However hackers have found there way through the WordPress CMS and have reduced efforts of many WordPress users, The security concerns have always revolved around the WordPress, and loyalists of other open source technologies have often reprimanded the use of WordPress CMS because of the same reason. Though WordPress offers an in-built security system against the spams (Akismet), the WordPress users may have to work a little extra hard and bit more cleverly to maintain the security of their WordPress powered websites.

The write up further comprises of detailed description of various tips which users can practice in order to keep their website safe against the hackers. It will also help in opposing the harm caused by other non human entities like PC’s or robots. Furthermore, the article also elaborates upon using a few WordPress generated Plug-ins in order to keep the WordPress website and blog safe and secure.

Update your website on a regular basis.

The WordPress community is maintained by fervent WordPress developers across the globe, and time to time they come up with the latest updates for your WordPress powered website or blog. It is mandatory for you to keep your website updated with all the latest features. WordPress developers work hard to maintain the security of your website, and by constantly updating it, you move a step closer towards the security of your website. Updating has added advantages as well. When you update your website, it facilitates your website to run better and make a lot many more plug-ins compatible with your website or blog thus adding to the scope and functionality of your website. Besides, updating your WordPress website is not at all a tedious process. It is very convenient and your entire data will be saved before updating the website, and it only takes a few seconds to perform the entire task. There are two options available to update your website. You may do it either from your dashboard or in case you wish to do it manually, use no site other than WordPress.org.

Select a strong Password.

Password is the key to your entire hard work in the virtual world. Anyone who has been around the Internet scenario for sometime now knows this as a basic rule to choose a unique and unpredictable password for the website or the blog. It should be a complete “NO” to select date of births, name of children, spouse, parents, best friends etc as password. While selecting a password include both small and capital case alphabets, a number and etc to make it impossible for people to guess your password.

Carefully check the entire file permission

One of the intelligent steps which you can take to secure your WordPress website is keep a constant check on the file permissions. The file permissions can be established with the FTP clients and FileZilla is another functional option to carry out the same.

Use .htaccess

The .htaccess file is available by default in your hosting folder. It stands for Hypertext Access and is used to get an easy access to directory level configuration files and be able to manage the web server configurations at a decentralized level. You can use .htaccess to block various IP adresses. Various other SEO and security advantages of .htaccess are offered in through the following tricks: Canonical robots.txt, Canonical Favicons, Canonical Sitemaps, Canonical Category, Tag & Search URLs, Canonical Feeds and Simpler Login URL. Canonicalization means being able to keep the useful and functional bots on tracks, chck any sort of illegitimate behavior and offer a user friendly experience to every user.

Use SSL Encryption

The SSL Encryption in general is a paid service that you receive in order to safeguard the data that your blog exhibits. An encrypted data means that no other person who is using your router will be able to intercept the data which belongs to you. The advantage with WordPress is that SSL encryption is for free here and you can avail the benefits of the same just by adding “define (‘FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true)” into your wp-config.php. SSL Encryption makes it really difficult for others to both intercept and decrypt your data.

Never expose the wp-config.php file:

Your WordPress powered website will not have a more important file than wp-config,php and hence you must safeguard it against all odds. Keep it out of reach from and you can easily do the same by inserting doing a little coding in the htaccess file,
<Files wp-config.php>
order allow, deny
deny from all
</Files>
it increases the security of your blog or website by hiding it away from the reach of hackers or such illegal entities who mean harm.

Remember “admin” shouldn’t be the “login”

Be a little creative while deciding a login name. Mostly people put the “admin” as the login name while creating the default WordPress profile. It is perhaps one of the bad practices people do and has the potential to get your website being noticed by spammers and other non human entities like robots etc.

Use an SFTP

Instead of uploading files through FTP, try using a secured version of FTP, SFTP which automatically encrypts whatever files that you send.

