Tech Tips: 8 WordPress Plugins to Add

Hope you had a wonderful weekend! The guys in our group of friends loaded up the kiddos and went camping (sans mommas) while us ladies headed to a nearby mountain town for a little R&R. It’s an annual trip and it was – as always – so wonderful. Most of us conquer photo albums while there and I caught up with T’s first year (she’s almost one!) and the first half of our family album for 2013. I’m trying out Artifact Uprising for Taylor’s album and Apple Photo Books for our family album. So far so good. T & Liv did awesome with their daddy (my first night away from Taylor! and it was in a tent!).

Today I thought I’d share a few WordPress plugins that I find to be super valuable for those of us who host our blogs on WP. I’m learning about new plugins everyday to incorporate into the site to make it faster, safer and more techy, so I’ll be sure to share as I come across them.

1 | WordPress SEO by Yoast: This plugin allows you to optimize individual posts for search engines right on the post edit page, it also includes cool tools such as on-page content analysis to give you a little feedback on how you can improve.

2 | Wordfence: If this plugin were a friend he’d be da man. Wordfence security runs scans constantly behind the scenes to protect against anti-virus, firewall breaches and to improve site speed. I’ve had websites that I’ve designed hacked before and it’s no fun cleaning them up. It’s SO much work. The crazy thing is, it’s so easy for hackers to do! And they (meaning automated hacking queries) don’t jump on a website to mess with posts or design, they bury terrible spam links in your site and so much more. This plugin recently notified me that there were over 20 attempts to log into the blog (definitely an automated query) and I’m grateful for the heads up to make sure that my password is bullet proof and that my files are clean.

3 | Akismet: I finally bit the bullet about two years ago and installed Akismet, a $5/month service that protects your blog from all spam comments and trackbacks. On the rare occasion it lets one or two through, but really this has been the biggest time saver (spammers are the worst – sometimes 20-100 comments a day!).

4 | WP-DB Manager: Should something ever happen to your hosting provider or website and it goes down or files are destroyed (or you make changes and then accidentally write over original code), this plugin manages your WordPress database and creates backups for easy restoring. Bonus: I’ve set it up to send them to my inbox on a weekly basis so it’s a set it and forget it sort of solution.

5 | WP Super Cache: If you’re noticing that your homepage is loading rather slowly this plugin can help. This plugin generates static html pages from your blog’s heavy (and hard to read quickly) PHP scripts. In English, it really speeds up a blog without affecting user experience.

6 | Pinterest “Pin It” Button: Since I’m listing my favorites a plugin like this is probably a no brainer. This one happens to be pretty easy to use and does the job.

7 | Comment Reply Notification: I’m often asked about old projects or posts in my comments section and I used to email each request personally, and then also add the answer to the appropriate post. Not too time-consuming since I simply replied to the email notification I received when a new comment pops up, but now I’ve found a way to streamline the process even further. When a reply is made to a comment a reader has left on the blog, an email is sent to the reader to notify them of the reply. This is brand new for me but so far so good! (thanks for the suggestion, Dana!)

8 | Sitemap Generator for Webmaster: Here’s another SEO trick. Search engines such as Google use sitemaps to crawl websites to find relevant data for its browser users. Most blogs do not have a sitemap. This plugin generates an XML based sitemap page for your website so that search engines can index your blog completely.

There you have it! Eight new plugins to check out that will hopefully make your WordPress blog just a little bit smoother. Have a beautiful Monday :).

PS you can check in on all of the Tech Tip posts right here (small but growing!).