WordPress is an excellent tool for getting your writing online, but as a web programmer I know that it lacks some important features ‘out of the box’. When I set up this site I immediately added ten free WordPress plugins to get the basic functionality all good websites need.
Here is my list of ten essential WordPress plugins for any writer’s blog, which I’ve divided into three groups; QA, Extra functionality, Security and utilities.
Feel the need for speed…with caching
Know if you have broken links
Know if your site ever goes down!
Automated checks can watch your site 24/7 while you’re busy doing other stuff.
My hosting company ran a script which kept taking my site offline because a WordPress admin script ran on too long. After a couple of incidents I found the answer (increase the memory allocated to WordPress and set a global limit on script execution time). If the downtime happens again I’ll know because the uptime check visits my site every 5 minutes and emails me if it becomes unavailable, and mails again when it comes back up. I can look at the history of these checks and know if my site has gone offline, suggesting a problem with the hosting or suggesting my site may have been hacked.
Uptimerobot.com gives you 50 free checks. I have one check looking at the homepage, a second at a blog page. Searching for a specific word or phrase on the page is the most reliable method. You can login to your account directly or via a the uptime robot monitor plugin, allowing you to view the data on the WordPress admin console. Also the free checks don’t have to point at sites you own – so if the broken link checker tells you an external site down frequently, you could have uptimerobot.com check the link, and decide if you want to remove your link.
Professionally I have also used Pingdom.com and found the UI and support to be very good, but they don’t seem to be offering any free options currently.
Add nice share buttons
Control your site’s look on social media
Use a contact form rather than an email address
Move your wp-admin page
Build a wall or put up a fence
All websites need basic security which WordPress by default lacks. A security plugin will run a firewall, protect against DDOS attacks (high volumes of requests intended to overload your site) and check your site against the official source code to detect any alterations made by hackers. I went with WordFence as it’s highly rated. There’s also safety in numbers, as WordFence is installed on a large numbers of sites, which should lead to a faster identification of any threats and security updates for users than a less widely used plugin.
Hook up some visitor stats
Schedule regular backups
If the worst does happen it’s easier to restore your site from a backup than rebuild a new instance. I keep ten days worth of backups in case I realise I’ve made a serious configuration error and don’t have the original version to return to. For small non commercial sites a free Dropbox or Google Drive account gives the backup plugin somewhere to deposit the backup files, which is better than having to log in and do it manually. It’s reassuring logging into Dropbox and seeing a folder with full backups of the site content and configuration. Updraft plus has good ratings and has been my backup plugin of choice.
If you’re not updating your site often and have a local copy of all your content safe from hackers, I would consider having only a weekly backup. If you do think you’ve been hacked get some advice from forums before restoring from backup, as the code that compromised your site may have been resting there for some time.
I hope you’ll find these recommendations useful. Most of us spend hours rewriting our posts, or tinkering with layouts to get our content and appearance of our sites exactly the way we would like. These plugins are generally quick to install and work without much additional configuration, so it’s worth reserving some time to give your writer’s blog some the features that turn it into a fully fledged website.