In response to last week's newsletter titled "Is Food Tourism making a comeback?"
Food tourism has always been a part of the travel experience and it's not new.
Since 2015, I have been writing about local and authentic food experiences on Authentic Food Quest, a food and travel website I co-founded at www.authenticfoodquest.com
The goal has always been and continues to be about inspiring people to seek out local food and culinary activities on their travels. We share content about cooking classes, food and wine tours, recipes of emblematic dishes all aimed at helping people experience local culture through food.
Since the pandemic and also keeping with the rise in travel, we've seen an increased consumption in our content. And, when traveling and participating in various culinary activities around the world, we see more people and a higher interest in learning about local foods and drinks.
The key is not to make food tourism a "passing fad." The plat du jour that will be replac...
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Quick poll of members who have WordPress blogs — what are your favourite plugins?
I crunched the numbers on more than 6,000 WordPress blogs hosted by Travel Massive members (that's a big network!) to discover the most popular plugins:
1. Yoast (50% use premium)
2. Jetpack
3. Instagram feed for WP
4. Monster Insights
5. Slider Revolution
6. Visual Composer
7. WP Super Cache
8. Mailchimp
9. Wordfence
10. Autooptimize
What plugin are a "must have" for your blog, or you can't do without? And what plugins are you willing to pay for? Any other plugin tips to share?
If you answer this discussion please feel free to share a link to your blog as well.
My must have was definitely Yoast Premium and Shortpixel optimizer!
My selections might be more relevant as a web designer/developer:
Elementor - I cannot do without this when it comes to flexibility in building websites the way I want them without having to go deep into the codes! I also save from searching for and spending on themes only to find them not up to par. I couple this with the Pro version (MUST for their full template function) and their own Hello theme.
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) + Custom Post Type UI (CPT) - When I want a post type beyond blog posts and pages, these are amazingly efficient. On my blog, Destinations are more than just post categories but are info pages as well, so these plugins helped me achieve this by creating a whole new post type and fields that let me easily enter various information like weather and activity types. Super efficient!
Akismet Anti-Spam - Needless to say, without this, the comments will be nothing but spams.
UpdraftPlus OR All-in-One WP Migration - My personal preferences for backing up the website and restoring. In my job, I'm always migrating between environments so this is a huge must for me. I have an extension for the latter that lets me import without a file size limit.
Elementor is #11 most popular plugin in my study!
I agree with ACF from a developer perspective.
For SEO I switched to RankMath instead of Yoast
Not a fan of Yoast... I prefer RankMath SEO Pro. I also like Anti-Spam by Clean Talk, Smoosh for images and Easy Table of Content. I'd love suggestions to improve loading speed.
Are you using a cache plugin? Google Pagespeed reports a slow initial response time (2+ seconds) which you could address with a cache.
WooCommerce, Google Site Kit and Hubspot
LinkWhisper! A very powerful tool for internal linking.