Top 5 WordPress plugins that we use on a daily basis
One of the greatest upsides of using the WordPress CMS is that it is extensible with the use of plugins. And the variety of plugins available on the market is astounding! There are currently over 54,000 plugins listed on the official page, and their number is growing.
Because of that, selecting the right plugin might seem like a challenge. In this article, we wanted to present a quick overview of the plugins that we use most in our projects, and why we could sincerely recommend them!
Advanced Custom Fields
Advanced Custom Fields (or ACF for short) is a hugely popular plugin, which allows you to add new custom fields to your WordPress pages and posts. The plugin currently has over 1 million active installations, and is still in active development. Most of the custom WordPress themes we have coded over the years rely on the plugin in one way or another. We actually have several articles on this blog related to the ACF!
Yoast SEO
With over 5 million active installations, Yoast SEO is currently the undisputed king of WordPress plugins for SEO analysis. It scans the content of your posts and pages, and provides you with useful insights on how you might improve the SEO scores. On top of that, Yoast allows you to add in and edit metadata for your pages to influence how they are displayed in search engines.
I also have good news for you if you use the previous plugin on this list, that is ACF. There is an extension for Yoast that was developed in collaboration with the plugin's developers, which allows you to analyze SEO also for custom fields that you added in WordPress using ACF. Neat!
Contact Form 7
Another popular choice, the Contact Form 7 plugin allows you to add multiple easily customizable contact forms to your site. The focus of the plugin is on simplicity, and over the years we haven’t found a solution that would be as quick to implement as Contact Form 7. The plugin also supports additional features, like reCAPTCHA and Akismet out of the box.
W3 Total Cache
Using a caching plugin is usually a great way to improve the performance of a WordPress site. W3 Total Cache can help reduce page load times across the site, and achieve a better score on Google’s PageSpeed Insights. We recommend this plugin to clients who are in need of a fast and well-optimized site.
WooCommerce
Last but not least, WooCommerce is the solution we use to create WordPress-based stores. It’s a simple-to-implement and highly customizable solution, that allows you to turn your website into a complete store. You may process orders, add and edit products, manage customer data and a whole lot more. All with one wildly popular plugin with a large active community of users and developers around it. You can also easily add more functionality to WooCommerce using extensions. If you are looking to put up an e-commerce store on your WordPress site, WooCommerce is a go-to solution!
If after reading this list you still have a need to look for a plugin that suits your needs, you can browse available plugins on WordPress’s official page. While choosing a plugin, it’s important to look at the number of currently active installations (usually the more installations, the more reliable the plugin’s functionality and support), and check whether the plugin has been tested with the most recent version of WordPress. You should also take a good look at the plugin’s description and reviews. Make sure it will suit your needs. Finding the right plugin might be a challenge, which is why we tend to stick with the tried-and-true solutions above!
