allienicole173, Author at Art 326 Sandbox

Yoast SEO

Name
- Yoast SEO
What does it do / what is it for?
- Helps you create better content and a fully optimized website with search engine optimization (SEO)
Screen shot

Details
- SEO is the most consistent and cost-effective website traffic source, but it can be a challenging and complex maze. Luckily, you don’t have to do this alone. We’re here to help!Yoast’s mission is SEO for everyone. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned expert, Yoast SEO equips you with all the essentials to navigate the complexities of SEO, turning those challenges into opportunities for growth and success.
Usage
- 5+ million active installations
Pos / neg reviews
- 5/5 stars
Your opinion
- Recently, some reviews are more negative after an update, but overall it seems like a good plugin to manage your SEO on your web pages and to optimize them, whether you are a beginner or are familiar with SEO.

Details
- Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Usage
- 5+ million active installations
Pos / neg reviews
- 4/5 stars. More recent reviews have been trending on the negative side due to some bugs within a new update.
Your opinion
- Works pretty good as a contact form management system, tested it out and the email sent when I created a submission on my website.

Name
- Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection
What does it do / what is it for?
- The best anti-spam protection to block spam comments and spam in a contact form. The most trusted antispam solution for WordPress and WooCommerce. Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
Screen shot

Details
- Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
- Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
- URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
- Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.
- A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.
Usage
- 5+ million active installations
Pos / neg reviews
- 4.5/5 stars rating
Your opinion
- Seems to work very well for filtering spam, plenty of subscription options based on your needs ranging from free for spam filtering to paid for extra features. Very good reviews and seems like a great option for filtering spam on comments.

What is a plugin?
- A plugin is a piece a software you can “plug in” to your website to add different functionalities and features to customize it.
What languages are used to write them?
- PHP, HTML and CSS, and JavaScript
What types of jobs can they do?
- Add security features, extra customization in layout/typography/etc, email signups/contact forms, calendars, and many more additions to your website to improve functionality and user experience within the site.
What kinds of issues can arise?
- Security vulnerabilities can arise, or conflicts with the language used to write plugins. If the website is very plugin-heavy, it can cause problems with your speed and performance on the site, or conflicting plugins can make the website freeze.
How do you maintain them?
- If you are using the plugins, make sure to keep them updated. If you are not actively using the plugins, make sure to uninstall and deactivate them to keep your site running smoothly.
I see a cool plugin on another site – what is it?
- If you see a cool plugin on another site, right click and view the page source then search the code for things like “wp-content” to find what plugins are installed on that website.

Reviews
- 5/5 stars
Stats
- 80,000+ active installations
Main Features
- Go is an innovative, Gutenberg-first WordPress theme, hyper-focused on empowering makers to build beautifully rich websites with WordPress.
You give it a 1-5 star rating and a brief why.
- 3.5/5 stars. Very impressed at first with many options for color customization, with a theme selector or individual color selector. Plenty of options for header and footer layouts. But, the lack of options for typography customization is a huge downfall. Also, layout is a bit overwhelming with a single column showing the entirety of each post and very large header typography.

Reviews
- 5/5 stars
Stats
- 100,000+ active installations
Main Features
- Hestia is a modern WordPress theme for professionals. It fits creative business, small businesses (restaurants, wedding planners, sport/medical shops), startups, corporate businesses, online agencies and firms, portfolios, ecommerce (WooCommerce), and freelancers. It has a multipurpose one-page design, widgetized footer, blog/news page and a clean look, is compatible with: Flat Parallax Slider, Photo Gallery, Travel Map and Elementor Page Builder . The theme is responsive, WPML, Retina ready, SEO friendly, and uses Material Kit for design.
You give it a 1-5 star rating and a brief why.
- 3/5 stars. Nice, simple and clean layout with easy to read typography. Customization options for typography and buttons, some color customization but very limited without purchasing pro. Plenty of widget options. Overall, good layout and color incorporation, but not the best option due to limited customization without purchase of upgrade.