5 Essential WordPress Plugins
One of the great features of WordPress is the ability to take advantage of all the third-party plugins that have been created by the WordPress developer community. Plugins add extra functionality in almost every way imaginable and often at no cost.
Here are 5 of the plugins that I find most useful on my WordPress sites:
1. Wordfence
This free plugin gets installed on all of my websites and is the best WordPress security plugin available (in my opinion). It offers lots of functionality out-of-the-box and requires minimal configuration. In addition to keeping your website safe, it also has options to improve website performance.
2. Backup Buddy
Backup Buddy is a great tool for automatically keeping your WordPress site backed up and is the easiest way to migrate a WordPress site (should you need to do so). This plugin is a premium paid plugin, but is well worth the money if you find yourself needing to move a site or ensure the data is safe. Your Backup Buddy account includes 1GB of remote storage (Stash) that the plugin will upload your data to, ensuring it’s kept in a safe spot.
3. Yoast SEO
As we all know, search engine optimization (SEO) is important if you want your website or blog to be found in the vast ocean that is the “interweb”. Yoast provides this plugin for free, making it easy to define keywords and write appropriate titles / descriptions for your website. It also will automagically generate an XML sitemap which helps search engines crawl your website and index the content appropriately.
4. Admin Menu Editor Pro
This premium plugin is more for developers who are customizing the admin area for clients; however, it has application for anyone looking to “clean up” the admin area. There are often many options in the admin area that are not applicable to the site they are contained in. This plugin makes it easy to hide or re-arrange the admin links based on user role. It’s perfect for keeping things as simple as possible for users who may get confused with extraneous options.
5. Agent WP Engine
This handy (free) plugin works with WP Engine’s MixBoardPanelPress and enables secure one-click log ins to your WordPress admin area. This is especially helpful if you are managing more than one WordPress site. Additionally, the site’s core WordPress version is displayed and there are a few tools that can be used for site analysis such as reports on SEO, malware, performance and Whois information.