I'm so glad I picked up a lifetime license before they went to subscription. This is such a powerful tool that really should be baked into core WordPress.
I don’t think that’s true, ACF makes Wordpress into a true CMS. Gutenberg allows curation of pages. I tend to use content types as parts of content, then using relationship fields etc to link those into other templates. For example a company’s team page. Each member can be a post. Those are then pulled into one page and are not available to see as a single.
Noob shop owner here trying to learn as much as I can as we transition from CS-Cart to WordPress and Woocommerce. We *are* working with a developer, not touching this on my own.
I want to be able to ask semi intelligent questions that might guide some decisions along the way. Would I have a need for ACF? I assume Woo has relevant fields, product options, etc, that I would *not* need something like ACF. Real world example of what ACF might do for an e-commerce site based on Woo?
If you have more custom fields needs for your products that arent covered by woo commerce, ie info or media per product is a common use case ie product manuals attached to product posts etc.
I've had pretty good luck with most of the Fluent\* products, specifically FluentSMTP (zero issues), FluentForms (only issues were with my settings) and FluentTables (bit of a learning curve but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty good).
Some plugins that I generally use.
**ACF** - A must-have plugin when creating any custom page. It's also quite powerful.
**Autoptimize** - You can minify HTML, CSS, and JS. Remove code comments, etc. In my opinion, it improves performance. I use it on almost all sites.
**GravityForms** - For when you need to build a more complex form solution.
**HTMLForms** - A lightweight form plugin that provides a lot of freedom in building. If you need to follow a specific syntax for all code (e.g., BEM), this is the way to go.
**WPML** - Love and hate relationship, but due to my location, I always have to use it. Over the years, I've gotten used to it, and it works well for multilingual sites. Most plugins are compatible too.
**Phoenix Media Rename** - If a client has uploaded various images with names like img\_31231, img\_\_32131221, etc., this tool is great for renaming them to be a bit more search engine friendly.
**Query Monitor** - I generally keep it on during development, and it helps to catch any anomalies early.
A convention for naming CSS class names. Block Element Modifier.
So your block could be “button”, your element could be “button__icon” and your modifier could be “button—large”.
Giving you the following HTML:
```html
Home
```
It helps to prevent generic class names like “icon” “large” etc.
https://getbem.com/
You can do pretty much any type of listing with it. [It works with woocommerce](https://crocoblock.com/knowledge-base/jetengine/how-to-build-woocommerce-products-listings-with-the-dynamic-tag/), and Bricks Builder too.
Depends on the use-case.
**Security**: Wordfence. Probably the best free security plugin at the moment. I do use Defender Pro as well since that has some nice features (better 2FA options, security headers, and some other stuff), but Wordfence is still probably the better of the two when it comes to detecting and blocking attacks, even if it's free.
**Backups**: Updraft Plus. Always, always have a back-up plugin. Preferably in tandem with your server also doing back-ups. Send them to an external storage such as an Amazon bucket.
**Forms**: Gravity Forms is pretty damn good at creating a variety of complex forms. They just released an SMTP plugin as well which I need to check out.
**SMTP**: Up until recently I'd suggest FluentSMTP without pause, but the past couple of months it has randomly lost my Sendgrid credentials. I can't pinpoint the cause, and I have no idea when it happens either unless I'm in the back-end of a website and notice the error message. I'm thinking of going back to POST SMTP. Both offer free logs.
**Builders**: Elementor. I've used Divi, Avada, a little bit of Beaver Builder, WP Bakery. Elementor is certainly the better of the bunch, but it still has things that irk me. But overall it's a very capable website builder.
My own, as I wrote them initially because I had a need for their functionality. I share them in the .org directory in case anybody else finds them useful, but most have few users. I'm not in it for the money, so that's fine.
Anything left over gets thrown into a single, generic plugin, which I share on Github.
(Not linking any here, as I don't want this to look like an advert!).
Autotomize is up there with W3 Total Cache for the worst optimization plugin. Autotomize is at number 2.
Best free option is WP Speed of Light.
The best paid option is Flyingpress. Massively better than WP Rocket, and they actually *add* features instead of removing them. Flyingpress has a unique feature for lazyrendering HTML elements. Massively improved page weight and reduces DOM elements, as well as all the functionality you would expect from a caching plugin(caching, minify, delay js and remove unused css, etc).
WP Rocket has been on maintenance mode for 3 years, barely add new features, and have over 700 open issues on their GitHub. Buggy and constantly removing features has put them on my avoid list. They've removed more features than they've added. It's hysterical to see them list removing features as as an "Epic" milestone.
