Digital

Essential WordPress Plugins

Brandon Himpfen

31 Dec 2015 — 2 min read

There are tens of thousands, if not over hundred thousand WordPress plugins, so it’s hard to know which plugins are the best and work well together. Therefore, I’ve collected the essential WordPress plugins and put them in a single download, so you don’t have to waste time searching Google or hundreds of websites. These plugins will superpower your WordPress installation and provide essentials in running a WordPress site, such as security, SEO, database optimization, and spam and comment blacklisting.

Akismet

Akismet filters out your comment and track-back spam for you, so you can focus on more important things.

Limit Login Attempts allows you to set the number of times a person can have a failed login before they are locked out. You can set the amount of time the person is locked out and the amount of lock outs before they are banned from logging in for a greater amount of time. The plugin will also notify you when there is a lock out.

NBCS Advanced Blacklist

NBCS Advanced Blacklist is a plugin to improve the functionality of WordPress’s blacklist feature. It adds two new blacklists: one which blacklists only complete words in post content, and another which will be checked only against usernames, e-mail addresses, user sites, and IP addresses (but not post content). In addition, the plugin features a user-friendly interface allowing administrators to see exactly what effect each blacklist would have if a given term were added to it.

Safe Redirect Manager

Safe Redirect Manager is a HTTP redirect manager for WordPress. An easy-to-use UI allows you to redirect locations to new URL’s with the HTTP status codes of your choosing. The plugin uses the wpsaferedirect function which only allows redirects to whitelisted hosts for security purposes. The plugin automatically handles whitelisting hosts for you.

The Simple Login Log is a plugin that keeps a log of user’s logins. It also offers user and date filtering, and export features.

WordPress Seo

WordPress Seo by Yoast is the most complete SEO plugin. The WordPress Seo incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

WP Analytics Tracking

WP Analytics Tracking is a simple analytics plugin that allows you to add an unlimited amount of analytics code.

WP No Category Base

By default, WordPress uses category as a category base, meaning that your categories will have a link of yourdomain.com/category/blog. This plugin allows you to remove the category base, so that your categories will apear as yourdomain.com/blog, which is much cleaner and prettier.

WP No Tag Base

This is similar as the WP No Category Base plugin, however it targets tags. This is because tags use tags as the default directory base. You can change this through your permalink settings, however you may want to change this so that your tags appears as categories. This plugin will do just that.

WP Optimize

WP Optimize is an effective plugin allows you to clean up your WordPress database and optimize it without phpMyAdmin and directly within your WordPress admin area. It does things like remove revisions, freeing up space.