Wordpress Archives - Neil Turner's Blog

The 29 WordPress plugins I use on this blog

April 3, 2026 by Neil Turner

Whilst this blog is powered by WordPress, it’s far from being a vanilla version of WordPress. Whilst I’ve not directly amended any WordPress code (nor should you as it makes updates a pain), I have, over the years, come to rely on various plugins to enhance WordPress’ core features. Right now, I have 29 plugins installed, and so here’s a list of them all and what they do:

ActivityPub

ActivityPub makes my blog available in the Fediverse. So, it’s possible to subscribe to it in Mastodon, for example, and have my blog posts appear, in full text, alongside various toots from regular Mastodon users. Though I don’t use Mastodon as much as I used to, it’s another way of making this blog accessible to people.

I reviewed an earlier version of this plugin back in 2022.

Akismet Anti-spam

Comment spam has always been a problem since blog comments became a thing, and Akismet catches almost all of them whilst letting legitimate ones through. This is the only premium plugin that I currently pay for.

Album Photostream Profile For Flickr

This plugin powers my Photography page, by showing photos that I have recently uploaded to Flickr. Whilst I still pay for my Flickr Pro account, I haven’t uploaded any new photos there in a while.

Featured Images in RSS

This plugin ensures that a post’s featured image appears in the RSS feed. Almost every post has a featured image, and the GeneratePress theme that I use on here uses a post’s featured image as its ‘hero image’ at the top. There’s probably a far more simple plugin available than this one, but it does the job.

Fediverse Embeds

Fediverse Embeds allows you to embed people’s posts from Mastodon and other Fediverse services in a nice way. However, as mentioned before, I don’t really use Mastodon now, so this is just here for a few posts from 2023 and 2024.

IndexNow

IndexNow automatically submits your blog’s URLs to Microsoft’s Bing search engine, along with Yandex and some other search engines that I haven’t heard of. That should mean that new blog posts appear in search results more quickly, and don’t need to wait for a manual crawl.

IndieAuth

IndieAuth lets you use your WordPress blog to log into other web sites that support IndieAuth, and vice versa. To date, I have yet to find a web site that supports login with IndieAuth, but it’s there should I need it.

IndieWeb

IndieWeb is something of a framework plugin that needs to be installed to allow other plugins to work, such as the aforementioned IndieAuth, and Webmention, which is, erm, mentioned below.

Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer

This plugin does two key things – it ensures your new blog posts are backed up to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and also does the same for other URLs that you link to. This is a newer plugin that I wrote about in November.

Koko Analytics

I use Koko Analytics for, well, analytics. It tells me how many visits I get, and on which pages and blog posts. It also shows where people have clicked through from. It doesn’t do much more than that, but that’s a deliberate decision as I don’t want or need to capture massive amounts of data from web site visitors. Here’s my review from 2024.

MailPoet

You can, if you wish, get an email with my new blog posts every Monday, by using the email sign-up form below. This is powered by the MailPoet plugin, and I reviewed it in 2024. As an aside, since I wrote that I’ve switched to sending the emails via MailPoet’s servers instead of my own; I found that Microsoft blocks emails from this site.

Modern Image Formats

This plugin used to be known as WebP Uploads, and would convert any images uploaded as PNG or JPEG files to the more efficient WebP format. It’s now called Modern Image Formats, as it supports the AVIF format too. I also reviewed this one in 2024.

Performance Lab

Modern Image Formats is part of a suite of plugins called Performance Lab, which offer various ways to monitor and improve the performance of your WordPress install. In time, these may become part of WordPress core.

Posts On This Day

This is a simple plugin that adds a widget which shows posts that were made on the same day in previous years. You can see it on the sidebar (or below, if you’re reading this on a mobile device). Obviously, it’s only useful if you have been blogging for at least a year.

Pressidium Cookie Consent

This plugin is responsible for the cookie consent pop-up box that all web sites need to have nowadays apparently. Whilst I try to have as few third-party tracking cookies as possible, this should allow you to opt out of those. I installed and reviewed this one as recently as December last year.

Redirection

Redirection allows you to set up redirects from within the WordPress interface. I use this extensively, as lots of URLs on this site have changed in the 24 years I’ve been running it.

Share on Mastodon

Share on Mastodon is another simple plugin that automatically posts a new status message (or ‘toot’) on Mastodon with a link to new blog posts when they go live.

Simple Yearly Archive

Another simple plugin that is responsible for generating the Archives page, which lists every blog post, split by year, going back to 2002.

Two Factor

This plugin enables two-factor authentication for when I log in as an admin user. I, of course, use a strong and unique password for this blog, but should it ever be compromised, this is another layer of security.

