Five of our essential WordPress plugins for 2024
As a web design company that specialise in creating and maintaining WordPress websites, we have tried countless plugins over the years. Here are five of our favourite WordPress plugins that we use on the sites we build.
Advanced Custom Fields (Pro)
This is the backbone of the custom WordPress themes we build for clients. Using Advanced Custom Fields Pro, we create a lightweight page builder and disable the Gutenberg editor. This means the edit screens on our sites have been stable for up to ten years, not constantly changing when WordPress forced the new editor on us, or they change the way Gutenberg works over time. Client find it easy to use and it’s great to develop with, even working with version control for the agency work we do.
Advanced Custom Fields is sadly now owned by WPEngine, but so far they are currently honouring the lifetime developer license. I’m expecting that to change to a monthly/yearly cost at some point but it will probably still be worth it.
https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/
Contact Form 7
A clean, simple form plugin that can handle most types of form we need to build for small businesses. Various included and add-on features include sending to a ‘webhook’ like Zapier, or having conditional groups of fields that open up when needed. Very well documented and absolutely no disruptive upselling in the admin area. We’ve donated to this plugin to show our appreciation!
https://wordpress.org/plugins/contact-form-7/
Custom Post Type UI
WordPress comes with a blog post type built in which allows a searchable, listable archive of posts. Some websites might need an extra channel however, like recipes, staff members or locations. This can be done with PHP coding, but this plugin makes it easy to add them via an admin interface. Great for making sure it’s all working properly during development as custom post types can have a huge number of options.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/custom-post-type-ui/
Fluent SMTP
As we describe in our article about using an SMTP plugin to send emails from WordPress, it can be necessary to use SMTP to send admin notifications and contact form messages to your email. Most of the SMTP plugins are crippled freemium products from deeply annoying companies – Fluent SMTP is simple and completely free. Install from inside WordPress or grab it from https://wordpress.org/plugins/fluent-smtp/ so you don’t need to give your email address to download.
Imsanity
A simple but very useful plugin that limits the size of images uploaded to a WordPress install. Over time the size of a site can get unwieldy for backups or hit a hosting size limit. Photos straight from a camera or modern phone can be huge: There’s no need for 6000px wide images on most sites and an upper limit can be set in the plugin, which drastically reduces the footprint of the media library over time.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/imsanity/
Summary
Here we have listed five of our favourite WordPress plugins that have clean user interfaces, add useful functionality that goes beyond a few lines in your functions.php file and don’t annoy with constant upsells in your admin notifications.