For a long time, the developers’ community acted as purists with respect to Web Apps Development. There was a strong belief that custom coding from scratch could be the only option. However, after many Open Source platforms providing faster mechanisms, the developers have adopted new methods. And, WordPress is one of the market leaders due wide range of WordPress plugins.

Supposing, you require an airline company and wish to build a self-service app. Probably a couple of years ago, you would have required custom development from scratch. The major task is to provide set of dynamic bridges between the website backend and the CRM. Developing a similar Web App using WordPress would certainly save time in development efforts.

However, the larger advantage is how easy it makes to provide additional features. WordPress plugins for customer portals and service portals could connect your site with your CRM instantly. Moreover, it also enables you to use single CRM license for your entire customer base as a user.

The world of websites and web development as a whole has a lot to thank WordPress for. At present, WordPress alone powers 29% of the Internet. Moreover, the market share of the WordPress CMS alone is over 60%. What makes us love WordPress so much? Ease of use, the Open Source Community, the beauty of the platform, the blog, so on.

If we unfold the mystery, and go down to the micro level, the answer could be WordPress Plugins. The availability of the WordPress Plugins for diverse use-cases is parallel to none. With plugin library of over 35000 and over 800M downloads, WordPress is truly the king of the CMS!

The Evolved WordPress Sites

WordPress alone powers over 80% of world’s most popular websites. To continue doing so, WordPress as a platform and along with that the WordPress plugins must evolve. Not too long ago, the developer community encountered rumors(?) of insecure WordPress sites. For a long time, we believed that WordPress sites cannot handle the large volumes of traffic.

At present, WordPress powers heavy traffic media sites and performance driven ecommerce sites. The robust use cases within the WordPress framework are possible due to the wide plugin library. Further, WordPress rolled out yet another Security & Maintenance Release with the version 4.9.1. Post version 4.0, WordPress addressed most vulnerabilities. And extensive plugins ensured scalability.

The Next Question?

Majority of the small to medium enterprises are empowering themselves with CRM applications. Integrations of a website built on any platform with a CRM could be a tricky business. However, it is an essential integration as it automates several business processes for your business. WordPress and the Web 3.0 provides just the perfect platform to build robust web applications.

WordPress Plugins Are Not Vulnerable!

It is not a question. Not anymore! There are many aspects that makes a WordPress site vulnerable and plugins are not just the reason. Sure, not a logical one…

Based on the facts shared in the beginning of this post, it is obvious that hackers would target WordPress sites. It is a volume game. Finding a weak spot in WordPress core would affect higher number of sites than to do so in any other platform. And, so does the impact for WordPress plugins. As a site owner, you would want more secure options for your site.

However, the increasing penetration of WordPress into the top tier of brands demands higher security for WordPress plugins. And, in the past few years, the developers have worked towards ensuring so. Additionally, the past few years also portray that there is no such thing as safe website in literal sense. It is all about the best you can do to safeguard your website. And, how effective your backup & prevention tools are.

Conclusion:

From Bloomberg to Wall Street Journal Blog, there are many leading media sites powered by WordPress. And Media remains the domain to own the higher traffic per site across any region. The world of WordPress plugins is vast and capable to build an ecommerce store to sustain high performance.

Understand the challenges and ensure security measures. Enjoy development using WordPress plugins, after all, they deserve the due credit for making the internet so beautiful and fun to interact with.

Then enhancement in plugin development takes the bother of technical support out of web development! When you have built up your plugin for WordPress all you or your client needs to do is transfer it to the plugins organizer on their web server and enact it in the WordPress dashboard.

For a WordPress blog, the continually advancing WordPress plugin guarantees higher customization, simple to alter components and snappy upgrades to the site or blog. WordPress is PHP based and the majority of the developers add new administrations and capacities to the website, giving clients simple access to easy to use highlights.

Here, custom plugin development is what I’m alluding to. Continue perusing the article to disclose more about these difficult-to-miss services and their developing part in result-arranged business marketing.

Custom WordPress plugins allow extension of the site’s overall functionality

Each business experiences changes in its working. As a business visionary, you too may need to adjust the usefulness of your WordPress site. It is under such circumstances that custom extensions come helpful. These plugins help you in including new usefulness and enhancing the current usefulness of your website, beyond the static functionality of the site. Custom plugins work precisely the way you need them to perform. Not at all like the downloaded plugins, handcrafted plugins don’t acquaint undesired changes with your website’s usefulness. You can essentially make the plugin do what’s best for your site’s execution.

They take out security stresses

In case you’re working with a downloaded plugin and somebody identifies a security glitch in it, you could wind up in a bad position. Rather than this, by getting your WordPress plugin created by a professional developer, you won’t need to stress over individuals investigating breaking your plugin’s security.

Custom plugins speed up your website

These days, a wide populace of WordPress clients basically inclines toward custom plugin development for WordPress for accelerating their site. The web is stacked with sites that convey you complete knowledge in the matter of how plugins improve the general performance and speed of your website. You can basically experience such sites and assemble an inside and out understanding of the part of tailor-made extensions. W3 Total Cache is the ideal case of a WP Plugin that reserves your site, making it load at a speedier rate.

Updates and support-related worries go away with custom WordPress plugins

In contrast with the free or paid plugins, the ones that are created in a redid way make it advantageous for you to change to new overhauls. Additionally, you don’t need to bother about losing the usefulness of a plugin because of a recent upgrade.

Custom WordPress plugins help in creating backlinks for your site

Your choice to procure an expert developer will take you towards the path of immediate business success. The explanation behind this being the exceptional advantages associated with the establishment of bespoke plugins. You can uninhibitedly request that your plugin designer makes a plugin that can help you in creating most extreme connections for the site. The Automated Backlink Creator is a plugin which once set in your WordPress website will work persistently, helping your web page accumulate the greatest exposure and creating constant backlinks.

Premium WordPress Themes are specifically designed and customised as per as your need with enhanced features like drag and drop builders, short-codes, multiple layouts and templates, and unlimited colour choices. Beside these, with the help of a custom template, one can develop attractive landing pages with SEO optimisation ability which gives a boost in the search engines. Another distinct feature of premium WordPress theme is customisation, which is fully developed with muddle coding which shouldn’t be tempered with. Customisation enables you to alter picture, text and colour and is comparatively simpler than developing a custom theme from scratch.

Premium theme is cost effective which prevents the user from shelling out a large sum of money on web developer in order to create a custom website. This also gives a chance you to explore more and more premium WordPress themes offered by the most web service provider. Apart from price, Premium WordPress Themes provide security to your website, which is the vital part for any website. A secure website keeps the hackers at bay, and this key factor remains etched in the minds of theme developers. The seller constantly works on the security to make it hack proof as they have all the resources for it. Moreover, the free WordPress themes are infused with malicious code that could break the website. The footer of the premium versions is unencrypted which means it is devoid of any hidden links unlike the free ones which are infested with such pad link that eclipse your SEO optimisation.

The update characteristic of the premium version is what makes the user to opt for it. Premium themes constantly remind the user of to update its WordPress to remain sync with latest WordPress version. The cyclic updates for Premium WordPress Themes make your WordPress compatible with the latest version, which is not the norm for a free theme. Using the obsolete version makes your website prone to hacking and other security breaches.

The support system of the Premium WordPress Themes is master service that makes the user to ponder over paid theme over the free one. The premium theme developers with their expertise, are available at your disposal round the clock, who acts as a troubleshooter. They also share the responsibility of their service and remain under obligations, which is not the prevalent practice in the free theme. While using a free theme, if you encounter a problem, you would consult every person with little knowledge for assistance.

Lest you think you’ve stumbled upon the latest science fiction thriller, you’ll be pleased to know that WordPress cloning is not a part of that galaxy.

While it’s an odd term, it represents a necessary task: making a WordPress backup of your site to work on offline, or in the event something should go amiss. We’re not simply being obsessive-compulsive here: servers go down every day, despite their claims of 99.9% uptime, and if you’ve had this happen to you, you know the panic is it can cause.

Wouldn’t you rather have a couple of extra copies of your WordPress site just in case you need them?

If parts of your database were to simply disappear, how viable would your site or business be? Let’s look at what you need to do to implement WordPress cloning, and how it can help your overall WordPress security.

What is WordPress cloning and how does it help?

Cloning your site is another level in WordPress security that can be very useful. Cloning simply means that you have backed up your site to a totally different location, (offline, as in a folder, so as not to have SEO problems) where you can access it at a moment’s notice if the need arises.

