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Wordpress

You might know that we’re piggybacking off Mr. Reynolds for our web hosting. This means no Cloudflare and a few other things.

Themes

In past, we’ve used themes from all sorts of sources with varying success. Ideally, we should be going for speed - therefore, we’re only using WordPress themes that use the Site Editor. This ensures that everything is customisable and it also reduces the file size we send to computers.

TL;DR: Use Site Editor themes. It’s faster for everyone. (There’s even a filter!)

Plugins

In past, we’ve also had a lot of plugins that remain unused. These can potentially prolong the time used to load the website.

WPMU Dev

@lwu877 has loaded up the website with plugins mainly from the same source - WPMU Dev. These include:

  • Branda (used to brand the login page and the WordPress UI with our logo)
  • Defender (used in tandem with Solid Security to run general security checks)
  • Forminator (used for forms, like on our sponsorship page and our contact form)
  • Hummingbird (used to optimise the files we send to our users - makes the website faster for everyone)
  • SmartCrawl (used for SEO purposes - more on that in the writing page)
  • Smush (used to compress images - it’s faster and we don’t generally need full-resolution photos being loaded on the website)

and we also use them for:

  • Smart Uptime (gives us information on when the website is down, for how long, etc.)
  • Broken Link Checker (gives us information on broken links and where to fix them)

All of these plugins can be managed through our Hub account.

Automattic

In addition, we also have plugins from Automattic Inc. that can be managed through wordpress.com. These include:

  • Akimsnet (used in tandem with hCaptcha to stop spam)
  • JetPack (general use plugin used to get stats, do amazing things with the editor, and a bunch of other general optimisations)

We also use Google’s Site Kit for verification on Google and Bing Search Console.