Back-up on a regular basis

We live in a very uncertain world where anything may turn around, any problem can creep up any moment and such stuff may happen which we could never imagine. So the most wise thing to do, would be to maintain a regular back up of your website. There is WordPress available plug-in called the Backup Buddy which easily creates a back up for your website if you don’t wish to do it manually.

There are plug-ins also which are being provided to the users, to easily safeguard their WordPress web application. Some of these plug-ins are discussed below in the write-up,

Plug-ins for securing WordPress based websites

Use only those plug-ins which belongs to the original WordPress Directory:
Before getting started with the use of Plug-ins, always opt for only those Plug-ins which have been listed in the WordPress directory. Though we do not intent to run down the customized plug-in installation, the fundamental reason behind using WordPress Plug-ins only is the fact that they are completely safe, doesn’t contain any viruses or bugs and will do no harm to your website. If you are not much of a technical person and do not understand PHP, it will be a good idea to stick to WordPress generated Plug-ins.

Login Lockdown

This plug-in takes it upon itself to lock the number of login attempts a user can make. More often than not, a hacker may try several various options while guessing the password. If you have enabled Login Lockdown, you will be able to check that out. Login Lockdown takes into consideration every failed login attempt and IP address from where the request was made. Also it disables the ability to login from different IP if the failed login attempts increased beyond the number stipulated by you. However the admin panel allows you to remove the IP address

if required, from the admin panel. The only requirement before using Login Lockdown, is the simple fact that you would have to remember your own password, else even you will be locked down.

WP-DB-Backup

This plug-in solve all of your back up related problems. It is very essential to maintain a back up of all of the data base for the website and this plug-in provides efficient back up of the data base, either on your e-mail account or on the web server. You have the liberty to adjust how often you wish the plug-in to generate the back up of your data base.

WP Security Scan

WP Security Scan helps you keeping your website protected against the hackers and other attackers, simply removing the version of WordPress from the top of each page. It is other wise very difficult to remove the version number from header section of the PHP, but WP Security Scan does it seamlessly. It is important for you to remove the version number because once the hackers know the version of your WordPress website, they would know what all security issues you have with your website and they will manipulate the same for their own advantage.

WordPress, though is a widely used and preferred customized content management system for a website, but since the very beginning the security concerns have haunted it. Because of the amazing functionalities that WordPress offer, it is an undeniable option to create a website, but waking up one day and finding out that the web application has been hacked and all the useful information is lost, is definitely not a pretty sight. As they say better safe than worried, thus employ all the above mentioned tips and make sure that your WordPress website is safe and protected.

Optimizing your site is the most important thing you need to do. Doing so will assure the well-arranged and approachable content of your blog. Plugins are among the most preferred applications used for the purpose of SEO optimization. There are many plugins and they cover the wide range of tasks required for successful SEO campaign. Here are listed the top 15 that will help you achieve that. 

All in one SEO Pack

Many website owners refer to this plugin as one of the most helpful. All in one SEO Pack is easy to use plugin that will add meta tags, optimize your post titles and as overall help your blog to avoid duplicate content. Also important is that you can manually adjust the meta data such as keywords, titles and descriptions for every page and post on your site.

HeadSpace2

This plugin is also a good helper for the site owners. You can handle the meta data and many other various SEO tasks. Tagging your posts, writing descriptions and creating SEO friendly titles – all this results improved ranking of the page and increased relevance on search engines. There are many other features that allow you wide customization of the pages. The multiple languages make this plugin widely used.

Easy WP SEO

It is a SEO plugin which is very effective and keyword related, helping for the On-Page optimization. The main tasks are related to managing of the keywords as follow: calculating the density of the keywords, analyzing the tags, making SEO friendly keywords. You can see the score of your pages and posts – a task that would usually take you a lot of time. The plugin makes suggestions for changes that have to be made thus improving the performance of your website and making it more visible for the search engines.

