Posts Tagged ‘Plugins’

Most experienced WordPress users could spend hours discussing their favorite—and least favorite—WordPress plugins. If you’re still fairly new to WordPress, though, you might be wondering which plugins you really need.

Below is a breakdown of four WordPress plugins that all new users should consider installing. There are a lot more great plugins than the ones listed below, but the following list represents the core group of plugins I find essential to maintaining the optimal health and functionality of a WordPress blog.

BackUpWordPress

With traditional, static web sites, it’s easy to keep backups of all your files right on your own computer. With interactive, database-driven sites, however, the content is always changing, so you consistently need to create new backup files. For instance, if you have a WordPress blog, all of the site’s posts, pages, comments, and registered users are stored in a database on your hosting provider’s server. Because of this, it’s important to make regular backups of everything stored in the site’s database. That way, if anything goes wrong—if someone hacks into your site or your hosting provider accidentally wipes out all your files—you’ll be able to restore your web site with relative ease.

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If you have a WordPress blog on your own web site (not through WordPress.com) you should configure both a robots.txt file and an XML sitemap in order to provide indexing information to search robots.

If you don’t know anything about configuring robots.txt files, I encourage you to learn more about them by visiting http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html. If you don’t know anything about configuring XML sitemaps, I encourage you to learn more about them by visiting http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php.

Below is an outline of special considerations that WordPress users need to be aware of when setting up these files for their blogs.

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