Here are 5 WordPress Plugins that will help you with various aspects of your blog from tracking stats to securing your blog and providing functionality.
1. WordPress.com Stats
The WordPress.com Stats plugin tracks your most popular stats. You need an account and blog at wordpress.com and your WordPress API key to use this plugin. Here are some of the stats that you’ll be able to track on your WordPress Dashboard:
- A graph of visitors by day, week and month views
- Top Post and Pages
- Referring Sites
- Search Engine keywords that were used to bring visitors to you blog
- Clicks – Links that visitors clicked on at your blog
- and other summary type data
This is a nice plugin, but just remember that it’s easy to get addicted to constantly watching your stats. Stats should always be used to direct what actions you need to take to make things go the way you want them to go with your blog.
2. Login Lockdown
The Login Lockdown plugin helps stop brute-force attempts to login to your blog. However, first things first…
When it comes to your blog, one of the first things you should remove is the Login link that is commonly placed on a new blog. Typically this is in the sidebar of your blog and it’s a widget called the Meta widget that you can just remove.
What Login Lockdown does is remember IP addresses and ranges from people who have repeatedly attempted to login to your blog and failed. It then locks them out based on their IP adderess.
3. Plugin Folder Tip
Now here’s a great little tip the Danial Scocco provides over at Daily Blog Tips and it’s the fact that you can browse to the a person blog and add the location /wp-content/plugins to their blog address and find a list of the plugins the blogger could possibly be using, which in turn then could be a launching point of an attack.
Daniel says, create an empty index.html file and place it in the plugins folder of your blog and when someone browses to that folder the page will be empty. Pretty cool.
4. Executing PHP Code
Need to execute some php code in a blog post, page or widget? You can use Exec-PHP plugin which will allow you to do just that. Sometimes you just need to hand code a few things with PHP and this plugin will allow you to put that PHP code directly into your blog post, page and widgets. For instance…
5. Provide a Poll
I recently provided a poll using the extremely awesome WP-Polls plugin. You can use the widget-ized poll to just place it anywhere you want but you can also provide a poll by typing some PHP code as well. The Exec-PHP plugin helped with that.
That’s it for this plugin installation. Please subscribe for more plugin news to come.
Photo Credit: Andreanna
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