5 important plugins for every business website

In computing, a plug-in (or plugin, add-in, addin, add-on, addon, or extension) is a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program. When a program supports plug-ins, it enables customization. WordPress plugins can extend functionality or add new features to your wordPress website and we are going to look into some important plugins for every WordPress business website

I. Akismet Anti-Spam

Akismet checks your comments and contact form submissions against our global database of spam to prevent your site from publishing malicious content. You can review the comment spam it catches on your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

Major features in Akismet include:

Automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.
Each comment has a status history, so you can easily see which comments were caught or cleared by Akismet and which were spammed or unspammed by a moderator.
URLs are shown in the comment body to reveal hidden or misleading links.
Moderators can see the number of approved comments for each user.
A discard feature that outright blocks the worst spam, saving you disk space and speeding up your site.

PS: You’ll need an Akismet.com API key to use it. Keys are free for personal blogs; paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites.

II. Contact Form

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Docs & Support

You can find docs, FAQ and more detailed information about Contact Form 7 on contactform7.com. If you were unable to find the answer to your question on the FAQ or in any of the documentation, you should check the support forum on WordPress.org. If you can’t locate any topics that pertain to your particular issue, post a new topic for it.
Contact Form 7 Needs Your Support

With the default configuration, this plugin, in itself, does not:

track users by stealth;
write any user personal data to the database;
send any data to external servers;
use cookies.

If you activate certain features in this plugin, the contact form submitter’s personal data, including their IP address, may be sent to the service provider. Thus, confirming the provider’s privacy policy is recommended. These features include:

reCAPTCHA (Google)
Akismet (Automattic)

Recommended Plugins

The following plugins are recommended for Contact Form 7 users:

Flamingo by Takayuki Miyoshi – With Flamingo, you can save submitted messages via contact forms in the database.
Bogo by Takayuki Miyoshi – Bogo is a straight-forward multilingual plugin that doesn’t cause headaches.

III. Email Address encoder

Email Address Encoder is a lightweight plugin to protect plain email addresses and mailto links from email-harvesting robots by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities. Has effect on the posts, pages, comments, excerpts and text widgets. No UI, no JavaScript — just simple spam protection.

IV. Defender – Security Plugin

Defender is layered security for WordPress made easy. And by easy, we mean amazingly easy! No longer do you have to go through hideously complex settings and get a virtual PhD in security. Defender adds all the hardening and security tweaks you need, in minutes. 🙂
Security Tweaks

Defender starts with a list of one-click hardening techniques that will instantly add layers of protection to your site.
Block hackers at every level:

Disable trackbacks and pingbacks – safety first
Core and server update recommendations – stay on top of your systems
Change default database prefix – they won’t find this
Disable file editor – if they get in, they won’t get far
Hide error reporting – don’t reveal your issues
Update security keys – ultimate security reset
Prevent information disclosure – why tell them what you have
Prevent PHP execution – because it’s daaaangerous

File Scans

Run free scans that check WordPress for suspicious code. The Defender scan tool compares your WordPress install with the directory, reports changes and lets you restore the original file with a click.
Google 2-step Verification

Keep your site safe with Defender’s simple IP manager. Manually block specific IPs, import a list of banned IPs and set automated timed and permanent lockouts. Defender makes it easy to quickly block and unblock specific locations.

V. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache 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.

The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users:

Users who are not logged in.
Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.

99% of your visitors will be served static html files. One cached file can be served thousands of times. Other visitors will be served custom cached files tailored to their visit. If they are logged in, or have left comments those details will be displayed and cached for them.

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