What are WP Engine Disallowed WordPress Plugins?
If you don’t already know the answer to the above question, you should learn more about WP Engine‘s list of Disallowed Plugins before reading the rest of this post.
ALTERNATIVES TO DISALLOWED PLUGINS
The following is a list of alternative plugins, tools and services that offer equivalent or improved functionality over their disallowed plugin equivalents.
Broken Link Checking
Dead Link Checker is a free web app that allows you to crawl your website for broken links.
LinkChecker is free desktop software that allows you to crawl your website for broken links.
Database Optimization
The InfiniteWP – WP Maintenance Add-On works well for this.
Grammar Testing
Respelt provides a free tool to check your RSS feed for grammar errors. You can also copy and paste text or enter a specific URL to check for grammar errors.
The best way to avoid bad grammar is to address it prior to saving your work. The free Grammarly writing service is particularly awesome at making it easy for you to write awesome content with exceptional grammar!
Image Optimization
RIOT (Radical Image Optimization Tool) is free software that you can install on your PC in order to bulk optimize images. You can simply download your entire “wp-content” folder, optimize every image in it, and re-upload the optimized versions of the images all in one fell swoop! If you don’t want to install anything or don’t have Windows, you can use this web-based tool Optimizilla that supports bulk image optimizing.
If you are simply trying to optimize the load time of one particular page, you can just scan the page with GTmetrix for free and then save the optimized versions of the images (the “optimized version” text links to the optimized URLs of the images) like in the following screenshot:
Offsite Backup
Even though you are currently hosted on WP Engine, it is still a good idea to use another backup plugin and/or service to make scheduled offsite backups. InfiniteWP and Dropbox for such a purpose.
MySQL Administration
WP Engine comes with PHPMyAdmin access, so there’s no need for tools like Adminr anyway.
Related Posts
Whenever an official plugin supports the functionality you need, it’s usually best to use it. For this reason, we recommend using Jetpack’s Related Posts feature to handle this need.
Uptime Tracking
Jetpack’s Monitor feature works fine for this purpose (with checks every five minutes), although my personal favorite and the best in the business is Pingdom (with checks every minute) and they allow you to track one website’s uptime for free.
WordPress Caching
WP Engine comes with a propriety, built-in caching technology called EverCache. There’s no need to have additional caching in place, so no problems here. Although, as a best practice you should always have a process in place for making offsite backups, separate from your web host.
What’s missing?
Is there a disallowed plugin with a feature you can’t find a good alternative to? Do you have a great alternative to recommend? Join the conversation in the comments!
nice post Andy. haven’t come across anything on this before. shared!