WPMU DEV Plugins: Supercharge Your WordPress Website

By Ben Rea | January 16, 2020

There are many great WordPress plugins out there, but finding one that suits each of the needs of your business can be time-consuming.

That’s why we’d like to introduce you to a suite of plugins by WPMU DEV that we think will really help take your website to the next level.

In addition to these great plugins in one affordable package, WPMU DEV has a powerful dashboard that will make it easy for you to install any of the plugins as well as themes for your website.

The WPMU DEV Plugins

WPMU DEV comes with 10 fantastic plugins that cover all of the areas that your business needs:

Smush Pro- Image Optimization
Hummingbird Pro – Performance Optimization
Defender Pro – Security Monitoring
Hustle – Email Marketing
Branda Pro – White Label Branding
Forminator Pro – Form Builder
SmartCrawl Pro – Search Engine Optimization
Snapshot Pro – Backup Protection
Shipper Pro – Site Migration
Beehive Pro – Analytics Dashboard

These plugins will help not only with the customer-facing part of the website, improving user experience and customer satisfaction, but they will aid you in marketing and SEO as well.

It’s the total package for WordPress sites.

Let’s take a look at what each of these superhero-themed plugins can do.

Smush Pro – Image Optimization

Large images slow down page loads times. This annoys visitors to your site and can even penalize your search engine rankings.

With Smush, you can say goodbye to long loading times from bulky images. Smush will automatically compress the images on your site to half of their original size. It will even automatically compress new images as you add them to the site. On top of that, it will keep a backup of the originals so you do not have to worry about data loss.

Smush is our go-to image optimizer for our own site and every site we work on. Image optimization is constantly overlooked but a huge issue for so many sites.

Uncompressed images can add several seconds of load time to sites. That’s a pretty huge sacrifice for images that could be compressed and load much faster with virtually no loss in visual quality.

Image optimization is quick and can be done in bulk with global settings. We love the ease of ease and data savings feedback from this tool.

Hummingbird Pro – Performance Optimization

Images are not the only thing that can slow down your website. While Smush is busy taking care of the images, Hummingbird takes care of everything else.

The plugin will compress HTML, JavaScript, and Style Sheets so your page loads faster. It also contains a complete cache suite and the ability to position your files in the most optimal way to further improve load times.

Here at Nomadic we absolutely love Hummingbird Pro. Website performance is only becoming more and more important. In 2022, people expect websites to load quickly and if they don’t, that’s a potentially lost customer.

Website load times are also an SEO signal to search engines and can actually impact your rankings.

With Hummingbird Pro we are quickly able to improve the performance of our client sites by running their audit and addressing needed fixes.

Compared to other performance plugins, we’ve found Hummingbird Pro to be safe, reliable, thorough, and easy to use.

Defender Pro – Security Monitoring

Website security is hard, but keeping malicious hackers from accessing the accounts of your customers or defacing your website is an important part of maintaining a website.

When it comes to security, Defender has your back. This plugin has a full range of tools to prevent the most common attacks, give you a heads up on potential security problems, and give you actionable insights on how to resolve them.

Hustle – Email Marketing

In order to maximize your conversion of visitors into customers, you really need to hustle.

Or, you could let the Hustle plugin in do it for you. This smart plugin will manage opt-in lists, pop-ups, slide-ins, and social media links to help ensure that those visitors become customers. Of course, you can customize the appearance to match your branding because maintaining a consistent brand is an important part of marketing and Hustle doesn’t want to get in the way of that.

Branda Pro – White Label Branding

Speaking of branding, if you have a WordPress site then even the best themes leave WordPress’s own branding all over your site.

This could be fine for some businesses, but many will want complete control over their own branding. Having another company’s brand on your page distracts from your own and could be considered unprofessional. Branda will save the day by automatically scouring your site to remove any WordPress branding. It essentially turns WordPress into a white-label website quickly and easily.

Forminator Pro – Form Builder

You want to get customer feedback. Your customers want to give you feedback. But creating forms for websites can be a real pain. With Forminator, that is no longer the case.

Even forms that require calculations and conditional logic are a breeze to put together with Forminator. You’ll be able to create feedback forms, take polls, make fun and challenging quizzes, and even take payment via PayPal or Stripe right within the forms. On top of all that, Forminator comes with integrations to many popular third-party services, such as HubSpot, MailChimp, and Trello built-in.

SmartCrawl Pro – Search Engine Optimization

Forminator cannot get feedback from customers and Hustle cannot convert visitors into customers if nobody is coming to your site.

SEO is a big part of driving visitors to your website. We’ve talked about it at length in our various blogs from local SEO to blog SEO, we understand the importance.

SmartCrawl will help make SEO easy. By automatically generating sitemaps so search engines stay up-to-date with the content of your website. It will also link keywords, give you easy controls for editing meta-data, and provide you with regular reports on how well your site is optimized for search algorithms.

We use SmartCrawl on our own site and most client sites.

Why not Yoast? Well, Yoast is a fantastic plugin but SmartCrawl does 99% of what Yoast does, including some unique features that Yoast doesn’t have.

Not only that, but having it bundled together with the WPMU DEV plugin family helps everything run seamlessly and makes the process of setting up client sites even smoother.

We’ve found it’s extremely easy and friendly to use and the SEO Checkup function is very useful for quickly assessing your site without having to use an outside tool.

Snapshot Pro – Backup Protection

Data loss is a huge problem. The last thing you want to do is explain to customers that all of their data is gone because of a server issue that was beyond your control.

Even if you don’t store customer data, your own data used to drive the site could be lost or you could push an update to the site that you’d like to quickly revert if things go wrong. By automating backups, Snapshot will save the day in any of those circumstances.

Shipper Pro – Site Migration

You probably don’t change web hosts very often. But when you do, migrating all of your data from one host to the other can be a long and involved process.

Shipper will shorten that process considerably. With a simple click, this plugin will migrate your WordPress site from one host to another so you can spend your time doing more productive things.

Beehive Pro – Analytics Dashboard

You know the power of Google Analytics, but adding the analytics tracking code to your pages requires you to be tech-savvy.

Beehive will not only make adding tracking data to your site easy but will provide you with informative and easy to understand dashboards to view the analytics data right from your own website.

Is WPMU DEV Worth it? (How Much Does it Cost)

WPMU DEV costs $49/mo for unlimited sites. There are also individual free versions of 7 of their plugins which are still great, although to unlock the true potential of WPMU DEV, you’ll need the Pro platform.

For the number of plugins you get, the integrated system and the pure ease of use – we find this price for the Pro platform to be very worth it.

Especially if you are working with multiple client sites, you won’t want to pay for plugins over and over again on a monthly fee. This way, you pay once and install it on as many sites as you want.

We’ve found the company is even responsive to feedback we’ve given and are always looking for ways to improve their product.

In our opinion, WPMU DEV is the future of WordPress optimization and management.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that WPMU Dev’s suite of plugins will be the superheroes that save your website from mediocrity, but even the easiest to use plugins take time and a least a little technical know-how to set up.

If you would rather focus on the core aspect of your business than try to learn how to set up a WordPress site, then we can help! Please contact us today to see how we can help improve your WordPress site performance.

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Posted in Digital Marketing, Web Design