7 Essential Plugins for Developing with WordPress in China
Developing with WordPress is easy. Developing with WordPress well is hard. Almost 30% of the web is powered with sites build on Wordpress CMS, and they are a great way to provide clients with an easily-modifiable template or a updatable news section. For those completely new to web development, it’s also a soft landing and an opportunity to learn about things like hosting, domains, and databases without being completely overwhelmed. There is, however, a downside. All of your sites end up looking kind of the same. See if this type of layout looks familiar:
BIG BANNER (with fun rotating images!)THREE-FOUR ICONS (these show all of our synergy!)ABOUT US (a paragraph you’ll never read)OUR TEAM (four people’s LinkedIn profiles)OUR CLIENTS (a rotating image list of every company we’ve ever spoken to)CONTACT US (a contact form 7)
The reason why WordPress works so well is because its backend and frontend are so standardized.
Once you’ve mastered the wp-admin dashboard once, you can use it for any WordPress site. However, the downside of WP being so standard means that it’s also very prone to attacks. On a WordPress server, an exposed configuration or a rogue plugin can makes a site incredibly easy to hack (and then for the hackers to hijack the server to mine Bitcoin. No, really.)
For China, speed is essential. WordPress sites are simple to set up, but difficult to optimize, because of a slew of unnecessary files, unnecessary configurations, and JavaScript libraries (if you think jQuery is dead, it’s alive and kicking inside WordPress themes). The plugins I list below do everything, from optimizing the site speed, to ensuring security, and enabling multiple languages.
Here is my list of all must-haves for WordPress development in China:
1. Wordfence — Keep your site secure
I’ve seen websites with 150–200 visitors a month get 1500–2000 attacks a day. It’s absolutely bonkers how many bots there are on the internet constantly attacking sites and trying brute-force attacks, because, let’s face it, most of us don’t have secure passwords. Wordfence puts up a firewall, limits and tracks login attempts, performs security scans, and blocks malicious IPs. It’s simply the best security plugin available.
2. Polylang — Make WordPress multilingual
WPML may be the standard wordpress translation plugin, but I find it too bulky. Each WPML install comes with 5–6 additional plugins and a boatload of configurations. Polylang makes translation simple — it creates a mirror of each page on the site that can be set to a different language. My favorite feature of the plugin is language detection, which serves a different language of the site based on the browser language of the user.
3. ARVE Responsive Video Embedder — Add Youku videos seamlessly
If you need a YouKu video embedded in the site, very few out of the box solutions will work. Sure, there is always iFrame, but I’ve found that they don’t always work embedded in posts. ARVE is a highly-customizable plugin that can embed YouKu, Tudou, and other Chinese providers, as well as YouTube and Vimeo.
4. WP Fastest Cache — Speed up your site
Caching is essential for repeat visitors. These days, visitors on the web are impatient. If they need to wait 2–3 seconds for a page to load, they’re going to look for a faster option. I chose WP Fastest Cache (WPFC) as the caching plugin to feature, because out of all the alternatives, I find WPFC to be the easiest for set up for first-time users. The other plugins to consider are WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache (yes, caching plugins are not known for having original names), but there is really little difference in the three.
5. Clearfy — The best way to disable google services
Make wordpress less of a garbage dump of Google scripts and unnecessary libraries with Clearfy. Some of the features of this plugin are not for beginners, but there are plenty of guides on how to get started. The asset manager in particular is an awesome feature that can take a way Google Fonts, Maps, and other APIs one by one without disturbing any functions of the site.
6. Use Any Font — Add Custom Fonts
So.. you disabled your Google Fonts.. now what? I always prefer adding fonts manually, but that may not be an option for every developer. UseAnyFont is fantastic to add custom Google, TypeKit, or other fonts and set them for the headers, body, or for a specific div. Be mindful that the free version only has the setting for a single font.
7. Imsanity — Compress your jpegs and pngs
A web page should in general be less than 2 mbs in size. If your page has 20 images that are 2–3mbs each, that page will load at a crawl. Imsanity helps compress the sizes of the images based on a max height and width, while lowering the resolution. I like this much better than WP Smush that can generally only lower the quality a small amount per picture. Be careful though, once you compress a picture with this tool, there’s no way to reverse it.
Did I miss any other essentials for China? What are some of your favorite WordPress plugins? Let me know below!
