WordPress is a great content management system to maintain a website with whether you use it for web pages or blog posts. There are three plugins I strongly recommend to help maintain your WordPress based websites.

Akismet

The “social web” is meant to facilitate user participation and promote user generated content. This can be accomplished in WordPress by enabling commenting and then encouraging readers to participate in discussions by leaving comments and optionally providing a URL to be linked from their name. The unfortunate part is comments attract spam.

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. – Akismet Plugin at wordpress.org

Akismet is installed with WordPress by default and although not perfect, does a good job of catching spam comments. You will need to provide an API Key from WordPress to enable Akismet.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU)

From time to time, WordPress releases a new version of their software that you have to download, unzip, upload, and upgrade which is more time consuming then anything. I was ecstatic when I happened upon this plugin!

WordPress releases regular updates and security fixes to the software and after sometime makes it mandatory. Every time you have to manually upgrade your WordPress installation. This plugin helps you to upgrade your installation without any efforts. We also ensure you will always download the latest version. -WPAU faq

WordPress Automatic Upgrade can be set up to automatically upgrade whenever a new version of WordPress is released. I am not a big fan of software automatically upgrading itself so I prefer going through the upgrade clicking the links myself while it does the work for me.

WordPress Database Backup

Even good geeks like myself are bad when it comes to backing up items we know we should be backing up – even when we have been burned in the past for not doing so. It’s one of those things that never seems to leave the to-do list.

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database tables. You may also backup other tables in the same database. – source

I finally have no more excuses for not backing up WordPress-based websites with the WordPress Database Backup plugin. I can set this up to back up as frequently as I want, have it emailed to myself and backup other tables in the same database if I so choose.

If you don’t have the Akismet, WordPress Automatic Upgrade, or WordPress Database Backup WordPress plugins installed yet, I recommend doing so. *Touching wood* I have thankfully not had to restore a WordPress backup yet and have already saved myself hours of work with the automatic upgrade and Akismet plugins.