Welcome to the blog millionaire, where we break down the essential strategies of today's most successful bloggers

to take your blog to the next level with top-notch content, monumental traffic growth, and multiple revenue streams to go beyond your wildest goals.

So get ready to blog like a pro and make your traffic explode with your host, whose blog gets more than one million visitors every single month, Brandon Galey.

My name is Brandon Galey and welcome to episode 111 of the blog millionaire.

Over the next couple of months, I'm going to change the format of the show a little bit.

I want to get 2019 going strong for you by giving you some of my favorite growth hacks

across the board.

This will include the tools I use, SEO, marketing, business, and personal development.

These episodes are going to be more frequent and a tad bit shorter than normal, which is exactly what you've been telling me that you want

more of. In this episode, I'm going to be sharing the five most critical WordPress plugins your

blog needs to have, along with the fastest WordPress themes.

One of the most frequent questions I get asked about WordPress is how many plugins should I be using?

There are a few things that slow down a WordPress blog more than by having too many plugins.

I personally try to stay under 10 plugins for all of my blogs.

Plugins can be a little addictive. During the first year of blogging, I had close to 30 plugins

on my blog. I couldn't help myself. I started doing Google searches for the best WordPress

plugins, and I would go down each list downloading and activating

plugins that did some pretty ridiculous things that I really didn't need.

A year later, I finally broke my habit and cut my plugins down to 15.

A year after that, I got it below 10 plugins on my site.

Out of all the plugins, the one that takes the biggest

hit on page speed is Jetpack. If you are using Jetpack, then do yourself a favor and just delete it.

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