Three plugins you need for your WordPress blog

It seems that everyone and their cat has a blog these days. Literally. If you're using WordPress, you may have fought the battle with plugins. There's so many! They're so handy! Wait, my site has really slowed down. Darn plugins! They can be a blessing and a curse. It's true that too many plugins can slow your site down, but there are some plugins that you really should install to make your life easier. Here are those plugins.

BackWPup: If you don't already have a backup plugin for your WordPress site, stop reading now, and go install one. I'll wait. OK, now that that's settled, I like this plugin in particular because it's free (there's a pro version, too), and it can put your backups in Google Drive, Amazon S3, Dropbox and other cloud storage services. You can also have backups sent to your email. It is simple to use and schedule. Restoring your site, should you ever need to, is very easy thanks to this plugin.

WordPress SEO: This is probably the best plugin for search engine optimization available for WordPress, though All in One SEO Pack is my second favorite. It helps you optimize your images, content, meta descriptions, and all the other gobbledigook that goes along with SEO. It makes things easy by showing you how to focus your keywords with your content, and tests your content to see if it's optimized for that particular keyword.

Bulletproof Security: I learned about this plugin the hard way. While I had security plugins installed on most of my sites, I didn't bother with one of my blogs. It's a personal blog that I don't market for traffic; it's just a "let the words flow" type of space. Since it didn't contain anything important, I didn't think anyone would ever mess with it. Wrong. I woke up one day to a vulgar image splashed across my screen along with the hacker's name. Thankfully, it wasn't a serious hack. I just changed my password, deleted the plugin he installed, and everything was back to normal. It showed me the need for security on all my sites, though, and this is the one I've used ever sense. It's easy to set up and use, but very robust. It creates .htaccess files (which are processed first) to stop hackers before they have a chance to reach your blog's php coding. It sounds complicated, but it's easy on the user end.

What are your must-have WordPress plugins?

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