WordPress Plugins Secure Fast and Indexed

There are a number of things that should be considered when making public any website, including WordPress. Security, although not a favorite issue, is the most important. Also important is the general layout and graphics of the site, the site user friendliness, its speed loading and of course the content (which is a topic unto itself).  A final crucial component, which most of use don’t really fully understand, is search engine optimization (SEO) and tracking traffic data.

This post I am going to share which plugins are best to install for a Secure, custom, fast and indexed WordPress website.

WordPress is a free self hosted blogging platform, which can be used for various types of websites. WordPress is my favorite, and is the favorite of many other website owners as a platform for a self managed website. It has evolved into a complex (if you want it to be) content management system. Yet it maintains a level of simplicity that empowers ‘non-techies’ to have and manage a nice looking blog or website. A typical website would involve a huge amount of specific programming to ensure each of these bases discussed in this post are covered. With WordPress, you can do a lot without needing to know how to program these sorts of things. To achieve each of these  steps with establishing a WordPress website you simply need to install the right plugins, which is pretty simple.

Once your WordPress site is installed on your domain/hosting account, you simply loggin and go to ‘Plugins’>’add new’>’upload’. Select the zip file you download from the WordPress directory (or other source) and click install. Some plugins have settings that need to be customized once the plugin is activated and others only need to be activated, each plugin should contain a readme txt file that will explain how to properly use it.

Now to get into the plugins….

WordPress Security Plugins

There are many different types of attacks on websites, including WordPress. Most involve hijacking your wordpress site and publishing a bunch of spam posts/comments. Others suck up your bandwidth overloading or slowing down your server. Prevention is the key here, as once a site is compromised it becomes technical and difficult to get rid of without removing and reinstalling WordPress. If you have been hacked already, there are instructions on what to do within WordPress support, ‘FAQ My site was hacked’. Often you can still save your content, posts, pages, users, etc, by doing a backup of your database (Plugin listed below for this) so that your new install can be easily repopulated. None the less, it’s still a pain in the #$@ to have to wipe everything out and set everything up again. So, I will say again, prevention is the key.

I use these plugins to lock er’ down and keep a watch on the backend to ensure nothing fishy is going on.

WP Security Scan This Plugin is run manually from your WordPress control panel. It scans your site for vulnerabilities and gives options to increase security, such as changing the WP_ prefix. By default, the loggin page (and many other files) begin with the prefix WP_. Hackers knowing this can try to ‘break’ into your site using this prefix.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade A big factor in keeping your site secure is to keep it up to date. WordPress is ever evolving and updating. As ‘holes’ are found (and features added) upgrades become available. This plugin makes the whole process simple, just click and follow the instructions. This is still a good tool to have even though WordPress has an auto upgrade feature built in because it can be used to keep your plugins up to date as well. This tool also helps you to easily backup your website and database as it performs the upgrade.

WordPress Backup This plugin makes a backup of your themes and plugins and site settings not saved in your database, so that you can easily restore your site to a previous date. It is best to have a backup before you are attacked, to ensure your hackers ‘door’ is shut.

WordPress Database backup This plugin simplifies the process of backing up your database. The more content your site has (and comments) the more important this becomes. All of your WordPress content is saved in the database. Again, it is best to have a back up before the attack, but if that is not possible, once you import the backed up database, check the users and delete all that you don’t recognize or need.

WP antivirus This is a cool little plugin that runs in the background. If it ‘sees’ anything ‘fishy’, it sends you an email. Then you can loggin and see what is going on and if you need to take any actions. It also has manual scan options from the control panel.

