6 WordPress plugins I can’t live without
Every WordPress developer has a set of tools and plugins they rely on for an efficient, clean and secure site. These are some of the WordPress plugins I use on nearly every project, that I can’t recommend enough.
1. Advanced Custom Fields
With custom post types and the ACF plugin, the world is your oyster. I’ve used this combination to turn WordPress from a blog into a full-fledged custom CMS. Add custom text boxes, image uploads, even google maps to your pages and custom post types. With the relationships and repeater fields, WordPress becomes a very powerful CMS – you can link up any number of custom posts and pages to feed data from multiple sources into your template. And, the ACF website has great documentation for displaying your content in your theme.
Cost: Free, with some fields being a paid add-on. The repeater and flexible fields are definitely worth paying for.
2. Gravity Forms
If you’re just using Gravity Forms for a simple contact page, you might not be aware of the full potential of this plugin. You can use it to post from the front end of your website, place orders like a shopping cart and connect to a payment gateway, direct emails depending on field content, automatically add entries to your mailing list, and more. It’s insanely powerful.
Cost: You’ll want the developer’s license to unlock all the add-ons. It’s $199/year but you can use your key on unlimited websites.
3. WordPress SEO (formerly Yoast)
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
I’ve used All In One SEO and Headspace in the past, and both are great, easy to use SEO plugins for WordPress. Where WordPress SEO excels is social media optimization. Getting the correct thumbnail to display when sharing a post on Facebook is a challenge, and this plugin makes it easy. WordPress SEO also gives you mini reports on how optimized your posts and pages are. It will handle your Google sitemaps for you, so you don’t have to install yet another plugin to handle sitemap submission.
Cost: free with paid add-ons.
4. W3 Total Cache
wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache
This caching plugin has a multitude of powerful settings so you can find the combination that works best with your setup and server. It will handle minifying your code for you, too! I’ve used this plugin on some delicate setups (e-Commerce, tonnes of customization and plugins, etc.) without issues.
Cost: free (you may want to subscribe to a CDN service)
5. Vaultpress
If a client asks me, “What about backups?” I have a single word answer: “Vaultpress.” Sadly, I have actually had to use it (to restore after an update broke the shopping cart). Happily, it was a quick and painless process to restore the old site. This is a subscription based service that backs up onto their servers, so you don’t have to worry about issues with your web host affecting your backups.
Cost: starts at $5/mo.
6. Login Lockdown
Remember when, a year or so ago, a bot tried common passwords to access everyone’s WordPress site? No? Well, it happened. (Note: if you’re scared this can happen to you, don’t use “admin” as your administrator level account name.) Login Lockdown prevents people from trying to hack your site with an extra layer of security. Installing this plugin is a small part of securing your WordPress Dashboard.
Cost: free
Those are my go-to WordPress plugins… what are some of yours?