Essential WordPress plugins (part 2)

Following on from last week’s post that kicked this series off, here’s three recommended plugins for maintaining a WordPress site.

WordPress is renowned for its ease of use and its extensive features for keeping a site running smoothly. The comment moderation is first-class, the user management is a breeze, and with the help of the security plugins I recommended last week it’s simple to keep your installation safe. So what other areas of site management are there to improve?

Three areas we like to have covered, on our own sites and client sites, are backing up the data WordPress holds, a user-friendly way of managing site updates and rooting out broken links from site content. (Broken links are also a big issue in the world of SEO, but I wanted to include them this week because of their impact on user experience).

Making your site easy to maintain

WP DB Backup

It is always a good idea to back up your data. Even if you’re new to managing a Web site I’m sure you’ve felt the frustration of your computer crashing and losing hours of work because you hadn’t saved it. Magnify that a few times and add the horrors of lost revenue to it. Not the stuff pleasant Friday afternoons are made of.

If the worst happens – your site gets hacked or a server dies – it is relatively easy to reinstall WordPress and start from scratch, but what happens to all your settings and content? This plugin offers quick and simple ways to back up your database with peace-of-mind as a welcome side-effect. It includes options for scheduling regular backups and manual ‘backup and download’ features.

WP DB Backup also has a ‘backup and email’ feature to send the archive file to any address you specify. We currently advise setting up a dedicated email box and sending daily backups there. Simple, free and effective off-site backups. Very handy.

Maintenance Mode

From time to time you’ll need to update your theme or edit some templates. For scheduled maintenance and technical updates it’s useful to put a very clear and prominent message out for users so they understand why the site is down or not performing as it usually does. This plugin makes that very easy to do so from right inside the WordPress admin/authoring area.

When activated (with a simple on/off switch), it puts up a temporary splash page in place of your site, notifying visitors of ongoing maintenance and when to expect the site to return. You can edit the default holding page however you like to customise it for your site. This process is so much easier than uploading a temporary page via FTP each time to do the same job.

Maintenance Mode has the added benefit of only redirecting to the splash page users who are not currently logged in to the system. Those who have admin accounts, and are logged in, will see the site as normal. This is fantastically useful if you are discussing changes with colleagues or clients, for example.

Broken Link Checker

If you’ve been blogging for a while it’s easy to clock up dozens of outbound links. The speed at which things move on the Web makes it inevitable pages or even sites you link to will be moved, renamed or even disappear completely – leaving a less than perfect experience for your readers.

This plugin helps you keep track of those and offers a handy interface to update or remove broken links from your content (recommended to run it every couple of months). It checks through your posts, pages and blogroll for problem links and gives you a work queue to fix them.

There are many link checker tools out there offering the same features, but being able to do it all from inside WordPress is a big win.

So that’s it for this installment. Hopefully these will make your life easier when it comes to WordPress. If you have a recommendation I might have missed please leave a comment to let me know. Also check back next week for three more essential plugins – all focussed on making your site search engine friendly.

Tags: Plugins, site management, Wordpress

This entry was posted by Posted by Doug on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 5:30 pm, and is filed under Blogging, Web tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.