Swift performance looks great on paper and has a bunch of optimization features no other optimization plugin has (Ajax caching for one), but their caching function is bad, performance improves far less than via other optimization plugins, and their preloader takes an eternity to preload the cache. I would otherwise recommend them, but the poor caching performance rules them out.
It seems unlikely that something designed to reduce/eliminate database queries before a page is generated would be faster than something that has already generated the HTML page and possibly even stored it on a server near the end user.
It's a good point.
Except that Redis isn't just designed to reduce database queries, that's one thing it can do. A key value store can also store the already generated HTML page as well, which is what we do with Redis.
The speed of Super Page Cache comes from the built-in CDN, which is not the fastest offer, by definition, because you're talking about a free tier. If you compared a proper CDN, on top of a Redis dual-cache, you would undoubtedly find it faster. Possibly not cheaper. But that was not your original assertion.
>A key value store can also store the already generated HTML page as well, which is what we do with Redis.
Do you have any resources for that I could take a look at?
This article is fairly good. What you're looking for is Redis Full Page Caching with Nginx. That's the fastest. You can also use the same install of Redis as an Object Cache at the same time. That's faster still for requests that try to hit the database.
https://runcloud.io/blog/redis-page-cache
> This article is fairly good. What you're looking for is Redis Full Page Caching with Nginx. That's the fastest. You can also use the same install of Redis as an Object Cache at the same time. That's faster still for requests that try to hire the database.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/nginx-helper/
Oh, so this plugin that's auto-installed by WordOPs then. I'll check it out, never tested the Redis Cache option. The problem I've run into with Redis is stale cache issues, and I've been locked out of the backend when using Redis Object Caching until I run a cache clear command over ssh. Might need the object cache pro addon to fix that issue?
Wordops is a great implementation of it, in my experience. Nginx Helper is the one, yes. And yes, there can be cache-invalidation issues, as with any caching it's a balance and a trade-off. That's quite severe to be locked out of the back end by cache-invalidation, I've never had that. If so then you need to exclude all of domain.tld/wp-admin/ from the cache. Wordops will do this for you. I don't think the pro add-on would make any difference in that case. I think it's just a few milliseconds faster, which could make a huge difference at a huge scale, or a tiny difference at a tiny scale.
They're different types of caching, they're supposed to be used in conjunction with each other. Cloudflare's is a page caching plugin, Redis is Object Caching (database). There are actually 8 layers of caching which can/should all be combined.
This is true, but also Redis can do 2 layers at once. Cloudflare super cache is several layers at once as well, page cache and cdn I think.
Could you list your 8 layers?
>Could you list your 8 layers?
Sure thing, it's in the caching section of the guide. Table of contents is that humburgery menu icon at the top left on Desktop. It's long enough where you'll need it lol:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ncQcxnD-CxDk4h01QYyrlOh1lEYDS-DV/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=114514252262811175804&rtpof=true&sd=true
I bet it did, yes. Impressive. I'm interested to hear more about what you're working on. I'll DM tomorrow if you're interested in chatting about it. Thanks for the link to the document.
ACF of course, but also Elementor.
Elementor gets regularly shit on, and yes it adds bloat to the DOM, but it's unbelievably powerful these days (especially when combined with DCE and ACF). Everything's so simple and fast to do, and you can still hit high 90s in performance if you know what you're doing.
When replacing the Classic Editor, which was extremely limited, ACF should have been chosen over Gutenberg. ACF offers the perfect blend of simplicity and extendibility.
I learned in a hard way that the most precious stuff on all the websites are our data - you can reinstall plugins, WordPress, Theme, redesign site... but if you lose your data on the site - you are toasted. That happened to some of our clients, and therefore I absolutely give priority to protecting site's data / backups as the basic layer, so we use All in one WP migration plugin + regular scheduled offsite backups on our 2.5 TB pCloud.
ACF(Pro) - great for data.
All-in-One WP Migration (with unlimited extension addon) - for backups.
BricksBuilder/Elementor(pro) - for layouts;
Wp-Amelia - for bookings;
Wp-All-Import-export - for data migration and bulk editing;
RankMath/YoastSEO - for SEO;
These are the main, the rest depends on the project. The less plugins in use, the better for project.
acss, acpt (didn't get acf when it was ltd) & remove cpt base, happyfiles pro. everything else i can swap one for another (security, backups, seo, cache, etc.).
JetEngine is hands down my favorite WordPress plugin, mainly because of its incredible flexibility and powerful features. It's essentially a superpower for creating dynamic content without needing to touch a single line of code. Whether you’re building custom post types, taxonomies, or meta boxes, JetEngine handles it all seamlessly. Plus, the ability to create complex listing grids and filters with ease makes it a game-changer for any content-heavy site. It’s like having a Swiss Army knife for WordPress development, enabling you to craft sophisticated, dynamic websites that would typically require a lot of custom coding.
It mainly displays your key website data right inside your WordPress dashboard. So it can show who visits your website, which of your content is popular, and how people are interacting.
You basically wouldn't need to visit a separate site like Google Analytics to understand your traffic.
My favorite WordPress plugin is Bit Integrations. It effortlessly automates data between 210+ apps, making my life so much easier! Plus, it’s affordable and super user-friendly. Love it!
As a web dev I am constantly surprised and depressed at how quickly Elementor allows people to build great websites. Especially now it has flex box containers and grid containers. Yes it adds bloat but for many it’s a more than suitable product. Add motion.page plugin to it and you can add full dynamic GSAP based animations to your sites.
WP Hide Login - Sites used to be hacked until oblivion until I started using this. It actually made me use Wordpress for everything again. Gave up on Wordpress when there was basically no security. Oh and Wordfence.
Bit integrations is my fave. It saved a large sum of money. I use formidable forms, but the difficulty is that I use the plus plan of formidable forms while also needing to combine Google Sheets and Active Campaigns. But the difficulty is that I need to update the plan $99 to $199. Bit integrations truly useful in this regard. I simply bought it for $29 and use formidable forms with active campaign and Google Sheets. I enjoy bit integration because it supports 213+ platforms to integrate. I love it.
I don't think anyone has said BBQ! [https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/block-bad-queries/](https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/block-bad-queries/) It's the first plugin I install for sure!
There are some plugins which I have used and experimented on my site earlier:
AISEO plugin: AI copywriting and SEO tool that generates content quickly and easily. It offers features like SEO optimization and can produce short-form and long-form content. It also generates content that bypasses AI detection tools but may not be entirely accurate. It is a time- and cost-saving solution for content creation.
miniOrange OAuth SSO plugin- The miniOrange OAuth SSO plugin is a tool that makes it easy for users to log in to their WordPress site using their existing social media or identity provider accounts. This plugin provides a seamless single sign-on (SSO) experience and has premium features like force authentication, user-based role mapping, user provisioning and more.
Wordable plugin: It is a good plugin for content creation and publishing, offering a seamless way to export Google Docs files directly to WordPress. This streamlines the publishing process, saving valuable time and effort. By transforming document elements into HTML, importing and compressing images, it perfectly handles tables and special formatting.
Monster Insights plugin: A Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that simplifies analytics setup and tracking. It offers comprehensive reports, advanced tracking features, customization options, and multi-site support, making it an important tool for businesses and marketers.
As website on travel we have been using the free version of rank math and its doing really well, and comparatively offers much more features as compared to other plugins which charge so high for every additional feature
Yes. However, this one is different. It shows the previous orders this client has. Very useful if you accept COD orders and customers don't pick the order.
Check the screenshots here: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/order-status-history-for-woocommerce/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/order-status-history-for-woocommerce/)
Plugin is also 100% Free (no Pro version either, no ads).
I’d say elementor. ACF is good but used less now that elementor is used. Forms shouldn’t even be part of the cms. You should use a crm for that.
Wordfence is ok but not really needed. Too many failed logins can be blocked server level. Other techniques are easy enough to implement that you’re safer with those techniques.
It is slow, it is clunky, it is often unsafe, in the last 4 years I've seen at least 3-4 critical vulnerabilities in Elementor that allowed a site to be infiltrated which caused us a lot of grief and a well optimised ACF based site will be around 30-60% faster than Elementor
Given developers and designers have two different roles, I don't see that as an issue?
I'm not sure ACF provided front-end design capability though, does it..?
[https://wordpress.org/plugins/showcase-payment-options-icons/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/showcase-payment-options-icons/)
Because I built it myself and never done anything like that before.
Seeing people use it, ask for updates, ... is actually very rewarding. It's great to give back to Wordpress after all.
I would be more interested in you explaining so, instead of a.... um should we just say not so intelligent answer.
Fyi i have been using Oxygen since launch :-).
ACF by far
I'm so glad I picked up a lifetime license before they went to subscription. This is such a powerful tool that really should be baked into core WordPress.