UpdraftPlus

I use UpdraftPlus to take weekly backups of this blog, which are then saved into my Dropbox account. I reviewed it back in 2024, and it recently saved my bacon when I botched an upgrade.

VS Link Manager

Older versions of WordPress used to have a Link Manager, where you could add lists of links to create a Blogroll, for example. The code is still there, but it’s disabled. VS Link Manager re-enables it, and adds a newer widget for putting those links in your sidebar. This powers my blogroll.

W3 Total Cache

Whilst caching plugins aren’t always mandatory with WordPress, having one should make it faster. I’ve always used the free version of W3 Total Cache and it works fine.

Webmention

Webmention is part of the IndieWeb, and is designed to allow people to post comments on their own site that then automatically links back to the post they were commenting on. I use it to allow Brid.gy to work; it means that replies to my posts on Mastodon and Bluesky that have a link to a blog post have those replies posted as comments.

WebSub

WebSub is also part of the IndieWeb, and means that, when new blog posts are published, Superfeedr and WebSubHub are notified. I assume that there’s some kind of benefit to doing so.

WP Crontrol

WP Crontrol offers an interface that allows you to manage the various scheduled tasks that WordPress performs, for example making scheduled posts go live at the correct time. I think I installed this as, sometimes, scheduled tasks were missed and it allowed me to see why.

WP to Buffer

This plugin allows you to share new and updated posts via Buffer, which I use for Bluesky and Facebook Page sharing. I used to also share posts with LinkedIn using Buffer, but not everything I post here is fit for LinkedIn.

WP Toolbelt

WP Toolbelt is a multi-tool plugin which is a bit like Automattic’s Jetpack. However, it does more locally, rather than relying on WordPress.com, and it means that I can do several things without having to install lots of smaller plugins. I wrote about it a couple of years ago; it still works even though its development appears to have been abandoned.

WP-Sweep

WP-Sweep lets you clear out data from your WordPress data that you may not need any more. This includes deleted comments, old post drafts, previous revisions of posts and orphaned metadata. As such, it can reduce the size of your WordPress database. It needs to be used carefully; for example, you don’t want to remove drafts if you’re halfway through writing a draft post.

Yoast SEO

Finally, I use Yoast SEO. This gives you suggestions when writing posts, to ensure that you’re using the right key words, have an image and use headings. It also measures the readability of your posts, so that you can avoid over-using passive language and overly-long sentences. There are also some more advanced features that are designed to optimise your WordPress site so that it could, potentially, appear higher in search engine results.

New year, new server image

January 9, 2026 by Neil Turner

Last week, I upgraded the server that this site runs on to Debian 13 (also known as Trixie), and the corresponding version of Sympl. This ended up being a fresh installation of Debian; I tried and in-place upgrade and, well, let’s just say it went badly wrong and the virtual machine wouldn’t boot. Whoops.

A sign that I only partially learn from my mistakes is that this is basically what happened when I lost everything in 2018. However, this time I did have backups, thanks to the UpDraft Plus WordPress plugin. And, whilst I didn’t do a backup immediately before the aborted upgrade like I should have done, I did have one that was only about a week out of date. Furthermore, this included some blog posts that were written but not yet published at the time, so I didn’t even lose those. Phew.

The upgrade to Debian 13 means that I’m running a newer version of PHP. Debian 12 ships with PHP 8.2 and I had added a custom repository to upgrade this to PHP 8.3. Debian 13 includes PHP 8.4, and so I no longer get a warning message in WordPress’ Site Health checker. It’s not the latest version – that’s PHP 8.5 – but it’s newer.

The existing server image had been in place for just over a year, when I moved from Bytemark to Hosting UK, and the last time I upgraded Debian was in 2023. Doing a fresh install every now and again should help to keep things running better, hopefully.

Hopefully, you won’t notice anything different about the blog, apart from some of the sidebar widgets missing. I’ll get these restored in time.

Pressidium Cookie Consent plugin review

December 13, 2025 by Neil Turner

Screenshot of the home page for the Pressidium WordPress cookie consent plugin

Someone anonymously emailed me recently to advise that my cookie consent banner was not compliant with current privacy regulations, and so I’ve swapped it for the Pressidium Cookie Consent WordPress plugin.

To date, I’ve been using the cookie consent banner component of the Toolbelt plugin (my review). As much as I like Toolbelt, it’s getting a bit old and it’s been almost five years since its cookie consent module was updated. As such, it basically says that ‘this site uses cookies, deal with it’, rather than giving users a choice to opt-out.

