I am sure you are going to find many articles online that highlight the importance of having certain types of plugins on your website. Such types of plugins would include spam filters, SEO wizards and plugins that give your website more functionality. However, more critical than these plugins are the plugins that enable your website to simply be. By this, the plugins that allow your website to stay online and keep it from crashing down – these are the plugins that really do make and break a website’s performance. This is because, at the end of the day, a website live and running is always better than on that isn’t. Here are three plugins you must install on your WordPress website to make sure this happens.
#1 Security
Security is of paramount importance for WordPress websites because WordPress does not provide any such security automatically. You are exposed to the elements and any attack that should find its way to your website.
Common attacks include:
- Brute force login – Trying infinite amounts of usernames and passwords until one is correct
- Server overload – Trying to cause a website to crash by making the server overload in requests
- Gaining data – be it through login attempts, infected files, infected php files etc.
There are many useful security plugins that will prevent these common attacks from occurring, simply by adding two factor authentication, preventing IP addresses from accessing your website and adding more stringent security in general.
#2 Backup
I cannot stress enough how important it is to make sure you back up a website. It should literally be one of the first types of plugins you purchase. Backup plugins gives you the peace of mind that if anything does go wrong with your website, you can resort your website back to a previous version when it did work.
I can speak first hands of this saving one of my websites, PoemAnalysis.com – for some reason a HTTP error of 520 started to appear for the WordPress login page, preventing myself and all the team from adding anything to the website. In the end, GoDaddy and Ezoic could not find a solution, except for reverting back to a working version. Luckily, that fixed it and the problem has not come back since – the backup saved the website.
#3 Server Analysis
As mentioned above, the amount of load that is on your hosting server is very important to keeping your website up and running. A way to monitor this is through analyzing the load on your server through a plugin.
This is particularly useful, especially since many of the hosting packages only allow a certain server load or number of visitors per month – by knowing when you are going to exceed this, you can upgrade your package before the website starts to crash for certain visitors.
