WordPress and plugins

Before we get too far into the plugins that we like the most, let’s review WordPress and plugins in general. First of all, WordPress is a website-building platform that’s been around since 2003. And if you weren’t online in 2003, you might not entirely understand how very different the internet was back then. 

In the early aughts, there weren’t many options for you to grow your online presence. (Oh, and your “online presence” wasn’t really a thing yet, because social media was in its absolute infancy, but we digress.) The point is that content management systems looked VERY different when WordPress arrived on the scene in 2003. And when WordPress launched way back when, it was strictly a blog publishing tool, so all it needed to do was allow you to input text and (maybe) an image or two. 

Fortunately for WP lovers across the globe, over the last two decades, it’s evolved with the rest of the Internet. WordPress now supports tons of other web content types, like media galleries, eCommerce, membership sites, forums, and even full, traditional websites. And one of the ways it’s able to do all of this is through the use of plugins. 

More on plugins: What are they, exactly?

Plugins are smaller pieces of software that add or change functions on your WordPress website without impacting core WordPress files. Using access points called filter and action hooks provided by the WordPress Plugin API, plugins connect with or “hook into” the source code without affecting it. Depending on their features, plugins can either make tiny tweaks or completely change your website. 

Plugins can be added in several different ways. Some are easily accessed and installed via the WordPress plugin directory, while others come from third parties. Most of those you find in the official directory can be installed with a single click, while other premium or third-party plugins must be manually installed using a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client. And if that sounds too complicated, well, that’s as good a reason as any to hire an agency to customize your WordPress website as you need it to do more! 😉 

5 WordPress plugins our devs swear by

1. Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)

I surveyed our internal WordPress development team to write this blog entry, and this was the only plugin that everyone agreed on 😆. Since much of our work centers around custom web design (i.e., WordPress themes if it’s the chosen platform), the websites we build need easily extendable interfaces for content generation into custom components while still providing a great user experience. In other words, it needs to be as easy to add content that adheres to the new custom design as it would be to use the native WP entry fields. This is basically what the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin allows. 

From a development perspective, ACF’s support for syncing custom fields across environments streamlines the build, saving our clients on valuable development time and budget. It also has a great graphical user interface (GUI) in the backend for building requisite fieldsets (including validation/constraints as needed) to populate front-end components.

Overall, ACF is a mature and well-supported plugin that allows our developers to construct a content structure behind custom design components. This is often part of our process, no matter how we customize WordPress. As a result, our WordPress clients can easily build and manage their website’s pages while retaining their tailored design philosophy.

2. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a premium caching plugin that specifically focuses on the performance of WordPress websites. Our developers like this one for WordPress customizations because it packs a performance punch with minimal setup and maintenance. 

Some of the features our developers enable for most sites include those that optimize files, improve media loading times, and preload caching, links, DNS requests, and fonts. While many of these settings seem very minor at first glance, such as “minify CSS/JS files” - each of which removes whitespace and comments to reduce the sizes of CSS (cascading style sheets) and JS (JavaScript) files - page load speed is often dramatically hampered or boosted by changes to a vast number of small settings just like these. 

One of WP Rocket's biggest benefits is that it addresses many of the issues identified by PageSpeed Insights. Since page load speed likely factors into search engine results ranking, WP Rocket’s performance improvements directly enhance our clients’ SEO status.

3. Imagify

It’s no secret that great imagery can absolutely carry a website’s impact. Whether refined iconography or high-resolution photography is on the menu, the visual content of your website does as much to drive traffic as the written content, especially these days. However, the visuals can prove to be a rather heavy lift for your page load speed. So how do we offset the page load “cost” for this valuable asset on a WordPress website? Well, with a plugin, of course!

Our team likes to use a premium plugin called Imagify, which conveniently integrates with WP Rocket to automatically optimize images. Imagify’s own website boasts that it’s the “simplest image optimization tool to improve web performance and save time.” And indeed, with a single click, Imagify resizes, compresses, and converts weighty images into WebP and AVIF formats, reclaiming precious seconds of page load speed without sacrificing image quality. 

4. WP Migrate

Though it doesn’t sound super sexy, WP Migrate is one of the most useful and reliable plugins our team frequently uses. We use it mainly for local development, as it allows developers to push/pull the database, media, themes, and plugins between WordPress sites with minimal-to-zero friction. This lets them pull the latest site state onto their local machines to make changes to a live site. 

It can also be helpful when migrating a site from a development site to a production site, though we typically use WP Engine's “copy site” feature for this if the site is hosted there. Though it’s not the most exciting plugin out there, it’s stable, well-supported, and almost a necessity for WordPress website overhauls. 

5. Yoast SEO Premium

Unlike most of the plugins on our list, Yoast is targeted toward content managers and other non-dev users rather than developers. Our team likes this one because it’s relatively simple to install and doesn’t bog down WordPress websites like many similar plugins. 

Our developers recommend Yoast for many clients who will manage their websites independently post-launch. It simplifies the management of meta titles, descriptions, and images during page content creation. The premium version includes a redirect manager, which automatically sets redirects whenever you change a URL; alternatively, you can manually set redirects to prevent SEO-pesky 404 error messages.

Yoast also helps content managers and creators optimize for up to five keywords per page, identifies orphaned content, and more, helping SEOs dot all their i’s and cross all their t’s.

6. And one to grow on, accessiBe

Hey, look, a bonus list item! Whoo-hoo! 

Because we heavily value accessibility as a company, both for ethical and business reasons, it’s important for us to adhere to the latest from the WCAG without additional stress on our team or clients. 

accessiBe helps us keep our clients’ WordPress websites inclusive for all users by auditing them against the latest accessibility standards and making recommendations. Armed with a comprehensive report of accessibility issues, our developers can then request design or content changes and implement code changes that keep our clients’ websites a WCAG-compliant and user-friendly experience for all.

The future of WordPress plugins

WordPress will undoubtedly continue to expand its plugin library as it absorbs ingenious contributions from third-party developers and builds its own. We look forward to seeing how it continues to grow to meet the myriad needs of today’s web surfers, as it has reliably done for the last two decades. From basic blogs to a full eCommerce website builder, WordPress has been serving users' demands for a long time, and we’re proudly here to support our clients who use it.