The one WordPress plugin I don’t mind spending money on every month

One of the things I’ve always really appreciated about WordPress is the incredibly rich plugin ecosystem. You’ve heard the phrase, “there’s an app for that” well in the world of WordPress it’s pretty safe to say that for just about anything you’d want to do, “there’s a plugin for that.” From SEO to managing blog ads, security to customization, plugins make it possible to do so much without writing a line of code.

Oh and one of the best things about WordPress plugins is that the vast majority of them are free. I’m approaching the ten year anniversary of running my blog so I’ve had a lot of time to try different plugins. While there are some more premium plugins that do cost money I’ve mostly stuck to the free ones since they get the job done.

At the same time, there is one plugin that I actually pay $29.99/month for and it’s worth every penny. If there’s one plugin that you do spend money on as a blogger, this is the one that I do think is absolutely worth it. The plugin I’m talking about is VaultPress.

vaultpress

VaultPress is made by Automattic which is the company that makes WordPress and is the best plugin out there for backups and security. Along with doing comprehensive backups of your site (in realtime if you pay the $29.99/month which is pretty badass) they also have a really cool security feature. If your site gets hacked, or infected with a virus or malware, Vaultpress can actually automatically fix these issues.

This feature alone makes it worth it. A few years ago someone hacked my WordPress install and put malware on my blog. I hired a WordPress pro to come in and fix everything which cost me around $1,500. With Vaultpress, this could be fixed instantly and in many cases it would never happen because Vaultpress would detect a security hole before a hacker can exploit it.

security@2x

Vaultpress organizes everything into a handy dashboard so you can keep track of backups, security scans, traffic stats, etc. all from one place. I usually end up checking my Vaultpress Dashboard daily just to make sure everything is in good shape. Here’s what my home screen usually looks like (as long as everything is a-okay):

Okay, so with my glowing review here you might think that VaultPress is a sponsor or I’ve loaded a bunch of affiliate links into this post…but that’s not the case. I’m just a big fan of this plugin and like I said, it’s the only plugin I’ve found that I think is worth around $30/month because it buys peace of mind and that’s worth a whole lot more than that to me.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton