Tag Archives: VaultPress

Essential WordPress Plug-ins

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If you have a WordPress site or are planning a WordPress site, there are some plug-ins that are just flat-out essential. That said, plug-ins are a mixed blessing. Plug-ins are susceptible to security flaws and are not always maintained properly. It’s especially frustrating to face an upgrade in WordPress with several plug-ins that have not been updated for the latest version of WordPress. For this reason, we rely on the absolute minimum number of plug-ins possible and select our plug-ins from reputable vendors.

Here is the list of our recommended plug-ins:

  • Ultimate Blog Security

    Secure your blog effectively. You can visit their website at Ultimate Blog Security.

  • Gravity Forms

    Not free, but very powerful. Certainly not always necessary. If you need only a simple contact form, use Contact Form 7 instead. But for long and/or complicated forms, you won’t find a better solution than Gravity Forms.

  • Sociable

    Social media sites play a key role in promoting your presence on the web. This plug-in places links to your preferred social media sites so people can share your content on those sites.

  • VaultPress

    Backups are essential and VaultPress provides the best backup for WordPress. Period.

  • WordPress SEO by Yoast

    SEO (Search Engine Optimization) determines how easily people can find you on the internet. This plug-in stands at the top of the heap of SEO plug-ins. Yoast offers top-quality resources and advice on all things WordPress.

  • W3 Total Cache

    WordPress generates html from a mixture of php code and its database. This takes time so your site will load somewhat slowly. Cache plug-ins resolve this in various ways, but W3 Total Cache claims our favorite spot. It builds the pages in advance, so the user just loads a simple quickly loaded html page.

Feel free to contact us about using these plug-ins on your site!

Backups

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Sooner or later in the life of every site comes disaster. It’s not a matter of ‘if’ – it’s a matter of when.

A full and complete backup provides the only protection against these disasters. The details of the backup depend on the platform on which the site is built.

Simple HTML or PHP sites are the easiest to backup. Your webhost provider will offer backups – which you should use! – but you should also backup your entire site to your own local computer. Compress the entire site to one or more archives, depending on the size of your site, and download it to your PC. Then backup your PC, keeping a copy of the backup offsite. I use one of the many online services for this purpose – it happens automatically and the backup is available anywhere the internet is available. You may choose some other mechanism, but you are not properly protected until you have a verified backup stored away from your home or office.

If you are using WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or some other CMS (Content Management System), the backup will be much more complicated because you have to backup the CMS itself and the plug-ins (including the settings for the plug-ins) in addition to the content of your site. For WordPress, we recommend VaultPress. If you are using Joomla, Drupal or some other CMS, contact us for backup solution suggestions.