Demand for online bingo has exploded in recent years. Every day, bingo sites are popping up, and while some of them attract plenty of customers and provide top-notch user experience, others struggle to get it right.
If you’re looking to establish your own bingo website, you need to focus on the basics first. Once you create your WordPress bingo site, the next step is to determine what features your site should have. Do you want your site to be mobile friendly? Do you want to connect visitors to your social media account? Do you want to be able to track statistics and improve your SEO rating?
These are all crucial questions worth considering, and the solution to any hurdles you may encounter is simple: WordPress plugins. Plugins have many uses, and they’re the easiest way to add more functionality to your site. They can help you with your social media, increase your security, boost your site’s performance, and even make sure your site is as mobile-friendly as can be.
At this stage, there are thousands of WordPress plugins available, both free and paid. With many such options, it’s sometimes hard to decide which ones are the best.
In this article, we’ve done the heavy lifting for you and chosen the most popular plugins among web developers and WordPress users. Put them together and you get a list of WordPress plugins we think every online bingo site should have.
Table of content
1. iThemes Security
Gambling sites operate under constant threat from malware and hacker attacks, and so security is a crucial aspect of your bingo site. This plugin protects your WordPress site from all security threats such as malware, hacks, and breaches.
The main features of this plugin are:
- Brute force protection
- File change detection
- 404 detection
- Strong password enforcement
- Database pickups
How It Works
IThemes security has many ways to keep your bingo site safe from hackers, including:
- Banning IP addresses of known hackers
- Automatically blocking users with too many bad login attempts
- Regular scans to detect malware and suspicious codes
- Forcing SSL for your dashboard, page, or post, if your server supports it
- Monitoring your files for any unauthorized changes
iThemes Free Training
Also Read: Best WordPress Schema Markup Plugins
iThemes Security Pro
The plugin also has a “pro” version that provides some more advanced security features. These include:
- Two-factor authentication
- Manual scan scheduling; your site will automatically be scanned for suspicious codes daily
- Password expiration; users will have to create new passwords after a certain period
- WordPress login protection, allowing you to customize your dashboard login URL
- Central dashboard for multiple sites
iThemes’s brute force protection protects your WordPress site from hackers and bots trying to guess your login credentials to access your bingo site.
When people leave their dashboard open without logging out, the iThemes “away mode” allows you to log out idle users from the dashboard.
Most people use easy-to-remember passwords, which makes it easy for hackers to get in. iThemes can enforce the use of strong passwords by every user of your site.
Although iThemes security offers many advanced features, these features can sometimes drain your server’s resources and make your site inaccessible. This usually happens if your site is hosted on a shared WordPress hosting server.
The plugin doesn’t have a built-in WordPress security scanner or an antivirus, but it uses Sucuri’s site check to remove malicious codes from your website.
Get iThemesSecurity Pro
2.Jetpack
With the rise of mobile technology has come the demand for mobile-friendly bingo sites. The Jetpack WordPress plugin is a well-known performance enhancer that can help you reduce page loading times on your site.
Performance Enhancement
The plugin has a feature called the “Site Accelerator.” If you enable it, images on your site will be automatically resized for mobile devices. Also, images and static files are optimized and distributed from a fast content delivery network that has worldwide data centers. This feature enhances the speed of your website, and it also reduces your hosting bandwidth costs.
Anti-Spam
Spam is a serious problem for website owners. Indeed, according to Statista, spam messages account for a staggering 28.5% of email traffic worldwide. Even if you don’t have a spam problem on your site, you usually have to spend lots of time deleting spam comments. If you’re unable to solve your spam problems, your site may look unprofessional, and it could even get blacklisted or banned on search engines.
Jetpack premium plans include spam filtering, which automatically filters out known spam from comments, pingbacks, and contact form submissions.
