Registered domain on GoDaddy.com ($22 per year)
Set nameservers to GreekGeeks hosting ($16.95 per month).
Logged into GreenGeeks and installed free WordPress via Cpanel.
Installed “Videomaker” free theme
Deleted Aksimet and Hello Dolly plugins
Installed the following free plugins:
1. Limit Login Attempts Reloaded
Block excessive login attempts and protect your site against brute force attacks. Simple, yet powerful tools to improve site performance.
2. Disable Comments
Allows administrators to globally disable comments on their site. We don’t use comment features. Comments require babysitting — and encourage trolls.
3. Disable Emojis
Emojis are a non-feature in WordPress. They slowdown page loads so we disable it.
4. Easy Digital Downloads
The easiest way to sell digital products with WordPress.
5. Email Address Encoder
A lightweight plugin that protects email addresses from email-harvesting robots by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities
6. Exclude Image Thumbnails From UpdraftPlus Backups
A small plugin to exclude WordPress generated image thumbnails from Updraft backups. This prevents bloated backups which become impossible to restore in time.
7. Imsanity
Imsanity stops insanely huge image uploads. We use it to convert PNG images to JPEG when uploaded for feature images on posts.
8. Copyright Current Date Shortcodes
Provides Shortcodes to display the Copyright symbol and Current Year, Month and Day. These are automatically updated every year.
9. Koko Analytics
Privacy-friendly analytics for your WordPress site. We don’t use Google Analytics. This makes the site faster and give us the visitor information we need.
10. Redirect 404 to Homepage
Redirect 404 missing pages to the homepage.
11. Simple CSS
CSS editor to add CSS to your WordPress site or the live Customizer. We added the following custom code to our theme to remove unneeded “comment” space and labels on posts:
.wp-block-comments-title {
font-size: 0;
}
.wp-block-spacer {
height: 0px !important;
}
.wp-block-group.footer-credit.is-layout-flow {
display: none;
}
The benefit of Simple CSS plugin is the custom code will not disappear when switching or changing themes — like happens when using the default “Additional CSS” feature in the WordPress Customizer.
12. UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore
Backup and restore: take backups locally, or backup to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, (S)FTP, WebDAV & email, on automatic schedules. We use a free DropBox account.
UNUSED: LiteSpeed Cache
We are NOT using LiteSpeed Cache plugin even though GreenGeek servers provide it for free. Our experience has proven we can get errors with Easy Digital Download and electronic transaction websites like PayPal if pages are cached. We don’t need caching to have a fast-loading website with the theme and plugins we’ve chosen.
