Great WordPress Plugins

July 15, 2012 - By

Good help can be so hard to find. That’s how I often feel about plugins. It’s a huge relief to find one that really works as expected, is kept up to date and is easy to use. Here are a few of my favourites.

Two of these are paid plugins, one is free but has extra paid modules. Paying for plugins is actually a good thing. It means there is a reason for those developers to keep their product up to date. For my clients I prefer this to the free plugins – you end up paying for those in blood, sweat and tears anyways.

1. Gravity Forms – Hands down the best contact form plugin ever. It may be overkill for the average form, but if you’ve got the dev version you should use it everywhere! This plugin does more than just email the contact form, it also stores the entires in the database. There are powerful notification tools, conditional logic, and it can even post the form directly into your posts feed. I have a feeling I only know about the tip of the iceberg here.

2. WPML – This is a fantastic plugin for making multilingual WordPress sites. It will require a bit of work to be smooth with any theme and plugins, but this is way better than alternative language management plugins, or worse having two sites to manage.

3. Advanced Custom Fields – Custom Fields are one of the most powerful things about WordPress, arguably the most defining feature that makes it more than a blogging platform. ACF makes these more usable and obvious for clients. No longer will you be at the mercy of spelling to get your content working properly. Lovely.

4. wp-dbmanager – this plugin has saved my skin a couple times. It makes backups of your database to files on the server, and can email a copy to you as well. If something terrible happens to your site (eg. a hacker gets into your Gridserver somehow messes up thousands of sites), you have a solid fallback. This is not a paid plugin – and here’s the problem with that: this plugin is no longer developed. I’m hoping to find an alternative to this soon.

Have any brilliant WordPress plugins that you highly recommend?!

Categorized in:

This post was written by ArleyM