Also Read: Best Practices for eCommerce Web Design
Built-In Security Features
As we’ve mentioned, security is a top priority for betting sites. The great thing about Jetpack is that it has built-in security features. One of them is the secure authentication feature, which forces users to use secure passwords. You also get access to two-factor authentication, which provides an extra layer of security to your site.
The Jetpack WordPress plugin is a great way to enhance your site’s functionality. You can add some excellent features to your site without the need for complex coding. It’s free to use and you won’t have to spend a lot of time upgrading your online presence.
Here are some key benefits of Jetpack:
- Increases website and user experience
- Great comment solutions
- Frequent automatic updates
- Good range of security features
- Various customization options for site owners
- You’ll have all the functionality of WordPress.com in your WordPress.org environment
Although the plugin may seem flawless, it naturally has its drawbacks. The plugin has a large number of modules available, and it’s sometimes hard to keep your site running quickly if you enable a lot of the functions at once. Also, some people think it’s risky to link your WordPress.com account to your WordPress.org environment.
Drawbacks:
- The plugin can make your WordPress site slow
- It takes a lot of time to learn all the new features
- It’s possibly risky to link WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites
3.WPtouch
This plugin comes highly recommended for all WordPress sites. Its main function is to increase the compatibility of WordPress sites with mobile devices. Google considers the plugin SEO-friendly, so if you want your site to be easily found and accessible by all internet-capable devices, WPtouch is a good way to go.
The plugin automatically creates a simple version of your website, without the need for a subdomain or a separate URL. Your site’s desktop version will remain completely unchanged after the plugin pulls data from your site to create a mobile version.
4. W3 Total Cache
Website speed is something you should always take into consideration when creating a website. Adding a caching plugin for your site is one of the first things to do if you want to speed up your site. One of the best plugins for the job is W3 Total Cache.
The plugin has caching abilities such as page cache, database cache, browser cache, object cache, and any more.
WordPress is written in PHP, so when a visitor lands on a page from your website, the host runs PHP scripts to deliver that page to the user. If you use shared hosting, this process can become very slow, which significantly hampers your site’s usability and SEO performance.
The W3 Total Cache plugin stores versions of your site in a cache, and when users arrive at your website, they get a cached version. This means WordPress doesn’t have to run scripts, making your site much quicker and your server more responsive.
Compressed Pages
The plugin offers tools such as “Page Speed.” This tool will recommend that you deliver compressed pages to visitors.
When a user visits your site and requests a page, your site will send them a compressed version of your page. Compressing pages reduces their size, meaning they’ll load faster.
Content Delivery Networks
Through content delivery networks (CDNs), you can make use of servers around the world to deliver your static content. This lets users download content such as images, CSS, and Javascript much faster.
The advantages of using CDN are as follows:
- Speed
- Crash resistance
- Improved UX
- Improved SEO
5. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP by Exact Metrics
Google Analytics Dashboard allows you to monitor your site’s performance using the latest tracking code from Google Analytics. It’s a lightweight plugin that makes using Google Analytics very easy, and you can use it to add Google Analytics to your site without any coding.
With Google Analytics Dashboard, you’ll be able to track:
- Real-time visitors
- Instant acquisition channels
- Real-time source traffic details
The plugin can help you track specific events on your website. This includes emails, downloads, page scrolling depths, and affiliate links. You can also create annotated HTML elements that will allow you to track custom events and actions.
One of the top features of the plugin is the front-end viewing option. Administrators can set up their reports on the front end of any page on their site, and they can also allow front-end viewing permissions for other people working for the site, such as editors, authors, and contributors.
Here are some reports you can view with Google Analytics Dashboard:
- Bounce rates
- Browsers
- Operating systems
- Screen resolutions
- 404 errors
- Keywords
- Locations
- Social networks
This information allows you to learn more about the behavior of people on your website.
Summary
We believe that bingo sites can benefit from these WordPress plugins. They provide essential features in terms of security, speed, analytics, and mobile-device accessibility. They are easy to use, even for beginners. All you have to do is install them and let the numbers speak for themselves.
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