SEO Friendly Images

The proper ALT and TITLE tags on pictures are crucial for the better acceptance of the search engines. This plugin will help you to optimize all your images and to make them friendlier in the perspective of SEO. This plugin will not only help your pages to rank better, but you can rank with your pictures in places such as Google Images.

Platinum SEO plugin

It is a good SEO plugin offering a lot of features that can be helpful in the improvement process of your website. The features start from optimizing the posts and pages, auto generating meta tags, adding automatic 301 redirects for changed permalinks and many more.

Pingback Optimizer

Backlinks are important part of your website optimization. Many blogs pingbacks and trackbacks, these types of notifications are when another site linked to yours. Usually they remain unnoticed by the search engines but if you treat them properly they can work for you. Pingback Optimizer is plugin that places the trackbacks and pingbacks in RSS feeds, which are submitted in RSS directories. The directories in their turn link to the url of you trackback or pingback and enhances the ranking on search engines.

Google XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps are used by Bing, Google, Ask, Yahoo and etc. Creating sitemaps will make the crawling task much easier for the search engine bots. The better structure of your website ensures that the information will be distributed better. It is a good way to notify the search engines about every new post on your site. The option to rebuild the sitemap manually in case of errors or problems remains.

Sitemap Generator

If you are looking for a way to make widely customizable WordPress sitemap then this is the plugin for you. You can choose what to include and what not to with the help of the multi-level permalinks, categories and pages.

SEO Slugs

If you have long file names that are assigned to your blog posts for example website.com/how-to-find-solutions-for-your-website, this is called a slug. SEO Slugs removes the commonly used words ( like, you, how ,the and etc. ) and in this way makes the posts friendlier to the search engines.

SEO Title Tag

Useful plugin that allows you to generate custom title tags, also you can define title tags for pages with error 404. The option to edit slugs and title tags all over the site make this plugin very helpful.

Automatic SEO links

This plugin can help you to link words or phrases that you desire. When you set word or phrase, the Automatic SEO links changes all the matches over the website. You can also customize the target, the title and the relevance for every link, and change the status to no-follow.

SEO Smart links

The usage of this plugin will automatically link keywords and phrases on your site to relevant categories, posts and pages that are also on your site. You can setup keywords and match urls to then, also adding no-follow attribute.

WP Backlinks

Link exchange is now very simple task thanks to this plugin. Upon installation, a small form is generated on the sidebar of your site. This form allows other bloggers and web masters to submit link to your site in exchange for link on their. WP Backlinks searches the web master site and one it finds reciprocal link – the link exchange is successful.

Robots Meta

The plugin provides you with the opportunity to set no-index to feeds and the index of pages, posts and archives. It is quite useful for setting no-index attribute to great range of content.

SEO Rank Reporter

It is simple and very useful plugin that tracks your keywords in Google rankings and on every 3 days you receive report. This is useful to summarize the traffic flow in your site and helpful when you are trying new techniques. You will be notified with emails for any major changes in the ranks.

1. TwitPic

This plugin displays your latest pictures from TwitPic in the sidebar of your blog.

2. Tweet Old Post

Tweet Old Posts randomly picks your older post based on the interval specified by you. The primary use of this plugin is to promote older blog posts by tweeting about them and getting more traffic.

3. TwitterCounter

Using this plugin, you can integrate TwitterCounter.com badges on your blog that show the number of followers you have on Twitter.

4. Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a useful WordPress plugins with several functions. If you have a Twitter account, these plugins tools directly twits the content to the relevant account. Twitter Tools is uniquely different from other Twitter plugins for WordPress. It uses a certain application to cut the URL’s short, add a hash tags and to post a regular and weekly updates of what other twits on your blogs and contents.

5. Twitter Feed for WordPress

The WordPress Twitter Feed Plugin lets you simply output any user’s tweets into your WordPress page, template or sidebar. You can customize the username, number of tweets, and style of output.

