WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms and CMS, many popular bloggers had using WordPress to run their blogs. If you are WordPress beginner user, there are several WordPress plugins that you should install after setting up your WordPress in order to maintain, speed up and monitoring your WordPress blog. Below are those useful WordPress plugins that you might need to explore and use.

1. WP-DBManager – 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, optimizing and repairing of database. (You must backup your WordPress database periodically)

2. Askimet – Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. (Pre-install during WordPress setup, you must activate this plugin)

3. 404 Notifier – Log 404 (file not found) errors on your site and get them delivered to you via e-mail or RSS. If you’ve decided to move things around on your site, you might overlook a few redirects and end up with some broken URLs. This will help you catch those so you can take care of them or you can fix them by using (4.) Redirection plugin.

5. All in One SEO Pack – Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

6. WP Super Cache – A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

7. WP System Health – Provides a new Dashboard Widget (limit to administrators) that displays information provided by 5 different categories: System, PHP, WordPress, Translation, and Database.

8. Hosting Monitoring – Enables to display information on the system where your wordpress website is hosted.

9. Error Reporting – Logs Errors to file and/or Sends Error Notification emails. Records Ping Errors and displays them in a dashboard widget. Logs Errors to files and / or Sends Error Notification emails. Records Ping Errors and displays them in a dashboard widget.

Perhaps some of you don’t like the default fonts of WordPress Editor, you can change it to your favorite fonts by copying and pasting some short code in your functions.php file.

add_action( 'admin_head-post.php', 'devpress_fix_html_editor_font' );
add_action( 'admin_head-post-new.php', 'devpress_fix_html_editor_font' );

function devpress_fix_html_editor_font() { ?>
<style type="text/css">#editorcontainer #content, #wp_mce_fullscreen { font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", "Bitstream Charter", Times, serif; }</style>
<?php }

Thanks to DevPress for this tip!

If you want to do some maintenance on your WordPress blog, and you want to let your visitors know that your blog is down for maintenance, then you have 2 methods to do that.

The first method is that you can adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance by using Maintenance Mode WordPress plugin, this method is easy for WordPress beginner.

Another method is quite simply for advance WordPress users, just copy and paste the following code to functions.php will do. Don’t forget to remove the code once you are done with maintenance.

function wpr_maintenance_mode() {
    if ( !current_user_can( 'edit_themes' ) || !is_user_logged_in() ) {
        wp_die('Maintenance, please come back soon.');
    }
}
add_action('get_header', 'wpr_maintenance_mode');

We need to optimize WordPress database for some period of time due to the useless data “overhead” piles up over the years and slows your database down, sometimes the database may be get crashed too. There are 2 easy method to optimize WordPress database, one of the method is using WordPress plugin and another one is through phpMyAdmin.

Method 1: Optimize DB plugin

For those beginner user of WordPress, I suggest you use Optimize DB plugin to optimize your WordPress database as it is easy to use. Just upload Optimize DB plugin to your WordPress plugin folder, activate it then you can start using it.

Method 2: phpMyAdmin

1. Login to Cpanel, go to phpMyAdmin
2. Refer the to screenshot below, select your database that you want to optimize, check all the tables, and then select “optimize table” from the dropdown box.

Warning: Always backup your full database before attempting any database changes. In case you do something wrong, you can restore back your database.