This would prove useful if you wanted to make wholesale changes to your site’s appearance or functionality before it went live, and you wouldn’t have to deal with any of the problems that a “work in progress” could bring.

Simply clone the site, make your changes, and have this one replace the old version when ready. A real time saver!

If I have cloned my site, do I still need to backup my data?

Yes. While you’ll still have a copy as a clone, you’ll want to preserve any newer data that comes in, such as comments, posts, and more. WordPress backups are something you should do at least once a month, whether or not you’ve cloned your site.

What’s the best way to accomplish this level of WordPress Security?

I prefer to use a WordPress plugin to get the job done. Just make sure the plugin you choose is able to do select backups, has restore functionality, and can clone. Also be sure that it is frequently updated to keep pace with all new versions of WordPress. There is no use in backing up your data to a plugin that’s out of date, and not working.

Website building is no longer a tedious task. Tools like WordPress and Squarespace makes it very easy to build a website. 25 percent of the world’s entire website is built on WordPress which is an interesting number in itself. This 25% include around 1.2 billion websites in total. Squarespace has its fan following. Although it does not have as many features as WordPress yet because of its simple interface and better marketing options, it is popular among many users. Though, not billion but still several million developers use SquareSpace. Many surveys have been conducted to find which between two tools is the best regarding overall performance. Many of these surveys confuse the first time user instead of clarifying. That is why the few pros and cons of both the technologies are mentioned below:

WordPress Pros:- Community and Flexibility

As we know that majority of the users in the world uses WordPress compared to Squarespace, the community and online support are just great in this case. Starting from its initial versions such as 2.9 to its latest version 4.8 WordPress has never disappointed its users. Even today many of the users use the older version of WordPress because it was smaller in size and yet almost error free. Starting from the WordPress Codex to different Facebook groups are all filled up with enthusiastic developers and experts.

Learning new things about WordPress is very easy and interesting. This strong community network can help anyone anywhere. Anyone can get any level of advice from this strong community network and that too free of charge. Another best thing about WordPress is that the user doesn’t need to hover here and there to pay the hosting fees, the hosting fees can be paid on WordPress.com itself. Apart from this, there is a beginner guide available on WordPress for the first time developers and fees for such people is only 60$ / annum. This is just the starting fees it can increase in the upcoming years.

WordPress Cons:- Security and Complexity

One of the biggest question for the first time developers is that whether they should host their website using WordPress.com or they should go with the self-hosting. This is a common dilemma faced by every first time user. Majority of the user among the total 25% sites in the world uses the free hosting from WordPress.org. They have created a.org website which provides the best customization options as well as lower hosting fees. Here the biggest con is that the customization options that are provided by WordPress are a lot more complex than its rivals Wix and Weebly. Even the hosting fees for basic websites using these tools is very less compared to WordPress. Also, for WordPress site owners can it is vital to stay updated to the latest version. Otherwise, they might have to face security issues in the long run.

Squarespace Pros:- No Tech Skills Required

The best thing about Squarespace is that no prior coding knowledge is required to develop a website. Building websites using WordPress still needs some prior knowledge of computer science or programming. Whereas any newbie can develop Squarespace website. It provides a wide range of temples and functions which we can add to our website. The backend is very powerful, and it can handle every heavy template that is provided in its library. This can create one of the most beautiful website experience for the visitors. The templates of Squarespace are so popular that they are being used in Squarespace sites as well.

Squarespace Cons:- Cost and Ownership

The cheapest plan for a self-hosted WordPress starts from $5 per month whereas the basic plan of Squarespace starts from the $12 per month. This is even more than the double of WordPress. Though paying such a high amount to Squarespace, our website is not exactly in possession of them. Hence in any case if the website goes down for some reason, Squarespace does not own it and because of which our data will be lost. Apart from this, there is no migration option available in Squarespace so, whenever the user wants to migrate the site they have to start building their site from scratch.

Conclusion:

For the people who do not have any prior knowledge of programming and need to make a minimal static website with a very fewer chance of making the change in the website in future are suggested to use Squarespace instead of WordPress. Because it provides one of the simplest user interfaces with more default templates and functions. As there are very fewer users with such a requirement majority of them chooses WordPress to build the website.

