It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of WordPress plugins out there. At the time of writing this blog, there are over 52000 free ones, and that doesn’t include the premium ones that aren’t in the WordPress directory.
Over time I’ve tried a bucketload, some are great, some like to break everything on your site. So now I have a suite of go to plugins and I will install them for pretty much all of the websites I create.
Here are my go to plugins:
Beaver Builder
For ages I struggled to allow my clients to easily format their content with columns and the ability to put that image exactly where they wanted it. I won’t name and shame but I tried using some template builder themes out there, but realised as soon as you switched them off all your content would disappear. Not great if you ever what to debug anything or if you ever want to change your theme.
Most of my site is now formatted using this plugin and it is fantastic, I used to spend hours creating my sales page and now I’ve setup a template and away I go. A free version will allow you to do the formatting, but upgrade to the premium and it will eliminate the need for at least half a dozen other plugins you probably would have installed, including time count downs, slideshows, pricing tables and much more.
Gravity Forms
If you’re looking for a very versatile form plugin with so many possibilities look no further. You can use this to hook up to your email marketing software, create surveys, automation sequences, create quizzes, collect payments and loads more! The thing I also love about it that a lot of the other contact form plugins don’t do is that it stores ALL of your entries in a database so if you’re missing an email you can check the database.
Jetpack
I always avoided installing jetpack until just recently I’ve started to really love it. I love numbers, and the stats functionality is awesome, however the related posts, extra suite of widgets, social media integration are excellent added features. Upgrade to the premium and you’ll also get Vaultpress (for site backups), Akismet (for spam protection) and malware scanning – piece of mind and totally worth the $99 a year.
Yoast SEO
Not the silver bullet of SEO but a great place to start and take get back some control over what is delivered to the google gods. You can set custom titles and descriptions, create your own SEO site map to submit to google as well as adjust what your social media channels will find. A great freebie.
What plugins can you not live with out?
Great Article. It helps me very much.
I have used Blog Designer plugin. This plugin is fantastic to modify the blog page layout. I think this plugin is best to design the blog.