No modern affiliate site launched on WordPress can go without at least a handful of plugins. However, although there are more than 23,000 plugins in the official directory (at the time of writing), you obviously don’t need all of them to run your site effectively.
Here’s a must-have list that we advise you to start with when handling the final steps of your affiliate site setup process.
(By the way, don’t forget to check the previous part in the series: How to Select and Install a WordPress Theme.)
1. W3 Total Cache
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This plugin enables your site to cache its output, which results in major site speed improvement.
In plain English, caching is the practice of getting the content of your site from the database and storing it in the cache memory. Then every person who visits your site gets the content served from the cache, which is a much faster operation.
This plugin is actually recommended by a number of big hosting companies and used widely across the web.
2. Jetpack
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This is one of the most popular plugins of today. Downloaded more than 4,000,000 times already.
Jetpack gives you some of the unique wordpress.com functionalities, which you can now use on your self-hosted site (on your own domain).
The list of features offered inside Jetpack is truly exceptional. Just to name a few:
- Publicize – connect your site to popular social media networks.
- Stats – simple and concise stats.
- Comments – a completely new commenting system.
- Subscriptions – allow visitors to subscribe to your posts.
- Carousel – for attractive looking galleries.
- Post by email.
- Sharing – social media share buttons.
- Spelling and grammar – a great proofreading feature.
- Contact forms.
- WP.me shortlinks.
- Shortcodes, and more.
3. WordPress SEO
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The top SEO plugin of today. Gives you all the features you could ask for, in one, easy to grasp place.
Especially important if your current theme doesn’t have any built-in SEO possibilities.
4. Google Analytics for WordPress
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Essentially, stats are the main tool to help you improve your affiliate site over time in various areas. This plugin lets you hook up your site to Google Analytics with just a couple of clicks.
It will handle things like: tracking views per author and category, tracking outbound clicks, pageviews, and also enabling a number of custom tracking variables.
5. Pretty Link Lite
[Download]
In short, Pretty Link is the top link-cloaking plugin for WordPress. It gives you the possibility to track any link through a custom redirection inside the plugin.
This is a great way to handle affiliate links. Apart from the stats, there’s also one more benefit – no one can see the actual structure of your affiliate links.
6. BulletProof Security
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This plugin gives you free .htaccess protection. This kind of security will stop every common attacker (including hackers and malicious scripts).
There are a lot of features inside the plugin, but luckily, it’s also perfectly operational working on the default settings.
7. WordPress Backup to Dropbox
[Download]
The final plugin on this list focuses on one of the most important activities for all website owners – backing up.
Even though there are various backup solutions available on the web, this one is very easy to use and requires hardly any management.
The plugin creates a complete backup of your affiliate site, connects to your Dropbox account, and sends the backup there.
We strongly encourage you to use the whole package of the plugins presented here.