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This is the second post in a series on WordPress Plugins.

Plug-ins are almost like having your own personal set of tricks for your website. They allow you to easily and quickly manage many tasks on your website therefore saving you time, helping you retain your hair (since you won’t be pulling it out anymore), and being a happier person all around. (You think I’m giving plug-ins too much credit? Nah. They’re that good.)

Are you expecting a huge surge of traffic? There’s a plug-in that will help speed up your site. Do you have a lot of links on your site? Manually checking those could take forever and is likely to fall to the bottom of your priority list. And then there are those nasty spammers. Even our blogs are not exempt from spam! Clever plug-in developers have even created an automatic spam detector for your comments.

Here are a few of the best plug-ins to help with these functions.

WordPress Super Cache – This plug-in helps increase the speed of your WordPress blog. The programming behind this plug-in is probably more complicated than any of us want to know about. All you need to know is that creates static html pages of your website and displays them more quickly than if your site had to call up the PHP scripting each time. So, when you hit the front page of Digg or other sites and expect a HUGE surge of traffic, be sure Super Cache is turned on so that your new visitors can see your great content rapidly.

Redirection – This plug-in creates 301 redirects for you if you change the permalink or slug of the post. Without Redirection, if you change the name of your post then any inbound links will be broken. Redirection however will automatically create a redirect for you. This is an incredibly helpful plug-in to have if you decide to change the name of your posts to increase your search engine optimization or if you started out posting to your blog using the WordPress default permalinks.

Broken Link Checker – Broken links are frustrating for you and the user. This terrific little plug-in will check each of the links of your site and let you know which ones need to be repaired. You can schedule it to run at a set frequency to keep your site at its best.

Askimet – Askimet is one of those plug-ins that every blog should have. In fact, WordPress has begun to include it as a standard plug-in for that reason. Askimet is essentially the equivalent of your spam checker for email. It monitors your comments and automatically labels spam comments and moves them to a spam folder or automatically deletes them depending on your preference. If you have previously had to sift through hundreds of junk comments for pharmaceuticals, internet marketing scams, or comments in other languages that you can’t read, you will be very grateful for this plug-in.

There is nothing that turns a visitor off from reading your content and becoming a loyal visitor than a slow site filled with broken links and spam. These plug-ins will help your site run faster and put your best foot forward with your readers.

We’ll cover more about plugins tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Now, before you take off, make sure to hit that retweet or share button back up at the top of this post, if you enjoyed it.

And have we connected on Twitter and Facebook yet?  Why not?

To Your Unending Success,

Mike Paul

P.S. There’s a HUGE movement going on right now that’s helping people change their lives and their health for the better.  I’m down 25 pounds myself since I began this challenge, and I’d love to show you how to get started and get the challenge going in your area.  Here’s the details for more -

Your Body By Vi 90 Day Challenge

Related posts:

1. Plug-Ins to Help You Prevent a Blog Disaster on Your Business Blog
2. Who, When, Where? Plug-Ins to Track and Analyze Your Blog Statistics
3. How Social Is Your Blog? Plug-Ins That Put the “Social” in Your Blog
4. 10 Reasons Why You Should Use WordPress to Run Your Church Website
5. 4 Evergreen Membership Site Models Anyone Can Run