In the last post I talked about exactly what WordPress is – a tool that makes updating your website a lot easier. This time around, I wanted to talk about the basic essentials you should use on top of WordPress to make life easier.
If you think of WordPress as a car you’re rolling off the lot, what we’re looking at here are the optional extras. But this isn’t an optional extra list intended to put the dealer’s kids through college. These are the optional extras that let you focus on doing exactly what you should be doing: flying down the highway, reminding people that you are in fact bad to the bone. To break the metaphor for a moment and leave Mr George Thorogood behind, the only thing you’ll be spending to put these in place is time, but the whole idea is to give you the bare essentials to save you time.
Before we start looking at your optional extras though, we should talk about plugins.
Plugins?
Yes, plugins.
Plugins are bits of software that do a specific job, that are added to WordPress. When WordPress goes to do some standard job, like showing a page on your website, or allowing a user to comment on a post, they alter how WordPress does that job slightly. Or sometimes plugins will provide entirely new features to WordPress. Most plugins are developed by people other than the people who make WordPress, but are listed in a catalog on WordPress’ website
When you’re managing your own WordPress website, it keeps a list of the plugins that are installed, and you can disable or reenable them at any time if they start causing grief for you.
So, here are the must-haves:
WordPress Backup & WordPress Database Backup
Sometimes, bad things happen to good websites. The server hosting your site can lose files, or the contents of those files can become unusable. Even though you might have all of the great content you’ve written scrawled on A5 notepads somewhere, you might lose months of great conversation with your readers in the comments they’ve made. And that’s the kind of thing that could have you reaching for your Smiths CDs in a fit of depression.
These two plugins represent the auto insurance for your beloved vehicle, making sure that when things go wrong, you’ve got a recent copy of your information. There are two parts to backing up a WordPress site. First of all there’s the files that come from the installation of WordPress itself, that don’t change frequently, but still need to be protected.
And then there’s the information that represents your important content – the pages and posts you create, which are actually stored in a database that WordPress uses. The database is like a highly organised spreadsheet that stores information with a lot of references between different cells in order to make sure the right information comes out at the right time.
Between WordPress Backup and WordPress Database Backup, you’ve got both sides covered. WordPress Backup lets you perform regular backups of the files on your site, creating a zip file that can be emailed to an address you configure.
WordPress Database Backup will regularly back up your database, which is the most frequently changing part of the site.
WordPress automatic upgrade
Like all software, WordPress is updated regularly. Being on the latest version isn’t just a status thing – being able to impress people at cocktail parties with big numbers – it’s often important for keeping your site safe. Upgrades can close up holes that other people have found in the software, sometimes with less than noble intentions.
Keeping up with information on the latest changes is time-consuming enough, but upgrading can be a nerve-wracking experience, even for technical users. What if you break something? How do you go back? (I get nervous every time. No matter how much stuff you’ve done with computers and how impressive it is, in my experience you still get that voice in your head)
Automatic Upgrade trakes care of all of this for you. it keeps your installation at the latest version of WordPress, automatically installing upgrades, and (here’s the serious injection of awesome) also backing up your current site before the upgrade.
Akismet
Just like the email you get, the most frequent comments that will be posted on a WordPress blog are spam – posted by programs that roam the internet looking for blogs to post ads on. The great news is that it’s really easy to deal with this. There’s a plugin that’s installed with WordPress called Akismet which does one job very well – looking at comments that are posted on your blog and deciding whether they’re genuine or useless spam.
Akismet isn’t enabled by default – you need to go and grab a personal key from WordPress’ site in order to enable it. In the next few posts, I’ll be putting together some demonstrations on how to configure some of these features manually, and I’ll be starting with Akismet.
So these are the must-haves that I’d recommend. With these plugins, your WordPress installation will be guaranteed to be up to date, regularly backed up, and won’t bug you with constant spam.
Thanks for taking the time to read! Next up, I’ll drill into some brass tacks on how to configure Akismet.