Whenever I take responsibility for an existing wordpress site, or deploy a new one, my first step is to ensure these plugins are installed and configured. This ensures a stable baseline for operations. If you have any recommendations for the list please leave a comment below.

• Link management (target and rel options) to keep people on my site and improve SEO.
• Broken Link Checker to keep quality high and improve SEO.
• Disable Comments as 90% of my clients don’t want them, and nuking the function just saves so much hassle down the road with spam.
• Under Construction if I don’t have the luxury of a proper staging environment (shoutout Cloudways!) then I can quickly put a holding page up in a matter of seconds. Also useful for planned or unplanned maintenance pages.
• WP Mail SMTP no matter how relaible my web server email might be, I want control of it, usually through Sendgrid or Mailgun.