WordPress plugins to protect your blog

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 6:40 am

Plugins really enhance what your WordPress blog can do so I will be doing a series of posts on plugins I like and use regularly. It will cover three main topics.

Protection
SEO
Integration

Today we will start with protecting your blog.

The nice part of WordPress is the power of open source but unfortunately that comes with a downside – the scum that like to go mess up things just because they can. Because the source code is readily available these curmudgeons will work quite hard to find any hole that they can to hurt your efforts.

Sometimes it is done to take advantage of you for their benefit and other times it is just because they can. The former I can at least understand the why but the latter befuddle me.

The first thing to protect against is the spam comments. This is especially true if you work hard to get comments and give people a reward for adding to your content with quality comments by using do follow and plugins like Comment Luv.

Plugins alone won’t take care of all of these only moderation is 100% but these two plugins will eliminate all of the automated comments and save you moderation time.

Askimet – This comes as part of the package when you install WordPress and you only need to sign up at WordPress.com for a key to make it work.

WP-Spam Free – This works well and eliminates the vast majority of spam without making it hard for people to comment on your blog.

There are other things to protect yourself again too so lets look at what I use for those things.

Antivirus – This plugin checks for malicious injections and lets you know about them right away. Finding these right away makes it much easier to fix them so I really like this plugin.

WP-Security Scan – This plugin will check your installation and show you any vulnerabilities and continue to scan daily and let you know if anything has changed.

Finally when all else has failed having a good data base backup is a God send. Add in this plugin and use it to regularly download your data base so you always have a current backup.

WordPress Data Base Backup – This will allow you to download your data base easily.

This saves you having to go into your Cpanel and using phpMyAdmin to create data base backups and can be automated to email you the data base. I use a special email account for these but you do need to check the email to make sure that it is actually working.

These plugins will help to protect your blog. Next time I will talk about the plugins to maximize your SEO efforts. Your questions are always welcomed just leave it in the comments below.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.

After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.

If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.