6. TwitterLink Comments

This plugin will add an extra field to your comment form so a user can add their Twitter username. A user configured ‘follow me’ link is then displayed along with their details on all their comments.

7. WP to Twitter

The WP-to-Twitter plugin posts a Twitter status update from your WordPress blog using your selected URL shortening service to provide a link back to your post from Twitter.

8. Tweetable

9. Tweet Blender

Provides several Twitter widgets: show your own tweets, show tweets relevant to post’s tags, show tweets for Twitter lists, show tweets for hashtags and more.

10. Simple Twitter Connect

Simple Twitter Connect is a series of plugins that let you add any sort of Twitter functionality you like to a WordPress blog. This lets you have an integrated site without a lot of coding, and still letting you customize it exactly the way you’d like.

11. HL Twitter

HL Twitter lets you display your tweets as a widget in your sidebar or even browse your entire Twitter history right on your blog. But it also does a whole lot more. You can track multiple Twitter accounts and store all of the tweets on your blog indefinitely (currently Twitter only keep your 3,200 most recent tweets) as well as pulling in any tweets that you reply to for future reference

12. Topsy Retweet Button

Provides a Twitter retweet button for your posts that shows all tweets, enables retweeting, and adds tweets as comments.

13. Twitter Goodies

Official Tweet Button + Twitter Goodies Profile & Search Widget. Plugin shows your tweets on Page/Post/Widget area.

14. Twitter Fans

Twitter Fans lets you display your twitter followers in the sidebar as a widget just like Facebook’s fan widget in appearance.

15. Twitter Blackbird Pie

Add awesome looking embedded HTML representations of actual tweets in your blog posts just by adding simple shortcodes.

16. TweetMeme Button

Easily allows your blog post or page to be retweeted. It provides a live count of how many times your post/page has been retweeted throughout Twitter.

1. MooPlay – Customize HTML5 Video Player

Download

2. Power Tools For Moo Tools

Download

3. FancyForm

Download

4. Javascript Calendar Based On MooTools

Download

5. Form Check Validation

Download

6. Gradually – Image Slider

Download

7. Skype-Style Buttons Using MooTools

Download

8. Scroll Gallery

Download

9. Media Box Advanced

Download

10. Nivoo Slider – Image Gallery Transition Effects

Download

11. Vista-like Ajax Calendar

Download

12. CkEditor – MooTools Adapter

Download

13. Custom Missing Image Graphics Using MooTools

Download

1. David Walsh’s jQuery topLink Plugin

Created by David Walsh, this ‘Back to Top’ plugin is one of the cleanest options available.

2. Back to top’ link using jQuery

This jQuery option adds a ‘Back to Top’ link on the bottom right of the page, which fades into view.

3. UItoTop jQuery Plugin

Matt Varone made a similar plugin but with two key differences, this one does not require you to add extra html markup or extra plugins to function. It will only work when JavaScript is turned on.

4. Disappearing “Scroll to top” link with jQuery and CSS

This tutorial will help you build a scroll to top link, that appears when the user scrolls down, and disappears when users reach the top of the page using a combination of CSS and jQuery.

5. Animated jQuery “Back to top” plugin

The styling of this option isn’t great, but the animation is pretty cool.

6. Scrolling Parallax: A jQuery Plugin

Scrolling Parallax is a new jQuery plugin that binds a parallax effect to the scrollbars and mouse wheel. This allows a background image or anything else to scroll at a different pace than the web page when a user scrolls around.

7. jQuery Scroll to Top Control v1.1

If your pages are long winded, it’s a good idea to provide viewers with an easy way to quickly/ automatically scroll back to the top of the page. That’s where this script comes in. It displays a stationary control at the lower right corner of the window that when clicked on gently scrolls the page back up to the top. And instead of always being visible on the user’s screen, the script lets you specify how far down the page the user is at (in pixels) before revealing the control.

