WordPress Wednesday – Three WordPress Plugins I Couldn’t Live Without

The thing with WordPress plugins is there are a million of them out there and there are also a million articles recommending a huge list of plugins. Forget top ten, there are some top fifty and top one hundred WordPress plugin articles that will make your head spin. I think WordPress plugins can be a bit like apps for your phone, you may end-up with many more than you actually need or use.

With your phone, unused apps won’t necessarily do harm, with WordPress all it takes is one insecure plugin and your site could be compromised. My three favorite plugins changes every few months as I go through all the plugins I’m using and trim down to what I really need. I’m also constantly reading plugin reviews, because I guess I’m just a huge geek!

So I thought for WordPress Wednesday today I would share three plugins that keep making the cut and that I really couldn’t live without.

  1. Akismet – without this plugin my blog would be a spam kingdom. I’m always amazed at how good Akismet really is at what they do. Turning it off for a day will show you just how many spammers are trying to comment on your blog, and trust me, it’s a lot!
  2. Sucuri – this is a relatively new favorite of mine but now I don’t know how I lived so long without it. Sucuri really is the best security plugin for WordPress. They not only monitor your blog site for malware, they also clean it up for you should someone break-into your site and screw things up.
  3. JetPack – last but certainly not least is Jetpack which is made by the people who make WordPress and really is a swiss army knife of a plugin. It does many different things but my favorite is the built-in stats functionality that makes it easy to quickly view your analytics data without leaving the dashboard. Even though I still track my traffic with Google Analytics, I find that just having JetPack stats enabled causes me to pay more attention to where my traffic is coming from and which pages/posts are the most popular.

Those are my three, now it’s time to share yours. What are the three WordPress plugins that you couldn’t live without?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton