Goodbye Plugins - 8 Ways To Reduce WordPress Plugin Reliance

with well over 50 000 active plugins for WordPress it's incredibly easy to start adding plugins for everything problem is it slows your website down and opens you up to the potential for security issues for plugins that are not maintained let's deal with some of that in this video I'm going to go through a range of different options you can use to remove the need for plugins to do some pretty basic things but also maybe some more intermediate to Advanced things this has got your interest let's take a look at how we can do that [Music] first on the agenda is handling the images that you upload to make sure that they optimized before you upload them so you don't have to use a plugin to compress those images on the server there's multiple different reasons why this is a better way of doing it but you may be thinking I could take ages poor one image it just becomes a pain in the butt but there's easier ways of dealing with some of these are online some of these are tools you may want to purchase some of these are tools you may already own so first of all let's take a look at some of those free options for online image compression so first on my list is Tiny jpeg or tinypng basically the same website under different domains and they do the same thing we can upload up to 20 images of 5 megabytes per image and then have it compress them pretty cool let's go ahead and give it a try now we can either drag and drop our webp PNG or JPEG files directly into the interface or we can just simply click and upload those from our computer all these images have a range of different sizes and as you can see it goes ahead compresses them shows us the before and the after and gives us a percentage of how much we've saved we've basically saved around 50 on each of these images up to 65 percent now we can go ahead save this to Dropbox if you want to or we could download all these images in their compressed format and then we can upload those to our site having a nicely optimized version of our image now another option is short pixel now I've used short pixel for quite some time both free version and paid for with credits you can do pretty much the same kind of thing but you have a little bit more control over what happens with short pixels so let's click on the compress option and you can see we can choose between glossy glossy and lossless this is going to give you a very different range of quality versus file size you can see we can simply go ahead upload up to 50 images this time so let's do the same thing again and the files should have a maximum of 10 megabytes so it's a little bit more leeway than you have with tiny PNG or tiny jpeg let's go ahead upload the same images as you can see now that goes ahead starts to compress them and this is using the lossy format and again we can take a look at the file size reductions what's nice about this though is we can click on the little I icon and we can see the before and after so we can compare to make sure that the quality is good enough for what we want to achieve you can see we can see the original versus the compressed version and there's pretty much no diff difference the in quality at all other than we've saved ourselves around 56 of our file size and again what we can do now is we can download those files now if you'd like to have an application on the computer that you will working with I would recommend taking a look at squash unfortunately this is a Mac only app but I'm sure there's plenty of options out there that do the same kind of thing for Microsoft Windows or for Linux but basically what this does is it gives me the ability to open up multiple files and then I can go through I can choose to resize them I can apply adjustments to these if I wanted to adjust contrast and blurring them sharpening them and so on I can apply effects if I want to so I can batch apply effects I can apply borders watermarks format them into different formats ranging from jpeg through to webp and so on so you've got great options there including the ability to adjust the quality those kinds of things and finally I can go ahead I can do things like apply renaming conventions choose what I want to export them those kinds of things so this gives you a lot more control over things than you have with one of the free online services but all you need to do now is click on export images that will then compress them send them to the relevant location and you are dropped in really simple example now you could use photo photoshop's save a web and their sort of batch automation unfortunately I don't use Photoshop anymore so a better alternative in my opinion is to use something like Affinity photo Affinity photo 2. you can go ahead into the file option and you can choose a new batch job and inside there we can now set things up to batch process how we want to first thing we can do is add our images so once you've gone ahead added your images in you can then go ahead choose where you want to save them you can save it into specific folders but what I really like about this is that I can choose to save as different file formats but all at the same time so for example I might want to save a JPEG and a PNG at the same time and I might want to set different size values on there for the physical dimensions of the image and then I want to go ahead and set different compression ratios for each of those this gives me the control over doing all of that I can even go ahead and run macros which I can use any of the pre-built ones or I can go ahead and add and create my own simply go ahead apply that and then when we run this it'll do everything we've asked it to do and output those images where we've told it to do it this is a really cool way now if you want to find out more about this I've done a dedicated video which I'll link in the description and you can find out in one of the corners right now check that out it's going to go through how to do this in a little bit more detail but that's some of the tools I would recommend to optimize your images before you upload them to reduce the need for tools in your website to actually optimize things like WP compress and those kinds of tools [Music] now you may want to use custom post types in WordPress and you may be thinking well you're going to need to use something like CPT UI or metabox or something like that and you probably would be right it's probably what you're used to working with however we can use an online generator to do pretty much exactly the same thing then we can take the generated code and use that in WordPress and I'll show you a couple of ways in which you can achieve that code a little later what do we have well we've got metabox to start off with we can use the online generator for dealing with taxonomies and post types all we need to do is go ahead fill out the relevant details for the plural name the singular name and so on all the kinds of things you're used to doing when it comes to working with WordPress creating those custom post types then hit the generate code and all the code will be created let's take a quick look and there we go once we've finished everything we want you can see there's all the code we need to be able to register this custom post type or taxonomy or anything else you kind of create using these tools we can simply copy that code and we can use that inside WordPress like I said I'll show you how you can take this kind of code and use it