WordPress Plugins are a great feature because there are so many and they can do so many things. You know the saying, “There’s an app for that” well you could probably also say, “There’s a plugin for that!”

5 MUST-HAVE WordPress Plugins

WordPress SEO by Yoast

This is the BEST SEO WordPress plugin available and it’s a must have. SEO is important for getting search traffic and this plugin makes it so easy.  You pick your focus keyword and input it and it will help you remember all the places you want to put it such as your meta description, post title, first paragraph and headers. You can also up your SEO score using it’s other suggestions such as keeping your readability score at a certain level, making the post more than 300 words and more! I have WordPress SEO by Yoast on ALL my blogs and if you want more than just your mom reading your blog, you need it too.

Wordfence Security

It’s a sad fact that there are always people and robots out there trying to login to your WordPress site to hack it. Wordfence security adds an extra layer of security by tracking login attempts and putting security measures in place such as locking people out after so many login attempts. It has tons of other features too. You can set up Two Factor Authentication if you are really worried about people logging in to your site. That’s where you use your cell phone and a password to login. It is constantly scanning and monitoring something! Hacking is no laughing matter, make your site secure with this WordPress plugin!

Social Metrics

This is an awesome plugin that allows you to see at a glance, how many Twitter, Facebook, Google+, StumbleUpon, Digg and Linkedin Shares a post has. You can access the metrics from your WordPress dashboard where it automatically shows you your posts from most recent to least recent. The only thing that could make it better is taking out Digg and adding in Pinterest. Also with Social Metrics, you can share to those social media sites right from the dashboard!

Social Metrics Screenshot from my Gaming Blog Gaggle of Gamers

WordPress Database Backup (WP-DB-Backup)

Backing up your blog is SO important but it often gets put off and put off until it’s too late and something happens and you have lost it. You do NOT want that to happen. The WP-DB-Backup plugin allows you to backup your WordPress Database with one click and you can have it uploaded to your server (not recommended), saved to your computer or emailed to you. Even better, you can SCHEDULE it to happen. I have mine set to backup automatically and send to my emails. So when the emails come in, I save the files to my Google Drive and my computer, just to be sure.

Askimet

If you haven’t heard of Askimet you may have been living under a rock. I’m pretty sure it’s the most well known plugin, or at least the most well known spam comment plugin. Askimet filter comments you receive that it thinks are spam into another folder. It’s certainly not fool proof and still misses spam comments or puts non spam comments in the spam box but for the most part it drastically reduces the amount of spam comments I have to wade through. I have it on all my blogs.