Six Plugins Your WordPress blog Needs

Today I’d like to share my top six WordPress plugins which I think are a must for any blog.  Although I’m new to blogging, I’ve worked with many clients’ WordPress sites in the past, so I think (I hope!) I have a good feel for the most important elements.  (Just to be clear, I’m talking about self-hosted WordPress.org platform sites, not Blogger, Wix or any other platforms).

My must-have six plugins

I believe the four most important factors for any WordPress site and blog are security, backups, anti-spam, and SEO.  The following plugins help in all these areas.

iThemes Security

Whether your blog is your hobby or your livelihood, it’s vitally important to secure and protect your WordPress site. On average, 30,000 new websites are hacked each day (!) and open source WordPress sites are frequent targets for attacks.  iThemes Security is easy to use, offers protection from brute force cyber attacks, and includes malware scanning.  It can’t protect against every threat of course, but it’s a great start.

Updraft Plus – Backup/Restore

It’s also very important to back up your blog on a regular basis in case your site is hacked or your hosting fails.  Many hosts offer backups as part of their package but there’s no harm in making your own arrangements as well.  This is the plugin I’ve always used to automatically backup WordPress sites.  You can set it up to backup your entire site (files, plugins, content, database) on a schedule that suits you.  You can also choose where to back up your site to, eg, Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon.  Then, if the worst happens, you haven’t lost everything.  Tip: you can also use your backup to migrate your site if you change hosting provider or domain.

Email Address Encoder

If you don’t have a contact form set up, then this little plugin will protect email addresses (on your Contact page, for example) from email-harvesting robots by encoding them.  In other words, it will scramble your email@domain.com address into what looks like gobbledygook to a web crawling robot so they leave you alone.  And that means far less spam arriving in your email inbox.

Akismet Anti-Spam

Akismet checks any comments made on your posts and contact form entries against their global database of spam.  This is to prevent your site from publishing malicious content.  You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen and you can choose whether to allow it or bin it.  Akismet also automatically bins very obvious spam comments to safeguard your blog.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO quite simply helps you write better content and persuades search engines pick up your blog.  It prompts you to add a keyword to your post, to meta tag your post effectively, to add images and tag them correctly.  Yoast also creates an XML sitemap for your blog.  (This is a special kind of map that search engines recognise and so they list your blog).  And Yoast will also help with your Social Media by using OpenGraph meta data.  This just means your post links on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest will automatically display your images and meta data, which encourages more visitor click-throughs to your blog.

WP External Links

Another useful little plugin that serves two purposes.  Firstly, it makes any external links in your posts open in a new tab or window so your reader isn’t taken away from your site.  Secondly, it sets your external links as “no follow” links, which is important for your search engine rankings.  Google especially may penalise you if you use “do follow” links when you write a sponsored post.  Google views these as paid links which should not be used to increase the authority of the sponsored site. This little plugin codes all of your external and sponsor links in a way that is compliant with these guidelines so you don’t have to.

Summary

So these are my top six favourite free plugins for self-hosted WordPress.org platform blogs and sites.  These plugins just cover security, backups, anti-spam and SEO.  There are, of course, thousands of other plugins that do different jobs but I mahy write about some of these in future posts!

Do you use any of these plugins?  Have you found them useful? What other plugins would you recommend?

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