If you have ever looked at the Add Plugins menu within your WordPress admin panel, you might be caught off guard by the sheer number available. In this post, I will cover my five personal favorite plugins that Webolutions uses for nearly every client site.

1. Yoast SEO

I’ll start off by saying that “I know — this plugin is on everybody’s list.”  The short answer is “Yes — because it is awesome.” Yoast has been around for years and provides top-shelf SEO enhancements including: automatic XML sitemap creation, easy title, meta description changes and content analysis.

2. Imagify Image Optimizer

Not all of us can be photography nerds and wrap our minds around the crazy world of dimensions, file size and image compression. Luckily, there are a number of WordPress plugins that allow users to upload images to their site that won’t take minutes to load.

Imagify does this by intercepting images that are uploaded to your media gallery and resizes and compresses them automagically. For example, I could upload a 9MB JPG image that is 5616px by 5616px, and Imagify compresses the image to 600KB with dimensions of 2048px by 2048px. Results may vary, but overall image compression can benefit for your site-load speed, thus making users and search engines happy. Imagify is free for 25MB (about 250 images) of uploads per month, as of this writing.

3. Redirection

Redirection is a simple plugin, but it’s super handy. It allows you to create search-engine friendly redirections for users and bots that visit your site. For example, if you build a new site and your URL structure changes, you will want to set up redirections for every page that changes. By doing this, users navigate to the correct page — not a 404).  Speaking of 404s and broken links: Redirection includes a log of 404 pages that you can review and redirect.

4. WP Security Audit Log

This plugin lists a multitude of activity — from user logins to 404s, password changes, database updates, page creation, plugin updates, theme changes and more. (Seriously it’s a lot of stuff!)

Personally, I use it mostly to see what changes are happening to the database when something is updated — but I’m weird like that.

5. UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin

UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin is ideal for our clients who use professional WordPress hosting solution that includes daily and on-demand backups. With that being said, this plugin rocks!

There are many services available for storing your backups (Amazon S3 is my go-to). With this plugin, you can create re-occurring backup jobs, keep fantastic logs and — my personal favorite — execute smart backup prompts. For example, before updating a WordPress plugin, there is an option to create a backup of the database and plugins folder prior to the update. That way if something goes awry, you can easily roll your site to the previous update to before the plugin files and database were changed.

Summary

That’s my short list. There are tons of other great plugins out there for almost every need.  When it comes to finding a quality plugin, read the reviews and check how often they update their code.  Regardless of which plugin you use, always back up your site files and database before adding a plugin.

Cover Photo: Flickr User Adriano Gasparri

The post 5 of the Coolest WordPress Plugins appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.

CMS and Plugin Updates:

Most websites today are built using a Content Management System (CMS).  WordPress is easily the most common (powering at least 25% of all websites) but you may have also heard of Joomla, Drupal, and Magento.  Regardless of the CMS that you use, the group that created it are constantly improving it through new features, bug fixes, and most importantly, security patches.  It is of vital importance that if you are managing the security for your website that you login and perform the suggested updates at least monthly (ideally weekly).  When a new exploit is detected, teams work fast to implement a fix but until you update your site, you will be vulnerable.

This same principle applies to 3rd party plugins that many CMS’ use.  These add-ons can enhance a site but you must be careful to choose plugins from authors who are in it for the long haul.  A recent example of this in the WordPress world is a plugin known as Post SMTP.  This plugin allowed administrators to configure what email server a WordPress site would use when sending a message through the site.  This is a super helpful plugin that a lot of admins use (myself included) but the original author stopped updating it a few years ago.  It continued to work correctly, however, a recent security hole was found that was too major to ignore.  Luckily, a developer in the community took it upon themselves to update and maintain the plugin.

The short answer here is:  Keep your site up to date. If you are a Webolutions client, we perform these updates for you automatically and critical updates are pushed out within a few days of being reported.

Daily and On-Demand Backups:

Going hand in hand with keeping your site up to date is having a process in place for disaster recovery.  If the worst should happen, your provider should be making a daily backup of your entire site (files and database) and storing that off-site, preferably in a redundant cloud solution such as Amazon S3).  This system should also allow you to make on-demand backups.  The purpose of this is for when you update your CMS and plugins, if something breaks, you can easily roll it back to when everything was functioning correctly.  This gives you time to identify the issue with that particular update instead of scrambling to figure out how to get your site back up.

At Webolutions, our sites are automatically backed up daily and before any CMS/plugin updates are performed, an on-demand backup is taken.  In general, we try to process updates during off-peak hours.  That way, in the event there is a glitch, we can restore from the backup quickly and with as little impact as possible.

More Tips Next Month:

I’ll be back next month with more tips on how to keep your site running smoothly and securely.  In the meantime, if you are looking for help in maintaining the security of your site, please reach out to us at 303-300-2640 or use the contact form on our site.

The post Don’t Go Breaking Your Site: Security Tips to Avoid Down Time appeared first on Webolutions Digital Marketing Agency.