8. Scrolling to the Top and Bottom with jQuery

This is another useful option, in this version you have both down and up arrows.

9. jQuery SimplyScroll Logic Box

simplyScroll is a jQuery plugin that can animate (scroll) a set of elements either automatically or manually, horizontally or vertically. It can also accept dynamic image input via a Flickr feed (note not full API integration) or a local JSON source.

10. WP To Top

Yet another WordPress ‘Back to Top’ plugin solution

11. Infinite Scroll Effect With jQuery and ColdFusion

This is not a new effect but, this “infinite scrolling” effect is definitely interesting and something that you’ve never played around with.

1. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

2. SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF)

SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) is an Ajax powered contact form plugin for WordPress. SMCF is built on the jQuery JavaScript library and uses the SimpleModal modal dialog plugin.

3. Scaleable Contact Form Plugin

a very customizable contact form on your wordpress blog.

4. Contact Form by ContactMe.com

Contact Form by ContactMe.com is yet another feature-rich contact form plugin for WordPress. The plugin offers three variants: two paid plans and a free plan. The free version allows you to create a contact form for your WordPress-powered site, but lacks some features (such as the ability to attach files) and has a limit of one contact form per site. Once installed, you’ll need to provide your email address in order to create an account on ContactMe.com.

5. Tiny Contact Form

Use [TINY-CONTACT-FORM] within any post or page. Add the widget to your sidebar.

6. Clean Contact

Clean Contact is a simple contact form for WordPress. It requires less to no configuration and able to run out of the box upon installation. You can specify the Thank You Message and also Thank You Url, which is the URL that users would be redirect to after the form is being sent.

7. Spam-Free Contact Form

Spam Free Contact Form. On errors, displays elegant error messages and confirmation messages on successful mail delivery.

8. WP Clean-Contact

Clean-Contact shields itself from Spam-bots by embedding the contact form via script, and optionally will filter messages using The WordPress Akismet plugin.

9. MM Forms

Supports multiple contact forms. You can customize form and mail contents with simple mark up. AJAX submitting with jQuery Form Plug in. Bot prevention with CAPTCHA. Save form submissions to database Send HTML formatted emails

10. Slick Contact Forms

Slick contact forms allows you quickly and easily create contact forms for any area on your WordPress site using widgets.

11. WP Flex Contact Form

WP Flex Contact Form is a WordPress plugin made in Flex/Flash. It claims to reduce spam messages because most spam bots can’t deal with Flash. You can tweak the background color of the form and set custom error messages.

12. Super Contact Form

Super Contact Form is a small plugin that’s also super simple to use. You just need to specify your email address in the WordPress admin panel after it has been installed.

13. Visitor Contact Forms

1. All in One SEO Pack

Any basic research on SEO plugins for WordPress will lead you to All in One SEO Pack. It is the most popular solution for your WordPress site’s search engine optimization.

2. SEO Friendly Images

The best SEO plugin for WordPress to optimize your images and make them SEO friendly. Search engines penalize pages for images without th eproper ALT and TITLE tags. So this not only helps you rank higher in the search engines, but also helps your blog get found through services such as Google Image.

3. SEO Rank Reporter

This WordPress SEO plugin allows you to track certain keywords in your site, and then issues you a report every 3 days (with all sorts of pretty graphs to boot). The plugin will also notify you via email whenever certain keywords experience major changes in search engine ranking.

4. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate an XML sitemap that is supported by Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask. Your sitemap will make it easier for crawlers to find and index the complete structure of your WordPress blog and retrieve it’s content more efficiently.

5. SEO Ultimate

SEO Ultimate is a suite of tools for, well, ultimate SEO. It has a feature called Canonical-izer, which extends WordPress’s native canonical features to ensure that web spiders are pointed to the primary post in the case of web pages with the same content, but different URLs.

6. Sitemap Generator

There is another type of sitemap called a Human Sitemap for people who visit your blogsite and want to navigate to specific sections that may or may not be accessible from the homepage or inner pages.

7. SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links is a WordPress SEO plugin that automatically links keywords and phrases in your blog posts based on previous pages and posts. SEO Smart Links gives you the ability to set up your own unique keywords and sets of matching URLs.

8. cbnet Ping Optimizer

Did you know your WordPress blog pings unnecessarily every time you edit a post? Think about how many times you’ve clicked “Edit > Publish Post” or “Save and Continue Editing”. Your blog has pinged the ping notification services every time you’ve clicked those buttons.

9. Platinum SEO Pack

This SEO plugin for WordPress is loaded with plenty of features, including automatically generating meta tags, helping you optimize page and post titles for search engines.

10. WP No External Links

Mask all external links – make them internal or hide. On your own posts, comments pages, authors page. No more unnecessarily leaking valuable Page Rank.

11. SEO Rank Reporter

This WordPress SEO plugin allows you to track certain keywords in your site, and then issues you a report every 3 days (with all sorts of pretty graphs to boot). The plugin will also notify you via email whenever certain keywords experience major changes in search engine ranking.

12. Pingback Optimizer

Many WordPress blogs receive in the Comments section what are called “ping-backs” and “trackbacks”. These are notifications that another blog has linked to you. These back-links are useless and go unnoticed by search engines unless the search engines are properly notified.

13. Redirection

This highly effective plugin keeps track of your 404 errors and automatically corrects them, manages your 301 redirects and gives you a full log of everything. In addition whenever you change a post URL it will automatically add a redirection.

14. Automatic SEO links

The best SEO plugin for WordPress to automatically link any word or phrase to any page on the web. Just select a word or phrase, the URL you want it to link to, the Title, Target, Anchor Text and whether you want it to be No-Follow or not and you’re done.

15. SEO Content Control

This nifty plugin helps you identify weak content in your site. For example, many WordPress owners forget to include descriptions of their categories, which is a potential point of improvement for enhancing your search engine rankings.

Today I’m going to take a look at 5 plugins that, as a web designer, I recommend using when building customized content-managed websites in WordPress (all plugins are compatible with version 3.1.3). For more information on using plugins with WordPress, check out the Codex.

1. Custom Post Types UI

There are a few plugins available that allow you to create custom post types in WordPress, but I recommend Custom Post Types UI from WebDevStudios. It’s more of a preference than anything else, as they all essentially do the same thing.

Justin Tadlock explains what custom post types are and how to use them in his blog post.

The Custom Post Type UI offers Advanced Options when creating your custom post types, such as slug rewrites and defining taxonomies. They also work a treat with the next plugin on my list…

2. Verve Meta Boxes

Verve Meta Boxes allow you to add custom fields to your posts and pages. You can then call these custom values out using the function get_post_cutom_values and manipulate the data as you wish.

Perhaps not the most intuitive UI, but they’re pretty straightforward to setup. You can choose from a variety of field types including text, select and checkbox, and easily edit which custom post types you wish to use your meta boxes too.

3. Custom Field Template

I find the Custom Field Template plugin particularly useful when I want to use one page template but customize it specifically for a number of pages. For example, I have 5 pages that all use template-1.php but I want to have a unique banner at the top of each page. So, not only a great plugin form a UX point of view; it also makes life easier for me and reduces the number of template files I’ll need to build my site.

Once the plugin is installed and you’ve set up your custom template, all you need to do is add a small amount of code to your page templates to call it out. Kevin Leary has written a great tutorial on how to use this plugin.

4. Breadcrumbs NavXT

This is a great little plugin for adding dynamic, easily customizable page breadcrumbs to your WordPress site. The settings page allows you to edit the “Home” link and change things like the character between each link.

Breadcrumbs NavXT not only looks really smart but is also very user friendly, particularly if your site contains several subpage levels that the user can drill down into. Highly recommended.

