When we develop our bespoke WordPress websites, we like to use plugins to enhance the usability and management for our clients. Please note we do not use page builders, as we develop our own websites to ensure they are optimised for search engines and user experience. Below are the top 5 plugins that we would recommend on any of your WordPress websites. The right set of plugins can completely transform your websites by enhancing functionality, user experience and overall performance. We use all these plugins to make sure we streamline processes and create a user friendly design for clients.
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
Advanced Custom Fields is a powerful plugin that enhances the flexibility and functionality of our WordPress websites. It’s an excellent tool for us because it means we can create user friendly blocks and fields to tailor to clients specific needs. The plugin gives you access to a large library of fields including text, image, date and repeater fields. This allows us to make personalised and dynamic content for each website.
ACF seamlessly integrates with WordPress which makes it ideal for increasing the capabilities of the base WordPress structure. The recent updates have brought in the ability to create custom taxonomies and global options pages with just a couple of clicks! Therefore, Advanced Custom Fields is a must have for us when it comes to website development.
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a highly effective and user friendly form building plugin used on all of the websites we create. It comes with an intuitive drag and drop system which makes the form creation seamless! You don’t need any coding skills or advanced technical capabilities to use the plugin. It offers a wide array of form fields and customisation options so that you can make every form different.
Gravity Forms has conditional logic that allows for us to show certain fields and values depending on what the user selects in previous fields. This can lead to very complex forms and quote generators! Another benefit of using Gravity Forms is that it has built in spam protection eg Anti Spam Honeypot. This does it’s best to keep the enquiry listings clear of bots. There are also many extensions that can be added to Gravity Forms that allow you extend the functionality of the plugin.
Overall, Gravity Forms is worth the purchase so that you can create extensive forms to keep your users engaged and for maximum compatibility with WordPress.
Rank Math SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is such an important aspect of website development because without it, Google wouldn’t be seeing your content as worthy of it’s ranking. There is a lot of talk about the two biggest SEO plugins Yoast and Rank Math. However, we find that Rank Math is the number one contender for WordPress.
Rank Math starts with an intuitive setup process that anyone can make there way through. This also allows for users to migrate from existing SEO plugins without losing data and causing issues. The on-page SEO analysis is very powerful, offering insights and suggestions to improve existing content and increasing your visibility on search engines.
Rank Math boasts advanced schema markup capabilities, helping search engines break down content into specific sections. Meaning you will be seen as a better contender on search engines. You can also keep track of important analytics and keyword breakdowns with the inbuilt analytics system. Just connect your Google Search Console and analytics account to view all your data on one page!
With regular updates, Rank Math is our pick for the most reliable SEO plugin for WordPress because of its feature rich tools. If you want to maximise your online presence, give Rank Math a go and watch your stats rise.
Post Types Order
The WordPress plugin Post Types Order is a simple but valuable tool that we use on many of our websites. It gives the website admins and editors great control over the order of their posts, pages and custom post types. This means that we can create more logical and user friendly navigation structures.
This plugin is mainly beneficial for websites with diverse content because it takes out the process of changing all the dates on your pages / posts to get them in the right order. With post types order you get a new draggable interface that makes it easy to prioritise content that you think users will benefit from the most.
Overall, Post Types Order is a simple but effective plugin that we would recommend to take out the hassle of reordering your content. It will give you a more organised and aesthetically pleasing website.
Redirection
The Redirection plugin is another must have plugin for your WordPress site. Essentially the plugin simplifies the process of managing redirects by allowing users to effortlessly create, edit and monitor redirection without having to delve into complex doing in the websites files. When you have broken or outdated links, you can just place your link into the tool and tell it to permanently redirect to a relevant page. It’s that simple!
The benefit of doing this is so that your credibility significantly increases with search engines because they can effectively crawl your site for new content. When search engines detect broken links, it will bring you down in ranking without you even realising. Overall, we would recommend this plugin, if you are an admin wanting to maintain a well-organised online presence.
Our Conclusion
In Conclusion, you will want to use some of these plugins to make sure you stay ahead of the competition. From security to perfomance optimisation, content creation and user experience enhancement, these plugins help you with diverse aspects of website management.