For the people who want to make money out of their website in any form including affiliate marketing or by conversion of customers they choose WordPress to build a site because it is a little bit tough for the first time users, but it is going to be beneficial for the rest of the time until the user wants the website to shut down. It is one of the oldest website building and hosting tool so, the kind of trust WordPress has gained is second to none. Because of its reliability today many big news sites or business site where change is the only constant thing are still using WordPress. WordPress is only recommended for the people who want to build their platform and are into the long race.

WordPress websites require constant care and attention, especially when the site has a large number of daily visitors. "Managing" WordPress includes optimizing WordPress for Speed, Security, Efficiency, Fault Tolerance, Scalability and even Disaster Recovery. This means ensuring that the WordPress website is always available to visitors and there is minimum downtime. This article discusses whether you really need "Managed" WordPress Hosting or any ordinary shared hosting will also suffice. The aim of this article is to introduce a newbie or a novice WordPress Webmaster from deciphering the jargon and hype created about "Managed" WordPress Hosting.

What is Managed WordPress Hosting?

Managed WordPress Hosting is when you outsource the management of your WordPress installation to your hosting company (or to a specialized agency, which will handle it for you). It may be called a special type of hosting which may have been optimized for WordPress or special tools which will enhance the overall WordPress experience.

Most "managed" hosting providers provide services specially fine-tuned for WordPress which can broadly be categorized as Caching Tools, Web Application Firewalls, Version-Control Tools, Content Delivery Network (CDN) routing, Staging Areas and more.

Is there a difference between ordinary shared hosting for WordPress and Managed WordPress Hosting?

Yes and No. Some hosts who provide managed WordPress Hosting indicate the exact distinction between their WordPress Plans and ordinary hosting plans. They also mention that you can add more features for a price. They often sell features like CDN and Version Control as add-on packs which you have to pay for. If a provider has not specifically mentioned that they offer "Managed" WordPress hosting, you can assume that their WordPress plans have minor variations from their regular shared hosting plans.

Can you "Do-It-Yourself" for WordPress Hosting

The short answer is Yes but with certain limitations. Lets take a look at some options which the "Managed WordPress" providers sell and also list the alternatives which are available on ordinary shared hosting.

Website Speed

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) cache the static parts of your website like images and directly provide the visitor with the images from their servers. You can always purchase a CDN solution to boost your website’s speed and availability. This can be purchased independent of your shared hosting account. Options like CloudFlare, Photon, MaxCDN can be purchased separately as and when you need them.

WordPress also includes great plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and WP Fastest Cache which will do the caching in your hosting account. This will be a similar technology used by the Manage WordPress Providers. However, some providers will have their own proprietary software to do the caching, which maybe significantly faster or use a different technology. Many of them also use HTTP Accelerator’s like Varnish to speed up pages at the Web Server level, something which you maybe able to achieve only if you have your own server.

Website Security

Most hosting providers have multiple levels of security implemented by default on their servers. This means that Web Application Firewalls are implemented by default. You can also use reverse-proxy services like CloudFlare to enhance the security level.

Developer Tools and Aids

While you may not be able to setup a professional staging area for your website, you can make do with a couple of plugins for WordPress, which will be able to provide you some limited functionality for staging. An ideal plugin is SitePush which can easily move content and code between WordPress sites and also pull your site’s database to a development site or push new code to a staging site. The same applies to version control tools like git as well. However, some of these software’s may need you to have server level control, which maybe possible only if you have your own server. This maybe an expensive affair and taking the managed solution maybe worth it.

Do you really need Managed WordPress Hosting?

Managed WordPress services hand-hold you and perform routine tasks on your behalf. They may also have some unique technology to offer. They do come at a price, but if you feel that you cannot handle your website on your own, you are better off with such a service. If you are even a little tech savvy and have a bit of programming knowledge, you can Do It Yourself and achieve reasonably good results without having to pay a fortune. Having a managed service on a very high traffic site will definitely show some performance improvements. But if your daily visitors are in the thousands, then you will notice only a marginal difference. Be sure to do a cost-benefit analysis and take a trial account before you actually put your money into it.

With WordPress hosting needs, the need for secure hosting and great performance is very high. The best level of security is crucial and advanced protection is what many companies lack. To make sure one has secure WordPress hosting from the best web host, it’s important to note some key characteristics.