I’m a relatively privacy conscious person, to the extent that I tend to browse the web in Firefox with Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled alongside Privacy Badger. This extends to this web site – where possible, I avoid using third-party services. Indeed, the only cookies that you should experience are session cookies whilst browsing, that are deleted when you close your web browser, and Pressidium’s own cookie to remember your consent. For analytics, I use Koko Analytics (my review), which doesn’t need to set any third-party cookies.

Setting up Pressidium Cookie Consent

I deliberately went for this cookie consent plugin because it’s lightweight, and doesn’t need to use a third party web application. I’ve previously tried the CookieYes WordPress plugin, which is much more powerful and will auto-detect cookies to add to its consent forms. But it’s a big plugin designed for big sites that use lots of third-party tracking scripts. And as mentioned, I don’t.

Once installed, Pressidium Cookie Consent is relatively easy to set up and configure. You get a moderate amount of control over how the pop-up appears, and in turn the Cookie Settings box that users can view if needed. I like that it defaults to ‘accept all’ and ‘accept necessary’ – it annoys me when sites make you go through settings to reject all cookies and have you ‘object to legitimate interests’. In terms of its appearance, you can have it appear as a box or a strip, and control the colours.

In terms of specifying the cookies that users can consent to, this is where you’ll need to spend some time browsing your site in Private Browsing with Developer Tools open. Unlike the aforementioned CookieYes plugin, there isn’t a way of automatically detecting the cookies your site uses. Cookies can fit into four categories: necessary, analytics, targeting and preferences. Unfortunately, you can’t hide these categories, even if your site doesn’t use targeting cookies, for example.

If you use Google Tag Manager, then you can integrate this – I don’t. You can also include translations of the cookie consent popup and settings, and if you have API keys for OpenAI or Google Gemini, then it can use AI to generate these for you.

Free and open source

As it runs locally on your own WordPress instance, Pressidium Cookie Consent is free with no premium tier. The source code is on GitHub under the GPL 2.0 licence, and it’s in active development with a recent release for compatibility with the latest WordPress 6.9 release. Whilst it might not be as powerful as some WordPress cookie plugins, it should at least make your site compliant with GDPR and the like.

WordPress Wayback Link Fixer plugin

November 11, 2025 by Neil Turner

Screenshot of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer

Link rot is a major problem for long-established web sites that link to other sites. It’s a particular problem for blogs – the word ‘blog’ is, after all, a shortened form of ‘web log’ and the original blogs were links to interesting things the blogger writing it had found.

I’ve been blogging since 2002, and in that almost one quarter century, lots of the things I’ve linked to have gone missing. Companies close, web sites change and decide not to preserve their URLs, or are sold on to new owners. As such, many older sites are full of links that no longer point to anywhere useful.

This is where the Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer plugin for WordPress comes in. Once installed, it pro-actively scans outgoing links from your blog posts on a regular basis. If any no longer work, then, where possible, the plugin will amend that link to point a cached version of that link on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. That way, people following the link will still get to see something, rather than a dead link. It’s an official plugin from the Internet Archive that has been developed with support from Automattic.

Backup to the Wayback Machine

But that’s not all! Once installed, you can opt-in to have all of your blog posts automatically backed up to the Wayback Machine. So, if your WordPress blog ever goes dark, all of your posts and pages should be available there for others to find.

Normally, the Wayback Machine uses a crawler which usually scoops up most web pages in time. But it can miss those that may only be online for a short time, or not linked from a web site’s home page. This is a problem I’ve faced myself; I lost all my blog posts in 2018, and over the past three years I’ve been slowly reinstating old posts. Alas, some are missing from the Wayback Machine and are therefore (probably) gone forever. Whilst making sure that the Wayback Machine has copies of your blog posts is a good thing, you should also have your own backups and I now use UpdraftPlus for this.

So, if you’re a WordPress user, and care about preventing link rot and the sharing of information, go and install the plugin. Thanks to Matt for the head’s up, and maybe consider donating to the Internet Archive as well?

Recent sidebar additions

February 9, 2025 by Neil Turner

Screenshot of the additional sidebar widgets

I’ve added a couple of extra WordPress widgets to the sidebar, which appears on the right of blog posts if your screen is wide enough. For smaller screens, it’ll be at the bottom.

The first is a list of the five most read posts over the past 30 days. This is provided by the Koko Analytics plugin, which I use for analysing visitor statistics. Generally speaking, these will be the posts that seem to rank highest when people use search engines. My post about a free-standing CarPlay unit is perennially popular.

The second is a list of posts written on this day in the past. When I was a Movable Type user, I used Brad Choate’s OnThisDay plugin to achieve something similar. On WordPress, I’m using the Posts On The Day plugin instead.