in a moment we've also got a couple of other websites you can do very much the same but some of these have even more options over just what you can see inside here for example if you go to Hasty you can see we've got a similar kind of thing most of the options inside you are free but there are some Pro based features you can't actually use but you can see we can do the same thing again popping out post type or post name custom post key the domain whether you want to exclude this on search all those kind of things what it supports and everything and then on the right hand side this will then give you all the code that you need to copy to go ahead and use that in your site jumping over to generate WP this opens up even more options so once you've created your custom posts that you may want to apply and create custom queries where you can use that inside sure if we go to the query you can see we can go ahead and we can do things like a meta query generator open that up then we can go in and we can set up all the information we want inside you the relationship if we want specific relationships The Meta information right the way up to five different types of met information and then we can just update our code and that will then create the code for us which again we can use inside WordPress removing any Reliance for another plugin you may have as part of Wordpress check out these online generators because they offer a huge amount of options and variety of how you can remove your Reliance upon plugins [Music] now we've seen how to create custom post types and we've seen how to create like taxonomies and queries and so on well another feature you may want to use is the ability to have your own custom meta Fields well this is where this website jeremyhixen.com comes into play it's a totally free way of creating your own custom meta fields in the same kind of way that you would with a tool like Advanced custom fields or Meta Box you can come in and you can choose what options you want inside your title description the key prefix the type of field it's going to be for example it could be a color field or a checkbox or whatever you kind of want and then you can go in choose the location for where this is going to be used fill out all the relevant information and again you're going to end up with a little chunk of code that you can use wherever you want as part of your website so again take a look at this it's pretty cool how you can use these kinds of tools and then you're going to be able to generate this without the Reliance upon another plugin [Music] now when you want to make changes to a lot of things in WordPress including things like WordPress itself the admin dashboard woocommerce those kinds of tools you may be tempted to install multiple plugins to do very simple basic things however there is a much better and a much safer way of working instead of relying upon 10 plugins you can use one so we're stripping nine of those away you could do it other ways but I think this is the safer method this is where you want to take a look at what are called code Snippets little blocks or little chunks of code that do one or two different things that don't really require the plugin to do it so how do we go about doing it in a safe and secure way we use a plugin called code Snippets now there are alternatives and I'll link to some of those in the description if you want to check those out coach Snippets allows us to easily take those little Snippets of code and use those on our site to do various different things but you may be thinking that still involves me looking around the internet to find those little Co Snippets this is where you may want to check out code Snippets Cloud now code Snippets clouds is a repository where you can find code Snippets to use with code Snippets itself or basically with any kind of code snippet tool these have been vetted and checked to make sure they're safe and secure so it takes the stress and the hassle away you can use code Snippets Cloud for free and you can use the free version of code Snippets plugin to do everything you need so you can see if we come in we've got categories we can search for for example let's say we were working with woocommerce we can click on there and we'll just say we want to check out something to do with the checkout we can search for that term and then we can see we've got all different options inside your for various different things we will come with check out free woocommerce remove checkout Fields those types of things if we then click inside we can find out more information about this we can see it's been verified we can get ratings we can see any information about how you use it and then you've got the little block of code itself so once you've found what you want you simply go ahead copy this little block of code head over into your WordPress dashboard where you've got the code Snippets or alternative plugin installed and then you simply come in and you click to add a new snippet we give it a name paste in the code you just selected choose where you want to run this whether it's everywhere admin area so on add a description add any tags you may want to add in and finally click on Save and activate and then whatever changes you made using that code snippet will take place then if you find you no longer want to use it or what it happens to be an issue with it you can simply come in and you can just turn those on and turn those off simply by using the little check option so it gives you safety security and you can add in as many of these as you need to to get the job done and remove that Reliance upon multiple little plugins to do very simple basic things [Music] now next on the list is SEO or search engine optimization so you may think that you have to have an SEO plugin installed to get basic SEO tools and optimization setup on your website in some cases that may well be true or if you need more advanced features that also holds true however I a lot of users don't need all those bells and whistles this is why I'd recommend taking a look at the tools you're using to build your website so your theme your page builder those types of things in this example I'm using bricks Builder so if I come over to the page that I'm working at the moment into settings into the page settings itself I've got SEO if I open that up I've got the basic things that I need to apply SEO to this particular page the permalink the title for the Post The Meta description keywords and so on so I can insert that into here I don't need to rely upon a third-party tool to handle it themes also have a lot of these options included in a lot of cases then the second thing you need to do which is probably more important in a lot of cases is make sure that your actual content on page is optimized for the SEO this again is something that you use tools like yoast or all in one SEO or SEO press they give you the ability to check to make sure your keywords and things are relevant there are online tools that allow you to do very similar things for me phrase.io is the one that I use now phrase.io is a way of creating content in a much more structured way there are other tools to do the similar kind of thing and they're going to have very different prices involved so if you are a content creator this is something that I would recommend taking a look at because it just means that you can optimize your content the written content before you even add it to your website so once I've