To be clear, I'm not a web designer.  I'm not a web developer.  I'm just a marketing guy who has broken my WordPress site ... well ... a LOT.  Over the years and countless late night, "please help me for the love of god" calls to my savvier friends, I've come up with a list of must-have WordPress Plugins.

Installing all/most of these will provide you with a good balance of security, ease of use, stability and peace of mind with some marketing juice for good measure. It will *really* help.

Why so many plugins?
Well, a small biz website is usually designed to help you make money. And comment and contact form spam costs time (and money) to moderate and clean.  And poor SEO makes it harder for your customers to find you (more lost money).  And most importantly, a hacked WordPress site can cost hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours to fix.  Last time I was hacked, it took $150 to hire a programmer and 30+ hours of my time piecing everything back together - manually.

Did I mention (more…)