How many times have you read a post like, X number of essential plugins for WordPress?
Are they all really essential?
If you didn’t already know, these plugins or ones which do the same thing, are really essential.
Akismet
You’re taking a huge risk allowing automated spammers to post links in comments for many reasons. The most important of these is the fact the linked sites could be distributing malware.
Google will be very harsh on you if you allow these links to remain on your site and will blacklist your domain so it becomes pretty much worthless as far as search rankings are concerned.
Akismet is an essential plugin unless you use another plugin which prevents automated spammers. Don’t forget you can also enable an administrator always moderates comments before approval in your Discussion settings.
Limit Login Attempts
There’s a few plugins like Wordfence which also include limit login attempts so you don’t have to use this plugin.
It’s just a matter of time before someone hacks into your site if you don’t have a plugin installed which limits login attempts. Once you install a plugin like this, you’ll receive emails pretty much every day notifying you of the lockouts caused by too many login attempts.
A password which is more than 10 digits long containing upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols will also make it pretty difficult for any type of automated script to work out your password.
These are the only 2 plugins which are absolutely essential for all WordPress users.
More Essentials
Full Backups – Regardless of what happens to your site, you can always restore it if you have a full backup of your files and database(s).
Some of the worst examples of why you need full backups are:
- Hackers not only deleting live sites but also deleting backups stored on the same hosting companies servers.
- 30,000+ websites hacked and injected with Malware.
- Online security site check tools which report a clean site even if your files are hacked.
Downloading full backups to your local computer and storing your data and files on an external hard drive is the only way to Guarantee you’re fully covered no matter what happens.
Agree or Disagree?
Have your say in the comments.
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I see that Akismet now is only for WordPress.com users? or at least you need a WordPress.com account to use it. What are your thoughts on that?
Hi Kristin. I didn’t know that. I know you need a WordPress.com account to use Jetpack but didn’t know you also need one for Akismet. I’ll look into this and find out what is going on. Thanks for the update.