logged in I can see all of the Articles and content that I'm working on I can then go ahead and open any of these up that will then load the editor in and I can see my content I can check it I can create outlines there's a lot of great writing tools inside you but we're not looking at that today what we are interested in though is to go ahead and optimize the content this is going to analyze our content compare it to the top 10 results in the sub sort the search engine result pages and then give me feedback on what I need to do to kind of beat or compete some of those pages and that ultimately is what your SEO is all about so for example this article here you can see this has gone through checked everything out looked at the top 10 articles I can now head over to optimize and this is going to give me more information about the content that I've written and then I can modify and tweak the content and make sure that everything that I need to give me a good chance of ranking is included in there and this is basically what your SEO tools are doing anyway they're comparing some of this information but you're going to get probably more info from a tool like this to be able to optimize your content alongside the tools you're using for your on-site SEO finally just to make sure everything is as good as it possibly can be you may want to then take the content you've written and optimized inside a tool like phrase.io and then check it in an online tool like Hemingway which allows you to see how good your actual writing is are there areas in there that are too hard to understand for the average user is there too many sort of wordy things going on in it you can then fine tune and refine your information using a tool like this which gives you then the ability to get people onto your site with your SEO and the ability to keep them there reading the content because you've optimized it to make it as readable and understandable as possible [Music] so next up I want to talk quickly about making sure you have an optimized toolkit for building the website itself now for me I like to use tools that come from the same company for example generate press and generate blocks I like the fact that these are both optimized to work well together which means I don't have to worry about incompatibilities and ultimately I don't need to install multiple plugins I don't really know how good they're going to work together another solid example is to use Cadence WordPress and Cadence blocks these are optimized to work well together these give you the ability to have less reliers upon additional plugins to do some very simple things [Music] next and probably one of the most important things we need to consider is making sure we've got a good backup schedule and tools in place now you may be relying upon tools on WordPress itself and I would recommend before you go down that route is to check out your existing hosting company or if you're looking for a hosting going for a new project check out their policies for dealing with backups this can save you an awful lot of time and effort and heartache when you want to back something up but you don't want to have to have a plugin to do it so for example siteground gives us a very simple way of handling this if you log into your dashboard and go to your site tools inside there you're going to have a backup section and this example this is on the lowest plan you can get with them so you have this pretty much whatever plan you're going to choose you can then see underneath there's all the backups and as you can see these are daily backups and there are plenty of them here and then I can go ahead if I want to and I can choose to restore all the files in the database just the files the database or restore emails if you're using their email servers and you can just as easily create your own manual backups should you need to you can see there's your backup name all you to do is type in a name choose create and boom your backup is done may take a little time depending upon the size you site that's one less thing you need to worry about so before you make updates you can hop into your dashboard inside here make sure you do a backup then do your updates if anything goes wrong you can restore it from here and generally this will be quicker alternatively like me I use cloudways alongside siteground all I need to do inside here is go into my account open up the applications choose the site that I want to make sure it is backed up or to make a manual backup and inside there I can use the backup and restore option that will then go ahead check to see any backups I have in place when they were done and if I want to make a manual backup I can do that here as well as you can see I've got again a list inside here of backups again dated and the time these are daily backups but if I want to I can go ahead and restore from one of those or I can take a backup now and do a manual backup it's very simple so check out your hosting company check out your account and see what options you've got available to you for backing up so then you remove the Reliance for another Plugin or set of plugins on your site itself [Music] sticking with your hosting company optimization is a very important factor we still want to make sure that if we take plugins away we still optimize our site and you may be using third-party tools to do this kind of thing before you do check out what your Hosting account actually gives you sticking with siteground for the moment if we come into speed inside there we've got two options we've got a caching option and inside each one of these we've got three different sets of options the nginx Direct Delivery Dynamic cache and memcache which we can go ahead and enable on any of our sites this is going to give you on server caching to speed things up you've also got CDN option and again this depends upon the hosting company you're working with depending upon the plan you're going to have different levels of CD and all content delivery Network to speed up your website being delivered in other parts of the world so if you have an international audience CDN is going to be something you want to check out and again you can see we can activate the free version or we can go ahead and activate a premium version for lots of use cases the free is going to be more than enough now if you still want to use a CDN but you don't have one as part of your account with your hosting you may want to check out cloudflare cloudflare has a free tier which again should be more than enough for most users and take any Reliance upon third-party plugins being installed just to start working with cloudflare so check that side of things out and see if you can optimize and speed up the delivery of your website without Reliance upon another Plugin or Suite of plugins and that's basically what I wanted to cover here today all the applicable links are in the description below but I would welcome your feedback and comments what are you doing to optimize and reduce your Reliant small plugins let me know in the comments section below as always my name is Paul C this is WP tats and until next time take care [Music]

Channel: WPTuts

Views: 42,241

Keywords: WPTuts, wordpres plugins, reducing wordpress plugins, faster wordpress, WordPress speed, WordPress Security, how to, how to reduce wordpress plugins, wordpress code snippets

Id: cAGWD9Pyi-c

Length: 20min 7sec (1207 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2022