10 Essential WordPress Plugins

For those of you who might be interested, these are all the WordPress plugins I find useful in addition to this one that stops automated bots from attacking your site.

Some of them are old and outdated but still work on my current WordPress install.

• Growmap Anti-Spambot Plugin: Gives you a box to verify if the comment being left is spam or not by asking if you’re human
• Ajax Edit Comments: Lets commenters edit their comments for a specific period of time; v. useful if you want to say more
• Contact Form 7: Instead of putting an email address on there for spambots to crawl, it’s a form to submit a message
• If you use Contact Form 7 above, you’ll want this Really Simply Captcha to keep spambots away and Honeypot to make sure they REALLY stay away
• Display Widgets: Sometimes you want to show certain widgets on the main page and others on posts (e.g. my blogroll)
• Future Calendar: If you’re rambly like me, you have posts scheduled until Dec 2016 and need to manage them all

This is what it looks like (it scrolls all the way down on the post page until the very last scheduled post date)

• Revision Control: It saves space if you set it to 2 revisions rather than keeping 5 or more
• WP Database Manager: This is how I keep my databases backed up and current before I update plugins or the site
• WP Touch: This is to create a mobile version of your site
• Google XML Sitemaps: This generates a sitemap for your blog so search engines can crawl & index it