Goodbye Plugins - 8 Ways To Reduce WordPress Plugin Reliance

Рет қаралды 42,069

Күн бұрын

WordPress is great, but we tend to rely on WordPress plugins for almost everything. I'm going to share 8 practical ways in which you can streamline your installed plugins.
Reducing WordPress plugins has many benefits - speed, better security, fewer updates and more.
Say goodbye to plugin overload and a more stripped-back dashboard and faster loading WordPress website.
Time Stamps:
00:00 - Video contents
00:35 - Optimisation
05:28 - Code Generators
07:56 - Getting Meta
08:50 - Little Snippets of Code
11:41 - Streamlined SEO
15:10 - Complimentary Tools
15:50 - Better Back-ups
18:01 - More Speed Less Haste!
Essential Links:
TinyPNG/TinyJpeg: tinypng.com/
ShortPixel: shortpixel.com/
Squash (Mac app): www.realmacsoftware.com/squash/
Affinity Photo: affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/
GenerateWP: generatewp.com/generator/
MetaBox: metabox.io/post-type-generator/
WPHasty: www.wp-hasty.com/tools/wordpr...
CodeSnippets: jo.my/ndfbsx
Frase: frase.io/
Hemmingway App: hemingwayapp.com/
GeneratePress & GenerateBlocks: jo.my/atme3l / jo.my/xotgcy
KadenceWP & KadenceBlocks: jo.my/nu96im / jo.my/1hcktp
SiteGround: jo.my/sgwptuts
CloudWays: jo.my/1feeng8
CloudFlare: cloudflare.com
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Пікірлер: 107

@mohamedAmin-wf1ge Жыл бұрын

Why there is no SUPER like button on YT for such content!? This one is very helpful, thanks man.

@dewolf.digital Жыл бұрын

As always Paul , you nailed it. After 15 years of using wordpress i'd say 95% of all my issues arrise from plugin conflicts and their management. Adding Code snippets to my workflow has delivered a meaningful impact on my time (reducing maintenance), site performance (controlling where and when scripts are fired), seo (adding comprehensive specific schema markup to individual pages/taxonomies), and replace your child theme. A very powerful tool that folks shouldn't shy away from. Apreciate all your hard work and look forward to checking out a couple of your suggested alternatives. Cheers

@ross9503 Жыл бұрын

Great content Paul 😍😍😍

@sepfms Жыл бұрын

Amazing! Especially the Custom post type generators are pure gold thank you 🙏🏻

@frankstuerzebecher Жыл бұрын

A really really useful video, one of the best WP vids I've seen so far. Mentioned tools and the approach of going as slim as possible with plugin installs are gold.

@ivandelevic Жыл бұрын

Straight to the center. This is very useful to know! Thanks Paul!

@yoarnaldo Жыл бұрын

Fantastic! Excellent info as always Paul!

@MrBalloonatic Жыл бұрын

some really great plugins in here - thanks for sharing them Paul

@clintt5266 Жыл бұрын

This is such an amazingly useful post, the least I can do is add a like and little engagement via comments... thanks Paul! You do top shelf work.

@Atulwebdesigner Жыл бұрын

Nice video Paul. Got some useful information. Thanks for sharing.

@skarafahmed9183 Жыл бұрын

You nailed it Paul. Thanks

@AnilAgrawal Жыл бұрын

Awesome stuff as usual. Thanks, Paul.

@martinkaspar5095 Жыл бұрын

Thank you for sharing yourvery useful videos with us. ! Keep up your awesome project 🐱🤠☺👍 This video is very informative and easy to follow the video contents. It gave me many new ideas. Explained very well.

@redwetsolutions3360 Жыл бұрын

Thank you for the great video.

@Twisties34 Жыл бұрын

awesome video, thank you

@darouss1 Жыл бұрын

Thanks for the video

@wgm247 Жыл бұрын

So much value in one video... if this video was a car... it would be a fully loaded Kia Sportage instead of a BMW ;)

@pixelgap Жыл бұрын

Thanks Paul.

@BjarneOldrup Жыл бұрын

TinyPNG is amazing, especially for screenshots in PNG. However, WordPress generates a lot of thumbnails (thumbnail, medium, medium-large, large etc). And the fine compression of TinyPNG, does not survive WP's resize algorithm, meaning, that the "smaller thumbnails" often gets larger filesizes than the original. Those are use in the image srcset, whether you like it or not. Then there is the whole WebP situation, where you want to serve WebP formats for most browsers except older versions of Safari. In my opinion, taking care of all this, is best done by your caching plugin, which you probably already have installed.

@kerawelt2008 Жыл бұрын

Insanely useful ! (As usual...)

@bilimlink Жыл бұрын

Vary informative!

@iftekharrahman8100 Жыл бұрын

Thank you

@rgbcom Жыл бұрын

Really great video! I use Photoshop, Updraft, anyone of the leading cache plugins, yoast. I will definitely try killing some of them.

@jason-m Жыл бұрын

One of the best (because I know you like tinkering) tools I've seen lately for generating code snippets is WPCodey (you might need a WPCodeBox account to use it). You can pretty much type in english what you want (within reason) and it generates the code snippet. Genius

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

Yeah, it looks super interesting. I still need to grab a license and test it out.

@BoomlandJenkins Жыл бұрын

Foto Sizer (free version) is my go-to Windows bulk image resizing, compressor, and format changer. Such a great tool.

@winwinis3483 Жыл бұрын

thank you I love Code Snippet Cloud

@SamWereb Жыл бұрын

Excellent video. Better than TinyPNG/JPEG, I find, is Photopea. You can convert your images to almost any format and, while doing so, compress it as much as you like. In addition, it provides all the functionality of Photoshop.

@adrian.fernandes Жыл бұрын

That maybe a good case if you have just a few images. What about a bunch of product images (

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

Photopea is a great app that I’ve featured several times in previous videos. So many amazing free tools. We’re spoilt for choice for sure. 😁

@SuburbanPhilosophy Жыл бұрын

I am using Darkable (is a free and opensource alternative for Adobe Lightroom ) to batch export at .webp or any format.

@wptalkswitharif Жыл бұрын

Thanks a lot

@awakenthegreatnesswithin Жыл бұрын

Great video, thank you.

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

Glad you liked it!

@awakenthegreatnesswithin Жыл бұрын

@@WPTuts 😎

@marcoprofwebsitenl6484 Жыл бұрын

Thank you for this tutorial. WP stores a lot of unnecessary data that you don't use. For example, when you uninstall a plugin. But also photos are stored twice when you don't need them. I made tutorials about this.

@ethanbonnamour Жыл бұрын

Your tuts are so great thank squash crash sometimes. On the other side adobe xd does a great job too !😊

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

I haven't had any issues using Squash so far. Maybe I'm lucky or haven't used it enough. :)

@craiggrella Жыл бұрын

Love affinity - have had those programs since they were created. On the optimization - a local PC or online app isn't going to deliver image resizing on the fly right? I've been using WP Compress for that and it's been working really well. I've liked it better than EWWW or short pixel's plugin. For SEO AI - Ive used Squarely, Rank Math, and SurferSEO. They all work pretty well. For speed - cloudflare has been awesome. I really like WP Asset Cleaner plugin too though - it's able to clean up alot of stuff on a page by page basis when needed. As always. - good tut!

@awakenthegreatnesswithin Жыл бұрын

Thanks for sharing

@HossamKhalaf-sr1oo Жыл бұрын

Squoosh works on the web also, thanks for the video

@bakeraus Жыл бұрын

Great list! A love these video menu etc very slick. Is there any application to manage subscriptions? When I have Adobe, Siteground, Elementor, etc... I know I can setup Notion or a spread sheet but thought there might be a much better option out there.

@ivanbarta2821 Жыл бұрын

usefull 👍

@abrotherinchrist Жыл бұрын

One of my biggest gripes is with how developers market plugins to do all these great things and when you buy their plugin it doesn't work the way you expected, or doesn't work with another crucial plugin you already set up (like WooCommerce). Even though some of them might offer support you really won't get anywhere with them in most cases. The only plugin I will give huge props to is Calculated Fields Form. They have solved many of my problems for a small support fee of $25 (writing custom JavaScript for me). It's not the most pretty plugin, but it gets a complicated job done with some CSS and JS. Right now I'm trying to tackle the problem of fighting the presentation layer in WordPress at every turn. I'm considering headless solutions and learning some more advanced coding like JS and CSS libraries and maybe Node and/or PHP. My needs are more ERP/MRP oriented right now and that really pushes the limits of WP.

@justindouglas3659 Жыл бұрын

You can use irfanview to compress images too

@nikswebdesigns5759 Жыл бұрын

For optimization ,there is a offline software small Caesium.Tiny Jpeg doset support more than 5 mb.

@senseicodes Жыл бұрын

An alternative for squash is Squoosh, a pwa that works offline too

@worldnature2100 Жыл бұрын

Hi Paul, I think it's one of the most important topics for Wordpress implementers. Reducing the amount of Plugins is very important! I would love it if you could share for example JetEngine and the free options you mentioned like: WP Generator and others. Can we do the same as JetEngine? Thank you for these valuable video tutorials.

