Don’t Ignore These Essential Plugins for Building a Great WordPress Website
By: Matt Saunders
Tags: Website Development, Web Development, Coding, Wordpress Plugins, WordPress

Velvet Blues Update URLs

This rather poetically-named plugin lets you dynamically change URLs across your website’s database which is helpful when you migrate environments, such as from localhost to live.

Image credit: plugin author

It won’t, however, update all fields. The WordPress link field in particular is a tricky one to update after moving your website, and to do that you need to manually query the database. (Incidentally if anyone knows a better solution than this, I’m all ears!)

Will you need to pay for it? No.

Formidable

I’ll be honest it took me years to try out this plugin. As a front-end developer, styling forms is always a pain. For ages I used Contact Form 7, then graduated to Caldera before finally discovering Formidable.

Image credit: plugin author

Formidable is one of those plugins that not only delivers quite a lot out of the box, but it’s premium offering is totally worth paying for as well. You can easily create forms with all sorts of fields. You can edit all aspects of the form and you can create sophisticated journeys by triggering specific actions based on user input (do X if Y equals Z). On top of that, the back-end UI isn’t a mess like so many WordPress plugins. Formidable is the only form plugin you need for WordPress.

Will you need to pay for it? There is a free version for building basic forms but the premium options offer a great deal more functionality.

User switching

If your website has multiple users, for example editors and shop customers, sometimes you’re going to need to see things through their eyes.

I used to mess around creating a new user with the appropriate role(s) and then logging in to diagnose problems a client might be having. That is until I discovered the User Switching plugin.

Image credit: plugin author

With this plugin you can simply browse your user list and then “switch” to their account. This essentially gives you access to their account as they would see it. Perfect for spotting problems, answering questions or delivering training.

Will you need to pay for it? No.

Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)

ACF really levels up WordPress. It allows you to attach your own fields to posts, pages and other entities within the system. Without this plugin, WordPress would be little more than a blogging platform, but with ACF you can build out more sophisticated and custom websites.

Image credit: plugin author

I use ACF on every website I build. That’s because I create custom blocks that I attach custom fields to. This means that I can build highly customised components for my client websites. ACF, in conjunction with Gutenberg, is what makes modern WP really powerful.

Will you need to pay for it? The free version is very basic, the PRO version offers substantially more and you’ll almost certainly need to upgrade.

Breadcrumb NavXT

Something that WordPress has never seemed to get the hang of natively, is breadcrumbing. I don’t know if that’s actually a word, but I’m sure you know what I mean.

A breadcrumb trail enables the user to see where they are in the website at any time. I used to use Yoast for this, but Breadcrumb NavXT is more powerful. It lets you define the parent breadcrumb for custom post types, for example, and plays nicely with WP Multisite.

Image credit: plugin author

Will you need to pay for it? No.

CPTUI

Custom post types are another fundamental aspect of building websites with WordPress. Coming from a Drupal background, where you can natively set content types, I was surprised to find that for WP I’d need a plugin (or to edit the functions file).

Custom Post Type UI provides a user interface for creating these post types. What CPTs allow is for users to create specific types of content. So alongside Posts and Pages, you might also have Staff Members or Stores.

Image credit: plugin author

Additional tip: if you’re using CPTs you might note that they don’t sit easily inside the WordPress hierarchy. For example, if you have a page called “Stores” and you want to attach “Store” CPTs to this page, the menu link for “Stores” would not be highlighted when viewing an individual store. In this case, I use a plugin called Custom Menu Item for Custom Post Types.

Will you need to pay for it? No.

Don’t forget the rule: use as few plugins as possible

I’ve seen websites that use dozens and dozens of plugins, often many of which haven’t been updated in months. Each new plugin introduces more code to your website. This makes maintenance trickier and increases the fragility of the codebase. The lesson: every plugin must be considered deeply before adding. Don’t take a casual approach.

But by having a small set of plugins that you rely on regularly to provide much-needed functionality, you can build out new websites more quickly and with greater predictability. This approach, of not being gung ho with plugins, will ensure that you leverage third party code that works for you, rather than against you, in the long term.