Just like many other things in the world, WordPress blogs also need some maintenance and optimizing every now and then. You can do many things manually but they eventually feel irksome to do. These plugins can help you maintain and optimize a WordPress blog almost automatically:
WP Security Scan
Every blog owner wants their WordPress-based website protected from hackers. But sometimes, those malicious individuals can pass through all security layers and cause significant damages. Repairing damages done and restoring the website can be time consuming and costly. WP Security Scan checks your website for any vulnerability and keeps your installation completely safe from any threat.
WP Maintenance Mode
When performing significant changes to your blog, it’s always wise to take your blog down for awhile to prevent errors from reaching your loyal visitors. WP Maintenance Mode automatically put your blog into a hiatus mode during a maintenance session and it lets your visitors know that the blog will be back soon.
XCloner Backup and Restore
It is a really cool plugin for backing up your entire WordPress data including content, uploaded files, plugins and themes. XCloner Backup and Restore also helps you to restore everything easily. With the plugin, you will feel at ease knowing that your data is much more protected.
WP-DB Manager
WP-DB Manager backs up your database, which can be damaged beyond repair due to a hack or catastrophic server failure. It is a wise thing and perfectly logical to back up the complete database periodically. Performing this task manually can be time consuming, tough and potentially risky. With WP-DB, blog owners can define settings for scheduled backups as well as performing optimizations and necessary repairs.
Akismet
The built-in plugin needs no introduction and it efficiently filters all spammy comments. On popular blogs, there could be hundreds, if not thousands of flagged comments each day. The junk could take plenty of space and it is advisable to remove them regularly.
Revision Control
Post revisions and drafts can also consume a lot of space and it would be helpful to keep your database bloat free. Blog owners can set global limits on posts and revisions, while enabling regular deletion of old revisions.
Clean Options
On installing themes or plugins, occasionally options are saved in the database. Professionally-built plugins clean everything up when they are removed, but other neglect the housekeeping tasks and can bloat the database up. Clean Options is a very helpful plugin if you need to quickly remove any unused and unwanted options.
Broken Link Checker
As the name suggests, the plugin scrutinizes your website for pages that are no longer available. Other than checking for broken links, the plugins can also find out missing photos.
Manage WP
The plugins significantly simplifies maintenance tasks if you have multiple WordPress blogs. Performing all maintenance tasks on each WordPress blog can be time consuming and very irksome. Fortunately one plugin, the ManageWP, can help you do everything effectively and efficiently. It works as a nerve center for remotely managing all your WordPress installations from a single dashboard.
User Role Editor
During a maintenance session, it can be difficult to determine authorizations limits if your WordPress blog has many authors. This plugin would come in handy when you need to specify access details of each registered author.
Parallelize
Modern web browsers can simultaneously handle dozens of HTTP requests, but normally only a few requests from a hostname can be handled simultaneously. This would slow down page loads and it is recommended to parallelize resources from a hostname. The plugin allows attachment files and other resources to be parallelized across multiple hostnames, significantly improving page load. Resources will be loaded from the same hostname to assist caching.
WP File Cache
By implementing object-level persistent caching, WP File Cache can reduce load time significantly. However, the plugin won’t help you if there’s a disk I/O bottleneck as it works by shifting loads to disk/file system from your database.
Quick Cache
It is also an impressive plugin for improving website performance. Quick Cache build a cache periodically by taking snapshots of all posts, categories, media resources, URL links and others. These snapshots are the cached (stored) for easy references later. This should save the web server from processing frequently-loaded data. The plugin also employs an advanced technique to help it determines whether it should cache a specific resource.
WP Minify
Minify Engine is a PHP5 app that applies Yahoo’s recommendations for high performance websites. By integrating the app to your WordPress blog; CSS and JS files are compressed immediately to significantly improve loading times. It comes with numerous additional features such as plugin hooks, debug tools and others.
WP smush.it
The plugin integrates Smush.it API to your WordPress blog to reduce image file size and improve performance. When enabled, all images added to your website will pass through Smush.it for optimization.
WP HTTP Compression
The plugin is only useful for web browsers that support compressions. Output pages are compressed as GZIP and sent to web browser for rendering. WP HTTP Compression shouldn’t be used in conjunction with WP Super Cache as it already implements similar compression technique. Ideally, the plugin reduce your webpages to 60 -80 percent of the original size and improve loading speed for three to four times.
Hyper Cache
The plugin helps you to easily configure caching system and it is designed for those with limited hosting resources. Hyper Cache works on hosting based on Apache and Microsoft IIS; it can integrate with other plugins and generally easy to configure. It includes various features such as auto-clean system, caching redirects and global translator compatibility.
WP Super Cache
This could be one of the most popular performance-enhancing plugin in WordPress community. It stores static HTML pages from dynamic WordPress blog. After HTML files are stored, web servers will use them instead of comparatively more resource-demanding PHP-based WordPress scripts. Most of the time, visitors access webpages with static content and it would improve performance to serve them with cached HTML files instead.
CDN Tools
The plugin loads data onto a CDN (content distribution network) to speed up your blog’s loading time. Media files and Javascript codes are loaded to a different server to improve page performance.
DB Cache Reloaded
This plugin can potentially provide better performance boost compared to other HTML-based caching plugins. It requires much less disk space and keeps CPU loads on servers as low as possible.