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

I would hazzard a guess you could use some of the custom meta field with JetEngine, but not sure what you would gain by doing that. You'd still have to install JetEngine so you may as well benefit from the integrations it offers with its own meta fields, CPTs and taxonomies.

@author-rdh Жыл бұрын

Thanks, Paul. And here is another hint. Concerning webp -- which was intrinsically optimized for the web by Google in 2010 -- WordPress automatically 'crunches' every image, no matter the format, down to 82% or so. Crunching is what happens the very second the image upload hits 100%. This also explains the delay after the upload completes. Can you say, "Crunch time?" I researched this esoteric phenomenon. To stop the 'WordPress crunch', you have to use a plugin, or get into the CSS base code to block it. Yikes! We switched to all webp across our site, then matched the hex color codes of the PNG background colors to the background colors of the containers they are in. The last step was to convert the PNG to a webp, and there are free utilities for that, too. This eliminates the need for PNGs, because it becomes a perfect match anytime you're dependent on an ostensibly transparent background for a 3D effect. I call this 'background-matching'. It works surprisingly well, IMHO. Lastly, when we get hit by the 'WordPress crunch, it creates 'secondary compression'. And we all know that the more times you compress an image, the worse it gets.

@iSohaibKhan Жыл бұрын

I was thinking the same thing

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

A very good point... wouldn't it be nice in WordPress gave us the option to set the compression rate or remove it completely?

@simongajdosik5105 Жыл бұрын

With Litespeed cache plugin you can remove all images & performance plugins.

@susanwheeler-hall Жыл бұрын

Hey Paul, how can I click more than one like here? Your tips are so helpful.

@imagist. Жыл бұрын

Caesium Image Compressor is a great one for Windows

@BalramNair Жыл бұрын

Bulkresizephotos does a good job at optimising images, and entirely for free. You can even batch add watermarks and etc.

@skillresearch7742 Жыл бұрын

Great

@independentguitarcoaching6606 Жыл бұрын

Hi Paul, what a great video! Thanks a lot! I have another question: Can you recommend a simple but solid WordPress plugin that runs well in combination with Elementor?

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

To do what?

@anderoa2849 Жыл бұрын

Also WooBend is a good option if you are running a WooCommerce store and want to reduce the number of plugins

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

I’ll have to check it out. Thanks for the recommendation. 👌🏼

@alineduchesne6422 Жыл бұрын

I'm using Blocksy Pro. Would I need an seo plugin or does Blocksy do the job?

@DanaCottreau Жыл бұрын

Great video, thanks! Just curious why you would use a Snippets plugin instead of putting the code snippets in a child-theme functions.php file?

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

Good question! It adds an extra level of protection from messing up your site. But, you can go with whichever method you prefer - the takeaway is more about not editing your 'master' functions.php file and potentially losing those changes after each update.

@comleonmoto Жыл бұрын

Thank you Paul! Actually, a lot of people (myself included) use plugins because they are not 100% comfortable with coding (or where to insert code snippets or how to twik them). So plugin may be a natural and straigthforward solution for them.

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

I’m not criticising the use of plugins. Simply providing an alternative after people have complained about the use of plugins in previous tutorials. Options are great. If a plug-in is your preference, go with that. If you’re comfortable using code snippets, etc., that’s a great alternative too. 😁

@comleonmoto Жыл бұрын

@@WPTuts That's not what I meant, Paul. It was just a remark on why people do rely so much on plugins. A reliance you are encouraging, by the way, with your nice tuts (OK, it's a joke!).😂

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

@@comleonmoto I think we may have crossed wires. I was agreeing with you and saying there’s nothing inherently wrong with choosing a plug-in over a potentially more complex alternative. 😁

@DanZL1 Жыл бұрын

Couldn't find a Code Snippet to open links in new tab. :(

@soccernatic Жыл бұрын

I still have not found a plugin or a way to resize, crop (with guide lines), optimize images when users are allowed to upload images to their custom post themselves. Do you know any tool that when a user clicks a button to upload their images, they are presented with options to crop, optimize, resize the images BEFORE they get upload to the website? Or maybe even a plugin that will do all that automatically based on the setting the admin sets prior? Also if you know any tool that would create an "approval system" for uploading images, where it would alert admin that user wants to change their images, but the post would not be hidden/private while admin checks if the images are OK to be approved? Those approved images would replace the previous ones, and the ones that were denied would not show up? Maybe send a message to the user saying that those images are inappropriate for the post. Hopefully I'm clear :)

@mpozainno Жыл бұрын

Hard to appreciate how important this video is until you have a website with thousands of users and pluggins are weighing it down.😏😒

@grahambbird Жыл бұрын

Great piece. I don't see the link to the code snippet plugin you mentioned....