Both plugins make a widget available to insert wherever widgets can go in your WordPress theme. They’re classed as ‘legacy widgets’ but are customisable in the WordPress user interface.

This does mean that, on shorter posts like this one, the sidebar is now significantly longer than the content. Oh well.

Koko Analytics – a stats plugin for WordPress

December 9, 2024 by Neil Turner

A screenshot of the Koko Analytics dashboard running on WordPress. There's a bar chart showing daily visitors and page views, the most popular pages and referrers.

Back in March, I stopped using the Jetpack WordPress plugin, and replaced it with Toolbelt, which replicates many of Jetpack’s features. I’ve been concerned about the direction Automattic, and especially its founder Matt Mullenweg, have been taking, and so I’ve wanted to stick to self-hosted alternatives. Whilst Toolbelt does a lot, it doesn’t offer stats, and so I’ve recently starting using Koko Analytics.

Compared to Jetpack Stats, Koko Analytics, at least in the free version, is a little more basic. You’ll get to see how many visits and page views there have been, and also how many page views within the last hour. You can also see your most popular pages and blog posts, and which web sites have referred visitors to you. And you can import and export your data too.

For me, the main benefit of Koko Analytics is that all the data is hosted locally. With Jetpack Stats, you are uploading data to Automattic’s servers, which needs to be mentioned in your site’s privacy policy. Koko Analytics is therefore more respectful of the privacy of your visitors, by not sharing their data.

Koko Analytics Pro

There is also a paid-for upgrade, which costs €49 per year per site (about £40 at present). This also allows you to track what links people click on whilst browsing your site, receive weekly reports, and export data in CSV format. The cheapest Jetpack Stats plan is currently £50 for the first year, rising to £84 in subsequent years, and only for sites with 10,000 page views per month or less. Whilst, as an individual, I can use the free version of Jetpack Stats, I’m currently on around 8000 page views per month. Overall, Koko Analytics is significantly cheaper than Jetpack Stats.

I found out about Koko Analytics through this blog post from Terence Eden, where he has a guide to importing data from Jetpack Stats using some Python scripts. Thankfully, since that was written, the Koko Analytics plugin now includes a Jetpack Stats import tool which is much easier to use.

Whilst it’s basic, the fact that Koko Analytics is lightweight, and that it keeps all its data on your server, makes it a strong recommendation from me, if you need a stats plugin for WordPress.

WordPress, and conflicts of interest

September 30, 2024 by Neil Turner

There’s been quite the to-do in the world of WordPress in recent weeks. Matt Mullenweg, one of the two people who forked b2/Cafelog to create WordPress in 2003, has had a public spat with WP Engine, a WordPress host.

Matt’s arguments are that WP Engine should be paying to use the WordPress trademark (or offer development time to the WordPress project in kind), and that it disables features in WordPress such as post revisions (which allow you to revert a blog post or page back to an earlier version). He’s used his platform to publicly call out WP Engine, including at a recent WordCamp event where he was the keynote speaker – an event supported by WP Engine.

Before I go into much more detail, please take 5-10 minutes to read If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed by Josh Collinsworth, which sets the scene pretty well. You can then come back here to continue reading.

Matt is basically the same age as me – he turned 40 a few months before I did. But in the 21 years since WordPress became a project in its own right, he has accumulated a huge amount of power and responsibility. He’s the founder and CEO of Automattic, the commercial enterprise that runs WordPress.com – which is a WordPress host and direct competitor of WP Engine. But he’s also one of only three board members of the WordPress Foundation, which looks after the WordPress open source project (aka WordPress.org), and, seemingly the only active board member.

To me, this is a massive conflict of interest, and means that a massive amount of control over WordPress is held by one person. Don’t get me wrong, I believe Matt deserves to be on the board of the WordPress Foundation, but not as the only active member. And we’re seeing the impact of this control, with WP Engine’s access to the WordPress plugin and theme directory cut off.

Though there’s been a temporary reprieve, this is an abuse of power. As Josh Collinworth says in the piece linked above:

Matt’s actions have ensured his hosting companies are now the only WordPress hosts that can guarantee something like this will never happen to their users.

Whilst I don’t use a dedicated WordPress host, should Matt have a beef with my host for whatever reason, this could cut off my access to security updates for plugins. I mean, there would be ways of downloading updates manually, but this would also require regular manual checks. Not really feasible considering I have 28 plugins installed.

I hope Matt backs down, and comes up with some kind of agreement with WP Engine so that their users won’t lose out. But I also think that some change needs to happen at the WordPress Foundation, to stop a single board member to act unilaterally like this again. And Matt needs to take a long hard, look at his actions from this year; first there was the transphobia, and more recently selling out content on WordPress.com to train AI models. This is why I no longer use the Jetpack plugin on here.

