5 GREAT WordPress PLUGINS

The world of WP offers an immense diversity of Great WordPress plugins to install, and tough many of them are not as functional as the description states, some are quite useful. This week we decided to give you a brief overview of 5 of the must-haves you can use to improve your blog.

Starting first with the security related:

1. Limit Login Attempts

Thousands of WP sites get hacked daily, and passwords are relatively easy cracked through brute-force attacks, due to WordPress allowing unlimited number of login attempts. “Limit Login Attempts” changes that through a fully customizable login restrictions, making the attacks difficult to succeed.

Some of the features include:

– Limits the login attempts for each IP, and informs user of the remaining retries.
– Limits the number of login attempts using auth cookies
– Optional email notification

If you value your work, and blog reputation I strongly advise you to spare a minute and  install this plugin.

2. Better WP security Plugin

Another great WordPress plugin.This one is considered the number one plugin for WordPress security protection. The plugin is complex, customizable, and offers a comprehensive protection for your blog.

Some of the more important features are:

– Detection of unauthorized filesystem changes, bots, and other vulnerabilities.
– Scan of the website, and detects important security holes.
– Ban bots, and suspicious user agents.
– Turns off file editing from within the WordPress admin area
– Creates emails database with backups.

3. Google XML Sitemaps (SEO)

The XML sitemaps help search engines discover pages that many times will remain “unnoticed” by the SE. Used by all major search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, and ASK.com building a sitemap is the first step you need to take when optimizing your website for better search engines positioning (SEO).

Google XML Sitemaps plugin generates the XML sitemap for you, while giving you the ability to choose which pages, and posts to get indexed and which not. This plugin will help your page rank higher in the search engines’ organic results, and thus – bring you more relevant traffic.

4. Akismet

If you ever had a WordPress blog you will know the incredible amounts of comment spam coming in daily. This is a major problem, and the captcha does not seem to do a good job protecting your comment section. Askimet is by far the best anti-spam solution out there, saving you time by cleaning the unwanted guests by itself.

The plugin checks the comments and if they “look” like spam it sends them directly in the spam folder. You can later review the messages yourself and see what a good job Akismet does.

The use the plugin however you will need an Akismet API, which is free for personal blogs, but requires the purchase of a license for commercial ones.

5. Google Analytics for WordPress

Very much self-explanatory, this plugin allows you to track your blog through metadata generated by Google Analytics. The plugin lets you see the number of views for each article, author, and other useful stats.

We hope you find the information useful. Let us know if you know other great WordPress plugins that are worth mentioning.

Alek Chase,

The MochaHost Team