5. WordGento

WordGento is a recently released plugin developed by James Kemp, which allows you to quickly and easily integrate Magento blocks into your WordPress site. Like me, you may have spent several hours in the past trying to get your Magento categories and shopping cart to show up in your WordPress header… with WordGento, you simply install and echo out your blocks in your theme with a single line of code.

James is looking to develop the plugin further in coming versions, by allowing integration of custom Magento blocks (as the plugin currently only works with default blocks).

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post and if you’re looking to create an engaging web design be sure to check out the plugins for your future WordPress developments.

Ever wondered which WordPress plugins i use in CSSReflex.com? the wait is now over, below is a list of my most frequently used WordPress plugins, along with descriptions. I hope you will like the list and will use one of these plugins on your blog which i recommend. Feel free to Subscribe if you would like to be informed for the latest posts.

You may also be interested in one of these older posts
10 Super Clean and Minimal Free WordPress Themes
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18 Awesome Free Thematic Child Themes

1. Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

2. Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress

Services like Akismet and TypePad AntiSpam are great at detecting spam, but if you get lots of it then you have to trawl through the spam queue in case there are any false positives.

3. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

4. FV Community News

With this new Community News plugin you allow your visitors to add articles to the sidebar. Complete with moderation panel and a settings page, you can sit back while you have full control about the look and articles that being posted.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

6. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

7. WP-DBManager

Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

8. WP Smush.it

Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API in WordPress. Yahoo’s excellent Exceptional Performance series recommends optimizing images in several lossless ways: stripping meta data from JPEGs, optimizing JPEG compression, converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs and stripping the un-used colours from indexed images. Smush.it offers an API that performs these optimizations (except for stripping JPEG meta data) automatically, and this plugin seamlessly integrates Smush.it with WordPress.

9. WordPress SEO (My favourite!)

WordPress SEO is the most complete SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview that helps you optimize your page titles, meta descriptions and keywords to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

10. SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

11. Subscribe To Comments

Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!

12. Comment Redirect

Your first time commenters are precious people, once you realize that they’re first time commenters. This plugin allows you to redirect just those people to a page of your choosing!

13. Login Lockdown

This plugin records the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range.

You may also be interested in one of these older posts
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Akismet

Every blogger hate SPAM. If you already start gaining traffic to you blog, you will also get a lot of SPAM comments. So what you need is protection. Akismet will move all the spam comment to the spam comment section without publishing it. You can review those comments in future and publish them if you think those comment are not SPAM.

Download Akismet Plugin

All in one SEO Pack

This awesome plugin will help you do all the optimization of your blog Search Engines. Using this plugin also can increase your blog ranking and this is must have plugin for a wordpress blog.

Download All in one SEO Pack

Google XML Sitemaps

The best way to make sure Google and other search engines aware of ever page on your blog, you need to submit an XML sitemap. This great plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog.

Download Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

Commentluv

Increase your blog comment using this great wordpress plugin comluv. Using this plugin, you and your readers will get benefits and I am sure both will be happy. You will get comment and your readers will get a link to their blog.

Download Commentluv Plugin

AddThis

No doubt, content is the king but what is the queen? Yes, promotion is the queen. Great content without promotion is nothing. One way to promot your blog content is by submitting it to social network. What you need now is a simple button which make you easier to submit your blog content to social networks. Thanks to AddThis plugin allow you and your visitor to bookmark and share your site easily with many popular services.

Download AddThis Plugin

More Plugins

• WP Greet Box - Display a different greeting message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from..
• WordPress Thread comment - This Plugin is an enhancement for WordPress’s comment function. It enables users to reply on a exist comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested.
• WPtouch –  A simple, powerful and elegant mobile theme for your website. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application.
• Thank Me Later –  Automatically send a ‘thank you’ e-mail to those who comment on your blog. This plugin engages visitors by reminding them to check back for responses.
• WP-PageNavi –  Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress site.