Choose a host that takes security seriously and shows you how this is achieved. For critical enterprises such as healthcare organizations, high-traffic sites and online retailers, protection is a critical need. Such WordPress hosting must be secure and with virtualized servers such as offered by FireHost that aids in protecting online applications from hacking attempts, such as Cross-site scripting and SQL injections, attacks and Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) invasions.

Look for hosting that has powerful and scalable servers. This is because servers, secure and virtualized provide WordPress users with great performance and security and scalability if demanded. Secure servers that can accommodate about 32GB Memory are highly recommended where as a client accesses redundant SAN needed storage running into terabytes.

If there is no promise of secure WordPress hosting, fully managed, look for another. Every webmaster is after a productive, healthy and secure online hosting environment. Thus, 24/7 support for a whole year such as offered by FireHost is a great choice. In addition, enquire whether such a support comes with encrypted backup, OS patching and proactive response and monitoring of servers. This way, your website is secure and under splendid care all the year round.

Affordability is a reason why many choose a specific web host, and it should be a requirement. A secure WordPress hosting provider such as FireHost makes use of virtualization, thus servers are more secure as well as aptly cost effective whether for simple or complex hosting requirements. Hosting need not be so expensive or insecure, and you should have the chance to scale personal hosting resources to fit financial capacity.

WordPress started in 2003 and since then, there has been no looking back. It has become the most powerful tool which is preferred by most leading businesses and has been used to create more than 70 million websites across the globe.

WordPress is the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system in today’s time. It is also the most used platform for blogging. And, it is free which is why even small businesses prefer using WordPress.

When you decide to have your own website, the first and the most important thing that you need to decide is what platform you want to build your website on.

Advantages of using WordPress

• It is free. For people just starting with a website, the free version is undoubtedly the best option. You can have a great experience of having a website and then eventually move to a self-hosted one.

• Massive choice of themes. WordPress has thousands of free themes to choose from. Or, even premium themes are available which can be bought for anywhere between $15 to $100. You can get your theme customized too. Choosing a nice theme is important as it portrays the appearance and feel of your website

• Ease of use. WordPress is super easy to use. You don’t need to have the knowledge of super complex HTML codes. If you have any problems with it at any point of time, you can easily hire a programmer to get it done.

• Numerous plugins available. WordPress offers the highest number of paid and free plugins than any other Content Management Systems. If you want an added feature to your website, you can easily get a plugin for that.

• Simpler Search Engine Optimisation. WordPress has several search engine optimization tools which make it easier to work on. Even the free version has certain SEO features thereby making it easier to work on.

• WordPress is easier to manage. It comes with a built-in updater who allows one to update themes and plugins from within the admin dashboard. It will also notify you when a new version of WordPress is available.

• WordPress can handle different media types. When you use WordPress, you are not just limited to writing text. You can embed YouTube videos, Instagram pictures, tweets or any website link by simply pasting the URL in the post.

• WordPress is safe and secure. WordPress is safe and secure to run any website on it as it was developed with security in mind.

Essential WordPress Plugins

With a growing list of over 20,000 plugins, sometimes it’s a little tricky figuring out just which plugins to use! This is a quick overview of 12 essential WordPress plugins that every WordPress Blog should have. The good news is (at the time of writing this) they are all completely free. The below essential WordPress plugins relate to enhancing WordPress functionality, security, SEO and Social Marketing.

#1 – Secure-WP

Security should always be your first concern when anything is reachable publicly on the internet – that is why I rank Secure-WP as being one of the most essential WordPress plugins out there. Don’t get me wrong – WordPress does a great job natively of securing your Blog, providing that you keep the version updated.

However, Secure-WP bolsters that security further by removing oodles of information that could be used by hackers and removing some sensitive material from user accounts, while preserving this information in the administrator’s account. Good stuff!

#2 – Spam Free WordPress

Spam is a HUGE problem with WordPress blogs, which makes an anti-spam plugin one of the most essential WordPress plugins. I use Spam Free WordPress, which seems to be doing quite well. Over the course of a 6 month period, it has blocked over 8,000 spam comments, a number that seems to grow exponentially. Now imagine having to go through 40-50 spam comments per day! One of the key reasons we use plugins is to save time, and Spam Free WordPress certainly accomplishes this!

