WP-Database Backup Plugin is a very useful plugin for Wordpress that I have just recently installed on my blog. For those of you who never think to backup their blog database this plugin is for you! Normally if you blog often you could backup your database as often as once a day. If you were to do this manually it could be pretty time consuming so why not have this process done automatically for you? Here is how you can get the plugin for yourself!

• Download the plugin here
• Extract the files to your computer and upload the folder to your wp-content/plugins folder
• Login to your backend of your Wordpress – /wp-admin
• Click on Plugins on the left and check the box for the plugin and click activate
• Then click on Tools (down arrow) and select Backup
• Now here is where you can setup the newly installed plugin
• You can select certain tables to include and exclude
• You can do a backup right away to your server, computer, or to your email account
• You can also schedule backups – which I recommend doing!
• I set mine to backup once a week to my email but you may want to do it more often depending on how much you blog

So there you have it.  How to take away the hassle of backing up your Wordpress database.  You will not have to worry about backing it up again and thats a good thing because it gives you time to concentrate on other aspects of your blog.  Just remember to check and make sure you are getting those backups sent to your email because if your blog ever crashes you will need that backup or else you will need to start from SCRATCH!  No one wants to start their blog over after they have spent soo much time and effort working on it in the first place.

So after a few months of working on my blog I have started to generate a decent amount of traffic but have also generated a lot of spam comments to my blog. This has got so out of control that I can receive over a hundred spam comments per day. So in order to handle this I have installed the plugin Akismet to resolve the issue.  Here is how it works.

Download the Plugin / Install Plugin

For most Wordpress users this plugin should come pre-installed with Wordpress.  All you need to do is go to Plugins at the top of the admin panel and activate Akismet.  If you don’t see it in your plugins you can download it here.  Once you have it installed you can activate it like I have explained above.

Getting a WordPress.com API Key

In order to get this plugin to work correctly you will need a WordPress.com API Key.  You can get details of what this API Key is here.  So in order to get a WordPress.com API Key you will need to have a WordPress.com account.  You should go to WordPress.com and signup for an account.  Once you are logged in your API Key is listed on your profile page, which you can get to by clicking the “My Account” link in the top right when you’re logged in.

Using Akismet

So once you have applied the API Key the plugin is ready to be used.  It is pretty straight forward but here are a few details.  When you click on the comments section in the admin panel of your Wordpress there will be a link at the top for Akisment Spam and a number of spam.  You can click on that to review the spam and delete them all at once.  If you don’t go to this link this spam will be automatically deleted after 15 days.  Another thing you can do is when you are at the dashboard of your Wordpress admin panel you can click on Akismet Stats to get stats of the spam caught.  You can see the Ham – legitimate comments, spam detected, missed spam, and false positives (which are comments marked as spam when they were legitimate comments).

So hopefully all of these details on this plugin were helpful for you and I hope you try out this plugin because it will definitely make blogging and managing your comments a lot easier!

One thing most webmasters consider when working on their website is the speed of their website.  They want to make sure that it is very fast and responsive so that when people visit the website they get the information they want in a timely manner.  No one wants to sit and wait for information.  At this day and age people want to get access to information instantly and if you do not provide that with your website people will go to the next website that does.  This is where the Wordpress plugin WP-Cache comes into play.

If you are using Wordpress and have not heard of this plugin it is definitely something you should look into.  I actually never heard of it myself until recently while browsing the Internet and doing some research for my blog.  This plugin is probably one of the most underrated plugins you can get for Wordpress.  What it does is caches Wordpress pages and stores them in a static file for serving in future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database.  In simpler terms it does less calculations and pulls quickly from a stored file.  By using this plugin you are able to serve hundred times more pages per second.  This reduces the response time and makes your visitors happier because they get their information more quickly.

This plugin is very easy to install like the rest of the plugins available for Wordpress.  All you need to do is download the file HERE under “Downloading” and upload the file to your plugins folder.  Once it is in the plugins folder you can login to Wordpress and go to Plugins and activate the plugin.  Once you have done this you can go to Settings and find the WP-Cache and enable it with the button at the top and you are done!  Try it out for yourself and see how you like it.