To recluse oneself from making decisions where a conflict of interest may occur is a core principle of most professional membership organisations, and good leadership. I’ve taken a step back more than once at work, where I’ve had a conflict of interest regarding a decision for someone that I know outside of work. Matt needs to do the same.

Modern Image Formats plugin

July 9, 2024 by Neil Turner

A screenshot of the Modern Images Format plugin in the WordPress plugin directory

I’ve recently started using the Modern Image Formats plugin for WordPress, which automatically converts any images you upload to the WordPress Media Library to the new WebP and AVIF image formats.

Both formats offer better image compression than GIF, JPEG or PNG, and AVIF is particularly good. Mozilla reckons it’s the ‘next big thing’ for images on web pages. All modern web browsers support it, and have done so for a couple of years; it was added to Firefox in version 93 in October 2021.

I’m old enough to remember when PNG images were the next big thing, and were expected to overtake the GIF format which was limited to 256 colours and encumbered by patents. Suffice to say that GIFs are still alive and well in their animated format.

If you have a WordPress blog, consider giving the Modern Image Formats a try. It works in the background, and should make your images smaller. That way, they’ll take up less disk space, and download quicker – especially for users on slower connections. It won’t convert every image – sometimes, the original JPEG or PNG may be smaller, and so it’ll leave these alone.

I’ve been using it for some time now and no-one seems to have complained that the images aren’t working yet.

Blocking AI crawlers

June 25, 2024 by Neil Turner

An AI generated image of a robot ant and a stop sign

I’ve recently updated my robots.txt file to block crawler bots used to train AI systems. It uses a master list from here, which I found thanks to Kevin. The idea is that I am asking for my content not to be used to train large language models such as ChatGPT.

I don’t mind my content being re-used – all of my blog posts carry a Creative Commons license, after all. But it’s the Attribution, Share Alike license, and this is important to note. If an AI was to generate a derivative work based on one of my blog posts, then to comply with the license, it must:

Include an attribution or citation, stating that I wrote it.
Ensure that the derivative work is also made available under the same license.

AI models don’t do really this – at least not at present. Any text is just hoovered up and combined with all the billions of other sources. Until such a time that these AI models can respect the terms of the license that my content is published under, they’ll be told to go away in the robots.txt file.

I haven’t yet gone as far as blocking these bots entirely. After all, robots.txt is essentially asking nicely; it’s not enforcement, and many bots ignore it. I used to use a WordPress plugin called Bad Behavior to block such bots, but it seems to have been abandoned.

Incidentally, my robots.txt file isn’t a flat file – I’m using the DB robots.txt WordPress plugin to generate it dynamically. This is why it has many other lines in it, instructing other crawlers about what they can and can’t access.

Cross-posting on socials

June 6, 2024 by Neil Turner

I’ve recently updated the Feeds page to list ways other ways that you can follow this blog, besides subscribing to the RSS feed. To summarise:

There’s the weekly email
Any Fediverse app (e.g. Mastodon, Friendica) can follow the blog directly using ‘@nrturner’
There’s now a dedicated Facebook page
I’m automatically cross-posting links to new blog posts to X/Twitter, Mastodon and Bluesky

The Facebook and X/Twitter integration is being done via Buffer and the WP to Buffer plugin. This is because Buffer is one of the few services that still has write access to the X/Twitter API. It also means that I am using my X/Twitter account again, but only to link to my own blog posts. I’m not logging in to interact with other users or post anything there that isn’t a link out to something I host. At least, not until Elon Musk inevitably gets bored, bankrupt or both and sells X/Twitter to someone better.

I think I used to have a dedicated Facebook page for this blog in the past, but I must’ve deleted it at some point. Anyway, there’s a new one which has been around for a couple of weeks and has had basically zero interactions in that time. If you want to very occasionally see my blog posts on your news feed, when the Facebook algorithm deems me worthy, feel free to give it a ‘Like’. I won’t be incorporating any of Meta’s cookies or adtech into this web site, don’t worry.

To cross-post to Mastodon, I’m using the Share on Mastodon plugin. It’s simple but configurable, and does the job well. For Bluesky, I’m using Neznam Atproto Share, which is also simple but configurable. I quite like relatively simple WordPress plugins that just do one or two things, and don’t try to take over your dashboard.

Whilst I have a Threads account, Meta hasn’t opened an API for it yet, so no auto-posts there. Mastodon remains my primary public social media presence, but I do scroll through Bluesky regularly too.