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

Here you go: jo.my/ndfbsx Main description has also been updated. :)

@grahambbird Жыл бұрын

@@WPTuts Thanks! I'd love to see a video that talks to how to maintain snippets and update them, for example if I need to add a field to a custom PT how does one do that after initial creation? Cheers

@ricardodesirat2590 Жыл бұрын

If we use custom code, i.e. to create a CPT, do we have to maintain/update it as WP evolves?

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

You shouldn't unless WP changes the core structure of how CPT's work. Once registered, you shouldn't need to worry about making future changes manually.

@Crucall Жыл бұрын

I am creating a membership site. I will let members create post types and edit them from the front end. If a user creates a post type, I want them to be able to charge for that post type and collect a fee. The money will go to them and I will get the fee. Is this possible to do without installing a plugin?

@Stupidcatshow Жыл бұрын

Maybe I am off base here but other than plug-in conflicts isn’t the performance issues brought by plugins due to the code practices used in developing these plugins? So wouldn’t using a code generator or code snippet have the same potential for performance problems? I mean do we trust the code from the snippets or the generators more than the code in the plugins? Perhaps I am missing something.

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

You really have no idea what the plugin is doing behind the scenes either. At least with the code generator you can see exactly what code is generated and validate it yourself. Alternatively, in many cases you could learn the basics of the code structure, make a template and just edit the required code to get everything working. The code used for CPT's or Meta Fields is relatively straightforward and easy to validate and replicate.

@LowellBrillante Жыл бұрын

Have you ever tried using linode and docker for your wordpress server?

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

I have not, no. :)

@LowellBrillante Жыл бұрын

@@WPTuts Definitely a learning curve but containers are super cool and would be how one person could build something like wpengine (minus customer support). With kubernetes you can automate the creation of wordpress instances on a server, for example if a user adds a new site. That new site is a mysql, phpadmin and wordpress wrapped up with just its dependencies. You can run it locally too. They're basically virtual machines that don't divide the kernel. That means your computer is actually a bunch of computers that can also have computers and each one can run windows, mac, linux, kodi, raspian, home assistant, plex, etc. That's huge because people can easily run home servers on single boards like the raspberry pi to handle their sensitive data and control their environment (their house). Home assistant is an open source app for interacting with IOT devices. It will be the next big thing when the pi chip shortage ends. There's a whole industry sprouting in between docker and users. I bet your subscribers would love a video on something like home assistant or node red to get hyped about how powerful it is. Also running your own server on linode or digital ocean is far cheaper and faster, especially if you have multiple sites/traffic but again there is a learning curve but it's nothing that youtube can't teach. Anyway something to think about... Love your videos Paul. Big fan.

@leobalicas Жыл бұрын

In Affinity V2 you can export as webp image now

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

You can indeed and a lot more. Loving version 2. :)

@dave28lax Жыл бұрын

18:31 - "n-g-i-n-x" - it's Engine X (n-gin-x...geddit?). Other than that this was very useful.

@grafickyservis8875 Жыл бұрын

Code Snippets Beta is not working😐

@kevinschmidt2210 Жыл бұрын

I wish you would have provided backup options to Siteground.

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

Not sure what you mean?

@kevinschmidt2210 Жыл бұрын

@@WPTuts I mean other backup plugins besides Siteground. I am looking for one that does both automatic backups and staging.

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

@@kevinschmidt2210 my choice would be WPVivid Backup Pro - bought the LTD a couple of years back and use it on all my sites.

@kevinschmidt2210 Жыл бұрын

@@WPTuts Thanks!

@clafflin493 Жыл бұрын

You can reduce plugin reliance by using only breakdance builder. It’s the best!

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

Yawn!

@alanjacobs7302 Жыл бұрын

Excellent content but soooo many ads interrupting. I fear KZfaq is killing itself.

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

Sadly, KZfaq has ramped up ads to an insane level. I ended up getting Premium to avoid the bloody things! Ironic really. 🤦‍♂️

@alanjacobs7302 Жыл бұрын

@@WPTuts I’m afraid I’ve gone the other way. Already halved the channels I follow and more to go soon. £16/month is way too expensive - I could buy 3 new plugins for that lol

@digwillhachi Жыл бұрын

its crazy right !!

@kevinschmidt2210 Жыл бұрын

I took the plunge with Breakdance and eliminated all Gutenberg plugins as well as themes.

@emailjough Жыл бұрын

Why upload your images to wordpress at all? Upload them directly to a CDN like Cloudinary and then hotlink to them from your site. Cloudinary automatically serves the best format size and quality for the device that is requesting them

@WPTuts Жыл бұрын

I would imagine a lot of users using WordPress may not have the technical know how or confidence to delve into that method.