Essential WordPress Plugins #3 – W3 Total Cache

After security and spam are taken care of, site speed is the next thing that comes to mind. No-one is going to wait around for 30 seconds for your webpage to load, so site speed is critical. I’ll now mention a couple of essential WordPress plugins that help supercharge your website.

The first is W3 Total Cache. This plugin is massively popular, downloaded almost 1.2 million times! It helps speed up your site by improving server performance, caching every aspect of your website, reducing download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. In short, it makes your WordPress Blog faster!

#4 – WP Optimize

WordPress is database driven. The more efficient the database is, the quicker pages can be accessed from the database, the quicker your site loads to your visitors. However, over time, a WordPress database can become polluted with needless information (such as deleted content, spam comments, old page revisions etc). This increases the overall size of the database and increases access times to that database. The end result – your pages take longer to open.

WP Optimize cleans up your database automatically and keeps it streamlined by removing needless information on an ongoing basis.

#5 – WP Database Backup

In terms of essential WordPress plugins, backing up your data is right up there. It’s something we all leave until it’s too late, and then wish we hadn’t. WP Database Backup makes it simple to backup the core. The key thing here is that you are able to easily backup your site with WP DB – and if need be can hire a freelancer to restore your sites, I would imagine who would charge in the region of $25-50 – a lot less of a headache than rebuilding your site from scratch!WordPress tables.

The one downside to this plugin is that it’s a little tricky to restore from if something does happen to your site. There are alternative plugins out there that are a lot more user friendly, such as Backup Buddy, but this is unfortunately not a free plugin, priced at $75 for 2 WordPress sites.

#6 – Broken Link Checker

There’s nothing more frustrating than clicking on a link and getting the “page not found” error. While this is frustrating for the visitor, it also generally has the effect of pushing that visitor (and potential client) away from your website. The Broken Link Checker can monitor links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields and reports broken links to you either through your WordPress dashboard, or via email.

Essential WordPress Plugins #7 – Google XML Sitemaps

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of SEO related plugins. Only a handful of these I would consider essential WordPress plugins. The first is Google XML Sitemaps. A sitemap is basically a road map of your website, outlining all the individual pages and how they link together – their structure. Google and the other major search engines use such sitemaps to more efficiently crawl and index your site.

Google XML Sitemaps automatically creates such a sitemap and keeps it updated as you add new content. In addition, it also notifies all major search engines every time you create and post new content.

#8 – All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress blogs. It helps you to optimize pages and posts by automatically generating meta tags and helps you to optimize web page titles. The great thing about the All in One SEO Pack is that it is fully functional out of the box, requiring very limited configuration, making it great for those new to WordPress and SEO.

#9 – Ultimate Follow Me

Perhaps my “favorite” of the essential WordPress plugins listed here. Ultimate Follow Me is actually a WordPress side bar widget that links to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other Social media platforms. It now also includes Google +1, which is generally viewed as a very prominent way to increase your search engine rankings.

I have demo’d quite a few of these Social marketing plugins. While they all do pretty much the same thing, Ultimate Follow Me generally presents the social media icons a little “prettier”. There are various sizes to choose from and looks great in the sidebar – your visitors are sure not to miss them!

#10 – Shareaholic

Another of the essential WordPress plugins I can’t do without! The plugin automatically creates a gorgeous little social marketing bar at the bottom of your posts where people can like your post on Facebook, Tweet it to their Twitter account, or share on many, many social bookmarking websites.

At the time of writing this, Shareaholic supports 85 sites! It also comes in 3 flavors, classic bookmarks, sexy bookmarks and sassy bookmarks. Once you have decided which social sites to use, Shareaholic automatically posts the links to the bottom of every page or post – although you do have the option to override the plugin on a per page basis so it doesn’t show.

#11 – Google Analytics Dashboard

The Google Analytics Dashboard tracks visitors to each of your pages from within your WordPress dashboard, so no need to login to your Google Analytics account! You are also able to embed parts of the analytics directly into posts or as part of your theme. One caveat to this plugin is that it does not display the full information you will get from your Google Analytics account. It does give you the basic information you need to see who’s visiting what, which is mostly what I look for in my Analytics account anyway.

#12 – Page Links To

For me personally, this is one of the most essential WordPress plugins I use. I use it primarily in relation to the content I use on the front page. The front page descriptions of Blogs generally take the first 200 characters or so of the actual article page and display them as the advertising wordage.

