I know, I know, I know! Another boring plugins list with the same old plugins. But humor me for a second here. These aren’t your baby cousins plugins, these are plugins that are truly enterprise ready, used on sites that we’ve built, and have accommodated needs from the tracking of website changes of ~100 employees to content viewership in the 10,000,000 views per month range.
This is a short list of only 3 plugins that we highly recommend. We put this post together due to the importance and usability of these plugins but, unfortunately their use cases didn’t quite fit into any of our other lists. Without further delay, here’s 3 plugins of different use-cases that are enterprise ready today!
W3 Total Cache
Some WordPress features, such as user and role management, are terrific out of the box. On a technical level however, there are many aspects where WordPress is not sufficient for the enterprise at first unwrapping. One such technical capability where WordPress could use some extra love is in the caching department.
If the only time you hear caching is when you ask your developer why something hasn’t been fixed, and she tells you it has then you’re familiar with the nuisance. But in actuality, caching is extremely critical to your websites’ speed and performance, which is why we put up with it.
Briefly, caching is storing your website data for future use. For instance, if you visit flowpress.com, your browser may cache the website and next time you use flowpress.com, the browser will serve you the cached version. This means that it doesn’t necessarily need to reload the entire website again, thus making it faster. Caching also lives on your hosting server. It enables your hosting provider to deliver your website to visitors more quickly and efficiently.
WordPress, out of the box, does not have strong caching mechanisms in place to speed up delivery of your content. This is where W3 Total Cache comes into play.
W3 Total Cache integration with third-party CDNs’ also helps bolster performance and the robust features W3 Total Cache provides, such as minification, really make it a world beater. W3 Total Cache will sync your core files, theme and assets, media, and your content and even connect to the CDN you already use to provide the best experience to your visitors, and reduce bounce rates.
Advanced Custom Fields
Custom Fields are what allowed WordPress to move from the blogosphere to the business-sphere and without them, WordPress would be nowhere near as popular as it is today. Creating custom fields on your own can be a burdensome and time-consuming task. The out-of-the-box custom fields are, and I’ll be honest, an eye sore and clunky to use. Enter ACF or Advanced Custom Fields.
Advanced Custom Fields has over 1 million installs and just under 1,000 5 star reviews making it easily one of the most popular and most loved plugins in the WordPress public repository. ACF is definitely a must-have in any enterprise arsenal.
WP Security Audit Log
With multiple content creators, developers, and contributors working on your WordPress website at the same time, it can be tricky to pinpoint where mistakes have been made and at which point is the best for a revert. This is where an audit log can be indispensible.
WP Security Audit Log keeps an active record of everything that happens on your WordPress install and even your WordPress multisite (if you’ve got one).
This plugin is terrific for discovering potential future security threats, suspicious user activity, and pinpointing an error. The WP Security Audit plugin is chock-full of features that will ensure that your WordPress install is secure and properly tracked.
And that’s not all!
There’s unlimited potential in WordPress, which is a core reason as to why it has been gaining traction within Enterprises. In order to get the most out of WordPress, be sure to do your research and test your plugin choices on a staging environment before doing anything on your live site!
