5 basic but must have WordPress plugins

One of the most popular things about WordPress is the ability to instal plugins. There is literally a plugin for everything and usually they are pretty easy to work with! With so many out there it’s hard to know what to choose so here are some basic plugins that I think are the most necessary to have.

Akismet and FV Antispam

I talked about fighting spam with these two plugins before but I thought it was worth another mention. These two plugins work together perfectly – Akismet and FV Antispam. Akismet is the most popular spam plugin out there, but unfortunately sometimes it marks real comments as spam. FV Antispam will automatically trash spambot comments, leaving Akismet to deal with human spam. Using both means you no longer have to scroll through spam searching for genuine comments!

Comment Reply Notification

Comment Reply Notification notifies the comment author when they have received a reply from the blog author or another reader of the blog. You can choose the settings and customise the email notification they receive. This is a great alternative to “click here to receive follow up comments” because not everyone wants to receive a notification every time a comment is left, just when their comment has been replied to.

Note: As the Comment Reply Notification plugin hasn’t been updated in a very long time, I no longer recommend it.

iThemes Security

iThemes Security is probably the number one must have, giving you numerous ways to secure your site and scan for vulnerabilities. It may seem daunting but every option is explained and there’s a lot of helpful information within the plugin. I wrote about it in more detail in this post about security tips for WordPress users which I recommend reading.

Revision Control

Revision Control is a must if you work with a lot of draft posts. Every time you edit and save a post, it saves it as a copy so if you save your post 10 times before publishing it will have stored 10 copies taking up space. This plugin allows you to set a limit, choose an older version and automatically over-writes old versions when it hits the max number you’ve set.

Alternative: How to limit post revisions without a plugin

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

Backup to Dropbox allows you to choose set times to automatically backup your site. The benefit of your backup files being uploaded to Dropbox is that you can access them at anytime from anywhere. See this post for details on how to manually backup your blog.

Alternative: How to backup your website using Updraft Plus