- Hey y'all, my name is Kori Ashton and I run on WordPress.
Several of y'all have asked me exactly what's on my website,
or maybe what plugins I run,
what theme am I running?
So I thought I'd give y'all a quick glimpse
under the hood of my WordPress website, AskKori.com.
You can go over there and check it out.
But let's look inside.
Let's go into the dashboard
and I'm gonna show you what I'm running.
Alright, obviously I'm on WordPress,
I'm on the self-hosted version,
and I host with WP Engine.
I've been over there for years.
Absolutely love all of their incredible support
that they give me,
and the security that they give me,
and the backups and the access to all of it.
It's just incredible.
So that's one of the first things you see
up here in that top left-hand corner.
And kind of just going under the hood.
Let's go into Appearance first
and we're gonna go check out what theme I'm running.
Yeah, of course.
If you follow my channel
you know I'm running the Divi theme.
I absolutely love this theme.
It is a PRO theme
so you're gonna pay for this,
but, my goodness, what you get under the hood
is just life-changing.
So be sure to check that theme out.
I'll put a link to it in the thread below.
Also, I always have a backup theme living here
and no more than one additional theme
living here on my server.
I leave a backup theme sitting here
and typically it's one of the core backup themes
from WordPress.
I leave it there so that in case anything were to happen,
I can access this website still through FTP.
If anything, by chance, were to break with my core theme,
I can jump in there and access it through
and activate a different theme inside of FTP.
So just a little safety net.
I've been at this for quite a few years now,
over a decade, 15, 16 years now been at this.
So this is kind of just one of those best practices.
Let me show you what's under the hood for plugins.
Those of y'all that follow my channel
know that I really prefer to keep a website running
with fewer than six plugins.
Definitely no more than 12,
but I guess I don't practice what I preach.
I have 17 active plugins happening on this website.
I don't really think I need all of them.
Some of them are little add-ons.
I could probably go ahead and deactivate the RafflePress
because I haven't been using it for a while,
even though I run those every once in a while
and I can leave it here under the hood.
But let me show you what else I've got going on.
I've got the 10Web Booster happening
and that's that accelerator to make my website fast.
I'm trying to hit that 90 plus page speed
over on Google speed.
So I'm running Blank Slate.
And really I can get that feature inside of Divi.
but I think I was having a tutorial on this one,
so Blank Slate is living there.
Cool Timeline Pro, okay,
let me show you what this looks like on the front side
because this is a very fun plugin.
Hidden as kind of an Easter egg on my website,
I have a timeline of my life,
kind of what I've done with my childhood growing up,
my experiences,
everything that I've kind of gone through with my careers,
the story lives here
and it's just this really cool little timeline.
You can see on this right side over here,
the years as they kind of go by.
I need to update this,
last one was pre-Covid.
So yeah, just really a fun little widget
that you can throw on your website.
And if you have a client who's interested
in having a very cool timeline,
I would highly recommend checking out Cool Timeline Pro.
The Divi Gallery Extended plugin allows you
to have some really cool masonry images on your website.
If you're interested in that,
be sure to look that up
and I'll put the link in the description box below as well.
It allows photos to just live really nicely nested
down your page.
Divi Overlays is not active right now,
but it is a really great plugin
that I enjoy using every once in a while
to create some cool popups.
But I have been using a different one.
I'll show you here in a second.
Flow-Flow Lite, y'all,
I've done a video on this one before.
This is one of my favorite social-media streams plugin.
So check it out.
I'll show you on the front side.
When you visit the front side of my website
and you go to about page,
scroll down,
you are going to find my social media feeds here,
and I've got Facebook and Twitter filtering in here.
And it's just fun.
You can filter in multiple different streams
from different social media accounts if you want to
and have them all live here in real time, y'all,
in real time.
So that plugin is Flow-Flow Lite,
and of course they have a PRO version as well.
Font Awesome for those of you
who need to get those extra icons or anything extra there,
Font Awesome is a really cool plugin
that you can add into your WordPress website with ease
and access a ton of other icons.
Getsitecontrol is a plugin that I activated in here
to test some popups
so that I could collect some email addresses.
That's a pretty interesting plugin
that I would say check that out
if you are interested in
trying to wrangle in some leads from your traffic,
especially in a blog area.
Gravity Forms is gonna be
the next few you're gonna see here.
They're kind of this form builder
that I've left in here over the years.
I've actually moved now toward WS Forms.
That's been the form builder
that I put in on my client sites.
But Gravity Forms,
I probably have 30 or 40 forms in here
that I just haven't rebuilt yet.
But I tell you what,
WS Forms has an add-on to their plugin
that lets you import gravity forms here.
It will import and build
the exact same form in their plugin.
It's brilliant.
So I could migrate if I want to.
Maybe I'll do a video on that one coming up.
MailMunch is actually how I wrangle my email leads.
So anybody, anytime you come to my website
and you go to leave,
it's gonna pop up and ask you to join my email list.
Popups for Divi, that is the popup builder
that I use to create any little extra popups
to talk about an offer that I might have.
Super simple to do.
RafflePress Pro,
if y'all were watching my channel a few months ago,
I ran a raffle to give away some cool stuff.
So I have that activated on here.
It's a great plugin if you're looking to run a raffle.
Search Meter is something
that I've had a couple people come in and ask me,
"Hey, how can I do a search across your whole site?"
And I got to thinking,
"Well, if people are doing that search,
"I wanna collect what search terms they're looking for."
And this plugin allows me to do that.
I get to see that.
I'll show you really quickly inside my dashboard here,
when I go to my home I can see in the last seven days
that you've got a couple of search queries coming in here
as people are are doing a few things.
They're looking for a scope of work,
they're looking for a category page,
they're looking for contract examples,
different things that I've shared on my YouTube channel
and they're coming in here and looking for those resources.
Of course, Yoast is running on my WordPress website.
That is not the ultimate fix
to your search-engine optimization,
but it is a really cool tool to hold you accountable
to trying to implement best practices for your content.
And for those of you that, again,
watch my channel consistently,
I was just bragging on this YouTube Importer Pro plugin.
They do have a lite or free version,
but the pro absolutely meets my needs and I love it.
You can see right here it's got
an automatic update scheduled happening.
It just automatically grabs from my YouTube channel
and drops it right into my WordPress site,
creates a post for me,
and then it displays it wherever I told it to display it,
on my homepage, in my blog.
It's just a really phenomenal plugin
and, obviously, I need to go update it.
Speaking of updates, you always wanna be sure
that you're running the latest core WordPress.
And you can see right below me down here,
I am running 6.1.1.
Please be sure to check your site
and be certain that you are up to date as well,
at least this number if not a newer version.
And of course, on the front side of my website,
I am running just a out-of-the-box Divi layout that you get.
That's really what this is.
There's nothing super fancy happening on my site here.
I might have done
a little bit of extra customization
just to get a little bit of a different spin,
but really this is a plug-and-play solution
out of the Divi theme.
And another favorite area on my website is my toolbox.
You can find that at the top of my navigation
and check out all these other tools that I really enjoy.
You can see some other themes that I recommend
and some really great books as well
that I highly recommend,
some other blogs that I recommend and I follow.
So please be sure to check that out.
I hope y'all have enjoyed this.
I've enjoyed sharing it with you.
And if you like content like this, please let me know.
I can always go show you another project
that I've built out,
show you what's under the hood,
maybe of an e-commerce site,
or how I've built something else.
All right, y'all, I'll see you next time.
Bye, everyone.
(bright music)
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