The problem is, sometimes I don’t want to use the first 200 characters of my articles as the wordage that displays on my front page, relating to that article, so what do I do? I create an additional page, with the words I do want to use, and use the Page Links To plugin to redirect that page to the actual post.

Essential WordPress Plugins Summary

The general idea of plugins, is to make your job easier running a WordPress blog, but from personal experience, finding a plugin that does what you want it to do can often be frustrating task in itself!

I cannot begin to imagine how many plugins I have tested over the years. The above 12 free and essential WordPress plugins have managed to prove their worth time and time again.

As of the beginning of 2009 there were approximately 133 Million blogs online. This is a pretty large market and also the perfect playground for unscrupulous persons who live for spamming, scamming and just creating malicious programs that can seriously compromise and disable unsuspecting sites. As WordPress blog owners, we need to do everything possible to ensure that our sites are never compromised.

Here are 10 very simple steps, tools and tips to ensure that your blog can withstand malicious attacks and not be overrun with spam.

1. Use Login Lockdown Plugin

Hackers can easily crack your password and other login credentials by using Brute Force Attacks (Click here for a definition). This plugin adds an extra security feature to WordPress by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted from a given IP range.

2. Delete Unused Plugins

Always ensure to delete unused plugins as these can provide loop holes that can be easily exploited.

3. Secure the / wp-admin / directory using.htaccess

I found this one on Google's Matt Cutts' blog. Secure your / wp-admin / directory by using a.htaccess file to allow access from specific IP addresses only. Create a new.htaccess file, which you can place directly in /wp-admin/.htaccess.

This is what the.htaccess file contains:

AuthUserFile / dev / null
AuthGroupFile / dev / null
AuthName "Access Control"
AuthType Basic
order deny, allow
deny from all
# whitelist home IP address
allow from 111.111.111.111
# whitelist work IP address
allow from 111.111.111.111
allow from 111.111.111.111

Replace the 111.111.111.111 with the IPs you would like to whitelist. This file says that the IP address 111.111.111.111 (and the other IP addresses whitelisted) are allowed to access / wp-admin / but all other IP addresses are denied access. The '#' lines are just notes and can be changed to suit your need.

4. WordPress Security Scanner Plugin

Install this plugin to help detect any loop holes that may exist in your database and blog files. It provides a report on what needs to be done to prevent attacks.

5. Limited Blog Registration Access

If your blog accepts registration, ensure that a user can not immediately register and receive an administrative access. To change this, go to your Settings option in the WordPress dashboard, select General. Then change the New User Default Role to Contributor. This can easily be changed as the need arise. User privileges can also be assigned using the Role-Manager plugin.

6. Change Your Login Name

The default WordPress username is admin and hackers will always try to infiltrate using this default. So make it harder for them by changing it.

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Users and set up a new user account. Give this new user administrator role. Log out and log in again with the new user account.

Go to Users again. This time, check the box next admin and press Delete. When it requests for deletion confirmation, select the "Attribute all posts and links to:" and select your new username from the dropdown bar. This will transfer all the posts to your new user account. Press Confirm Deletion

7. Use a Very Strong Password

Ensure that you use a strong password that is difficult for others to guess. Use a combination of digits, special characters and upper / lower case letters to form your password.

8. Always Upgrade to the Latest WordPress Version

The latest version of WordPress always contains bug fixes for any security vulnerabilities, therefore it is very important to keep your blog updated at all times. The latest version at the time of this post is 2.9.2.

9. Install the Akismet Plugin

Once installed, Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and whats them being published. Spam is stored in a separate folder where you can review all that is caught. This can be downloaded from Akismet.com

10. Backup Your WordPress Database

There is a free plugin that can schedule backups of your database to reduce the risk of loss of data.

Yeah, I know its a pretty tedious To Do list list but invest the time to secure a robust WordPress blog. It will cost 100 times more to recover from a malicious attack. Think about down-time, lost revenue, loss of trust from your readers, hiring a professional to get rid of malicious code, loss of information, loss of integrity and the list goes on forever.

Are you doing what it takes to secure and protect your presence online? If not, now is the time to do so. If you have any additional ideas on how to protect a WordPress blog please leave a comment to let us know.