5 Wordpress Plugins to Ease Blog Maintenance and Enhance Functionality

WP Super Cache

The WP Super Cache Wordpress plugin stores your blog pages in cache form making pages load faster than ever. This is particularly helpful for blogs that get a lot of traffic (imagine one of your posts makes it to the front page of Digg and a flood of traffic comes your way).

Maintenance Mode

The Maintenance Mode Wordpress plugin adds a splash page to your blog telling visitors that your blog is temporarily unavailable for maintenance. The blog owner or administrator can see the full blog, but visitors only see the splash page making it possible for you to make revisions to your blog but not fully publish them until you're completely ready.

WP-DB Manager

WP-DB Manager is a "must have" Wordpress plugin that fully automates the process of backing up your Wordpress database. You can schedule backups to happen at predetermined times.

Theme Tester

The Theme Tester Wordpress plugin allows you to test out different themes on your blog without anyone seeing the changes except you and your blog administrators.

Instant Upgrade

The Instant Upgrade plugin for Wordpress is useful to anyone using a version of Wordpress prior to 2.7 (Wordpress 2.7 includes an instant upgrade function accessible from the Wordpress dashboard). The Instant Upgrade plugin allows you to upgrade your blog to the newest version of Wordpress in a few simple steps.