wordpress Project? Here are my essential starting themes and plugins.
With the popularity of Wordpress as a CMS, it helps to have a go-to starter to get the setup out of the way.
Working on websites will certainly lead to working on or building Wordpress websites. Almost half of all websites online or built on using WordPress as the content management system. It’s easy to use for the website owner, there are literally millions of plug-ins to achieve any type of functionality, and it’s free.
When I am staring a new project using Wordpress I have a base set of tools at the ready.
Themes
The themes I start with are both minimal frameworks that are lightweight and allow me to have as much of a blank slate as possible. They provide the basic Wordpress functionality built in and don’t force me to hack away at the code to get the desired look and feel I want.
Hello
Hello is my preferred choice if I am starting a brand new project and have no previous designs to work from.
Underscores (_S)
_underscore is what I will use if I need to match some existing designs or going into a web redesign where I need to keep the look and feel consistent with other pages or sites. This basic starter theme has minimal styling and very little css.
Plugins
I aim to keep plug-ins at an absolute minimum. This reduces site bloat, speeds up loading of pages, and reduces chances of code conflict. I would rather pay for a quality plug-in than chance a free script causing head aches later in the development.
Elementor Pro
Go with the pro version of Elementor, there are lots of quality free Elementor add ons but Pro has everything needed for any type of website. I love the ability to use custom css just about anywhere and the global integrations Elementor has is key to avoid duplicating code on multiple pages. It’s only $49/year for the license and they run sales and specials all of the time.
SEOpress Pro
This is the easiest and cleanest SEO plug in for Wordpress. Again I go pro because one pro license is good for as many sites as needed. It also unlocks some of the more detailed technical SEO tools that help me get my localized clients to the first page of search results.
Limit Login Attemps
The problem with WordPress being so popular with users, is that it’s also a popular target for hackers. I always install limit login attempts to help mitigate the threat, and help prevent brute force attacks.
WPS Hide Login
Similar to limit login attempts, I usually install WPS hide login to help keep my clients website safe. This plug-in allows me to change the URL slug for the login page. This helps hide the page from bots and scrapers. And also it allows me to give my clients a custom URL for them to use to login.
This is my usual starting set up when I’m building a WordPress website for a client. Hopefully this will help you collect a go to set up on your own project and get you past the set up and to the designing faster.