Must use plugins for every WordPress project
As a theme developer on WordPress for 15+ years, I’m going to share which plugins I instantly activate for every new project, and why.
If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll know that WordPress has a love-hate relationship amongst developers. It’s not taken seriously in the developer community (imo), and I think this is because it’s SO easy to get started, install themes, and load up with plugins. But with ease of use, comes great abuse and organizational nightmare.
A WordPress theme built to spec with just essential plugins will have the least dependancies, conflicts, and bloat.
Plugins are not all bad – many provide huge functionality benefits, are constantly maintained, and just wouldn’t make sense to rebuild – WooCommerce for example.
In alphabetical order, these are my most commonly used plugins:
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
Although you can associate extra information with users, posts, pages and media using WordPress API functions such as update_post_meta and update_user_meta, they won’t be visible on the pages you are editing.
ACF gives you the field visibility by predefining custom fields for your post/object types and uses native WordPress functions to save and store the data, meaning you’re not dependent on ACF going forward.
If you’re managing all data through the API, ACF may not be needed, but any site that needs additional fields on any object type will love ACF.
My use cases:
Akismet
Akismet is here to help you battle comment spam. If you have no comments on your site, you can simply delete Akismet (it’s pre-installed on every WordPress install).
I found that Akismet doesn’t handle ALL the spam but it does stop a significant amount.
I’m currently using Akismet with my own honeypot (what is a honeypot?) as well as a keyword blacklist curated by Grant Hutchinson.
Postmark (Or other SMTP plugin)
If your website is sending email, either manually with PHP or using the wp_mail function, you may have noticed they quite often end up in the recipients spam box, or they never reach the recipient.
There are many causes for this, but most commonly:
- Your host or server has PHP disabled
- Your server IP address will be marked as spam or entirely rejected as it lacks authentication or has previously been abused.
Using a dedicated SMTP service to handle your emails is best practice, and you can let them handle deliverability.
Services such as Postmark have an API for you to interface with directly, but with a few clicks and a copy/paste of your API key, the WordPress plugin will begin handling all emails routed through wp_mail (including your contact form plugin).
Postmark is my favorite, but other notable services are:
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
WooCommerce
If you’re running WordPress, and you need e-commerce functionality, there’s just no better option than WooCommerce. It’s a giant. Over 5 million active installs and 150 million downloads (2021) – it’s the most used, the most supported and probably the most stable platform to run your online store.
The best part is the basic plugin is free and open-source. Build additional functionality using the API or purchase extensions through their store.