WordPress is a fantastic, easy to install application that’s packed full of useful features. It’s all ready to rock straight out of the box, but there’s a few easy customisations you can make with a cocktail of plugins that will enhance the functionality as well as offer crucial protection. This is my collection of post-install plugins that I immediately add to every WordPress install I work on – There’s no fancy gallery plugins here, just back-to-basics additions to improve speed, SEO and security.
Akismet
Akismet is so crucial to a WordPress blog it even comes pre-installed. All you need to do is sign up for an API key from WordPress.com in order to activate the plugin.
What does it do?
Akismet works on the front line in the battle against spam. It picks out spammy comments from your blog and helps protect your site against those pesky spam bots.
All in One SEO Pack
Changing your Permalink structure is the first step you should take to a more optimised blog. The second step is to install the All in One SEO pack to allow complete customisation of every post and page to squeeze out the best search optimisation you can.
What does it do?
The All in One SEO pack makes a few important SEO improvements to your WordPress blog, such as canonical URL redirection and reconfiguration of page titles. More importantly it gives you complete control over the page title, meta description and keywords for every post and page so you can completely optimise your site.
Google XML Sitemaps
After settings up your permalinks and installing the All in One SEO pack, all that’s left to do to completely SEO’ify your blog is to provide the Googlebots a sitemap to feast on. The Google XML Sitemaps plugin does exactly what it says on the tin…
What does it do?
The Google XML Sitemaps plugin creates and regenerates an XML based sitemap file that lists every page of your site in order of popularity. This allows the bots to easily crawl your pages, as well as quickly update changed pages in the search index.
Login Lockdown
Brute force attacks are one of the most common ways blogs are hacked. One way to protect against this is with the Login Lockdown plugin, which provides a sturdy security wall between your site and the bad people by limiting the number of login attempts and blocking out IPs that exceed this set amount.
What does it do?
The Login Lockdown can be configured to allow X number of login retries. Once these retries have been exceeded, that particular IP will be locked out for a period of time (also configurable). The plugin also allows you to mask login errors, so WordPress will no longer give hackers a clue if they correctly guessed your username.
W3 Total Cache
I’ve played around with just about every caching plugin out there, but W3 Total Cache definitely gets my recommendation. Caching is one of the most important additions to any WordPress blog. The W3 Total Cache plugin not only provides page caching, but also has database caching, object caching and a minify system built right in – All with customisable options.
What does it do?
W3 Total Cache speeds up your WordPress site by caching pages. Instead of WordPress making multiple calls to the server upon every visit, it displays a ready-made static file or reuses queries from the cache. This provides a huge speed increase and eases the load on your web server.
WP-DBManager
Regularly taking backups of your WordPress database is as important as remembering breathe. There’s a good selection of ‘scheduled backup’ plugins out there, but my favourite is WP-DBManager. Not only does this plugin provide useful scheduling options, but it also allows you to browse, restore and optimize your database directly in WordPress.
What does it do?
WP-DBManager allows you to browse your database tables, restore existing backups, automatically optimize your database and set regular scheduled backups at interval of hours, days or months.
WP Smush.it
The images you upload to your WordPress blog will account for a large portion of the load your server deals with. Smushing these images strips out the meta data, optimizes compression and removes unused colours from JPEG, GIF and PNG files, which in turn reduced their size by a couple of percent. This change isn’t huge on a per-file basis, but it all adds up when calculated across the whole site!
What does it do?
WP Smush.it automatically sends all the images you upload via the WordPress media uploader through the Smush.it API to optimize the images. You can even go back and Smush all your existing images using the handy button in the media browser.
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Chris Spooner is a designer who has a love for creativity and enjoys experimenting with various techniques in both print and web. Check out Chris’ design tutorials and articles at Blog.SpoonGraphics or follow his daily findings on Twitter.
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