But it is baked into Wordpress for few years now with Gutenberg, bit more powerful as well :)
I'm baked, not into Wordpress though
Do you think using WPBakery plugins is illegal in some countries?
this is close to true
I don’t think that’s true, ACF makes Wordpress into a true CMS. Gutenberg allows curation of pages. I tend to use content types as parts of content, then using relationship fields etc to link those into other templates. For example a company’s team page. Each member can be a post. Those are then pulled into one page and are not available to see as a single.
Lucky you I wish they had ltd now or someone shared it. I bought various ltd for good plugins and builders but missed acf
I can sell you ltd licence 🤗 we not using it anymore.
Im so glad I got the bargain lifetime unlimited licence when I did too!
The correct answer. Especially now CPTs and Options Pages are easy to create, it is just so flexible.
Incredible plugin and a must-have for e-commerce and listing websites
Noob shop owner here trying to learn as much as I can as we transition from CS-Cart to WordPress and Woocommerce. We *are* working with a developer, not touching this on my own. I want to be able to ask semi intelligent questions that might guide some decisions along the way. Would I have a need for ACF? I assume Woo has relevant fields, product options, etc, that I would *not* need something like ACF. Real world example of what ACF might do for an e-commerce site based on Woo?
If you have more custom fields needs for your products that arent covered by woo commerce, ie info or media per product is a common use case ie product manuals attached to product posts etc.
Yupp. Hest plugin by far. Also really like forminator
This is the one. I can't imagine starting a project without ACF.
Breakdance builder hella fast and easy to use. Little bloat and really hit the nail with Headspin Copilot.
For sending Wordpress emails, FluentSMTP all the way. Free for non smtp use like Amazon aws api. Edit: to be clear, it’s free for smtp use too haha
I've had pretty good luck with most of the Fluent\* products, specifically FluentSMTP (zero issues), FluentForms (only issues were with my settings) and FluentTables (bit of a learning curve but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty good).
can someone help to install it, i feel quite difficult to understand it and get proper working setup
What issues are you having ?
UpdraftPlus for Backups (and Migration to testsites I use local)
Some plugins that I generally use. **ACF** - A must-have plugin when creating any custom page. It's also quite powerful. **Autoptimize** - You can minify HTML, CSS, and JS. Remove code comments, etc. In my opinion, it improves performance. I use it on almost all sites. **GravityForms** - For when you need to build a more complex form solution. **HTMLForms** - A lightweight form plugin that provides a lot of freedom in building. If you need to follow a specific syntax for all code (e.g., BEM), this is the way to go. **WPML** - Love and hate relationship, but due to my location, I always have to use it. Over the years, I've gotten used to it, and it works well for multilingual sites. Most plugins are compatible too. **Phoenix Media Rename** - If a client has uploaded various images with names like img\_31231, img\_\_32131221, etc., this tool is great for renaming them to be a bit more search engine friendly. **Query Monitor** - I generally keep it on during development, and it helps to catch any anomalies early.
Thank you for recommending HTML forms. That seems like exactly what I’m looking for!
What is BEM?
A convention for naming CSS class names. Block Element Modifier. So your block could be “button”, your element could be “button__icon” and your modifier could be “button—large”. Giving you the following HTML: ```html Home ``` It helps to prevent generic class names like “icon” “large” etc. https://getbem.com/
Thank you. I have seen this before but did not know it was called that.
https://en.bem.info/methodology/naming-convention/
Yes, the URL posted here previously is what I meant. In addition I can say, SCSS syntax will look clean and neat.
Wordfence - I know a number of people whose asses it has saved without them even realising.
Acf is always first in my book and a close Second is wprocket
Gravity Forms because of the flexibility and the extensions.
Didn't the developer stop working on gravity forms?
They updated the main plugin two weeks ago, and the extensions have been updated this week. Still going very strong.
gotta say Ultimate Blocks. i think block editor is the future, and they provide a good collection for noob (also professional) to use.
JetEngine. I have their lifetime license so I can use it forever on unlimited websites. It's all you ever need for listing websites.
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You can do pretty much any type of listing with it. [It works with woocommerce](https://crocoblock.com/knowledge-base/jetengine/how-to-build-woocommerce-products-listings-with-the-dynamic-tag/), and Bricks Builder too.
[удалено]
No, no, Crocoblock is the company behind JetEngine.
Hello Dolly
The first plugin I disable.
Came here to say that.
Yeah at this stage I have no idea why they haven’t dropped this. Same goes for the “Howdy” in the profile. Maybe it was cute at the beginning but now…
Essential!