WordPress Customized

IMHO cookie cutter sites suck! You should aim to have your site not look like every other site in your niche. It should be custom in styling, look and function and content. This is done primarily with WordPress Themes. As with plugins, there are an endless supply of free themes available online, WordPress theme directory biggest the biggest source. There are also premium themes, which often have plugin like features built in (such as SEO) as well as various layout, styling options. I have found only a handful of really good premium themes, so be sure to do a bit of research if you look to purchase a premium theme. Another option that I have been playing around with is using software to create/design your own themes (Artisteer is best for building your own theme). I am finding this to be the easiest way (besides hiring someone) to create a theme, with exactly the layout and graphics that I want. Plus if I build the theme myself, I don’t have a link(s) at the bottom going off to someone elses site, which is typical of free themes. The process of finding the right theme for you is the biggest challenge here, I think. But, there is soooo many themes out that you are sure to find something at least close to what you might be looking for if you are patient. Your WordPress site can be further customized by setting up your sidebar widgets as you like. Again, there are all kinds of things you can put in your sidebar, ads, rss feeds, popular posts, past comments, tags, a calendar, etc. Take some time to find a custom, relevant theme, customize your sidebars, etc. Alternatively, try your hand at building your own theme. These efforts will ensure your site is uniquely yours.

WordPress Speed

The speed that your website loads is a factor when google ranks your website. It is also a factor in your visitors experience and navigation. Obviously, the goal is to have your site load fast. A portion of this ‘speed’ is determined by your hosting service. Most of the bigger names, such as Hostgator, have very fast servers and have little to no negative impact on your load speed. Most of what will determine your load speed is your website and how it loads. WordPress, due to its dynamic nature, can be slow because it needs to connect and pull content from the database. The larger your database, the slower this process can be. One of the more effective ways to speed it up is to cache your posts and pages, so that your database doesn’t need to be ‘called’ each time you have a new visitor. This helps to take considerable load off of your database, which will impact load speed. There is a good article on WordPress that discusses WordPress Optimization further. Below are a couple free plugins that I use to optimize my WordPress sites.

WPOptimize This plugin helps to keep your database `clean`by removing old or repetitive data, such as post revisions. It scans your database for you and suggests what will optimize it. You simply select which recommendations you want the plugin to impliment and it goes and does it.

WP cache This plugin is very powerful. What it does is takes a ‘snap shot’ or each of your pages and posts and creates a static page for each. So when a visitor comes to your site, it will load the static page, without calling the database, which means it will load much much faster. You can set the frequency of caching your pages and posts. Be careful not to set it to update too frequently as this tool does use a lot of system resources to create the cached pages. Set properly, it will make a considerable difference in your load time.

WordPress Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Most Internet Marketers are well aware of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but few fully understand it. It is complex and ever changing. However, there are a number of factors that are consistent. Keyword in the domain, keyword in the header tag, title tag and body. Also, load time, inbound links (relevant), and a up to date page index.

All in one SEO As the name implies, this is pretty much the only tool I use to take care of my SEO. It has settings that you need to customize and it also has post/page specific customization that you can utilize, such as keywords, title, post summary (for display in search results) and more. There is a pro version of this plugin. I have only used the free version and it does a great job.

Google XML Sitemaps This  plugin creates an up to date site map of your website so that search engines, such as google, Bing, Yahoo, etc can easily index your pages and posts. The plugin will automatically create a new sitemap any time you create a new post or page and it will even notify the major search engines that your  site has update. This helps to get your content listed in the search engines quickly and effortlessly.

Before you post, you should always do some keyword research and determine what phrase, related to your post, is most highly searched. Traffic Travis is a free keyword research and SEO Software that I like to use. There is a paid version, but it seems to me that the free version gets most of the data that  I look for.

Some other Great plugins

Pretty link I love this plugin! Basically it is used to create custom ‘pretty links’, kind of like tiny URL, but from your own domain. So instead of a big ugly link, you can create a ‘Pretty Link’ such as www.yourdomain.com/link. The link above that goes to the Pretty Link free download page was created with this tool. It is useful for cloaking affiliate links, tracking links and keeping track of links. There is a premium version, but I have found the free version is working great for me.

Tweetable Twitter Plugin This plugin can be used to automatically tweet new posts, display tweets in the sidebar and add a retweet button to each of you posts.

TweetMeme is a plugin that works much like the one mentioned above. It is used by some pretty big websites. Again it adds the ability for visitors to easily retweet your posts/pages. It has quite a few settings that can be customized.

Follow me This plugin enables you to define and store the different social networks that you might be signed up with. This is then displayed, where you tell it, on your website.  A visitor can click this icon and see all your social profiles (and follow you). You can see an example of this within the sidebar of this website.

If you know of some additional plugins that should be installed on every new WordPress website, please share here.