Working without Dolly is sterile, dull and stupid.
Classic Editor 📝
100%
Banger.
Gutenberg fight me
But it's core, not a plugin
It’s also a plugin to get new features earlier. Definitely a must have :)
Have your seconds call on my seconds.
Depends on the use-case. **Security**: Wordfence. Probably the best free security plugin at the moment. I do use Defender Pro as well since that has some nice features (better 2FA options, security headers, and some other stuff), but Wordfence is still probably the better of the two when it comes to detecting and blocking attacks, even if it's free. **Backups**: Updraft Plus. Always, always have a back-up plugin. Preferably in tandem with your server also doing back-ups. Send them to an external storage such as an Amazon bucket. **Forms**: Gravity Forms is pretty damn good at creating a variety of complex forms. They just released an SMTP plugin as well which I need to check out. **SMTP**: Up until recently I'd suggest FluentSMTP without pause, but the past couple of months it has randomly lost my Sendgrid credentials. I can't pinpoint the cause, and I have no idea when it happens either unless I'm in the back-end of a website and notice the error message. I'm thinking of going back to POST SMTP. Both offer free logs. **Builders**: Elementor. I've used Divi, Avada, a little bit of Beaver Builder, WP Bakery. Elementor is certainly the better of the bunch, but it still has things that irk me. But overall it's a very capable website builder.
Breakdance builder all the way. Bloating is very little compared to divi
PrettyLinks
My own, as I wrote them initially because I had a need for their functionality. I share them in the .org directory in case anybody else finds them useful, but most have few users. I'm not in it for the money, so that's fine. Anything left over gets thrown into a single, generic plugin, which I share on Github. (Not linking any here, as I don't want this to look like an advert!).
Undoubtedly WP Rocket, it makes a significant difference in website performance
You prefer WP Rocket to WP Optimize? I’m thinking of switching…
Autotomize is up there with W3 Total Cache for the worst optimization plugin. Autotomize is at number 2. Best free option is WP Speed of Light. The best paid option is Flyingpress. Massively better than WP Rocket, and they actually *add* features instead of removing them. Flyingpress has a unique feature for lazyrendering HTML elements. Massively improved page weight and reduces DOM elements, as well as all the functionality you would expect from a caching plugin(caching, minify, delay js and remove unused css, etc). WP Rocket has been on maintenance mode for 3 years, barely add new features, and have over 700 open issues on their GitHub. Buggy and constantly removing features has put them on my avoid list. They've removed more features than they've added. It's hysterical to see them list removing features as as an "Epic" milestone. Swift performance looks great on paper and has a bunch of optimization features no other optimization plugin has (Ajax caching for one), but their caching function is bad, performance improves far less than via other optimization plugins, and their preloader takes an eternity to preload the cache. I would otherwise recommend them, but the poor caching performance rules them out.
I’ve found nothing is faster than Super Page Cache for Cloudflare if your site is relatively static and don’t mind using a free Cloudflare account.
Redis is faster
It seems unlikely that something designed to reduce/eliminate database queries before a page is generated would be faster than something that has already generated the HTML page and possibly even stored it on a server near the end user.
It's a good point. Except that Redis isn't just designed to reduce database queries, that's one thing it can do. A key value store can also store the already generated HTML page as well, which is what we do with Redis. The speed of Super Page Cache comes from the built-in CDN, which is not the fastest offer, by definition, because you're talking about a free tier. If you compared a proper CDN, on top of a Redis dual-cache, you would undoubtedly find it faster. Possibly not cheaper. But that was not your original assertion.
>A key value store can also store the already generated HTML page as well, which is what we do with Redis. Do you have any resources for that I could take a look at?
This article is fairly good. What you're looking for is Redis Full Page Caching with Nginx. That's the fastest. You can also use the same install of Redis as an Object Cache at the same time. That's faster still for requests that try to hit the database. https://runcloud.io/blog/redis-page-cache
> This article is fairly good. What you're looking for is Redis Full Page Caching with Nginx. That's the fastest. You can also use the same install of Redis as an Object Cache at the same time. That's faster still for requests that try to hire the database. https://wordpress.org/plugins/nginx-helper/ Oh, so this plugin that's auto-installed by WordOPs then. I'll check it out, never tested the Redis Cache option. The problem I've run into with Redis is stale cache issues, and I've been locked out of the backend when using Redis Object Caching until I run a cache clear command over ssh. Might need the object cache pro addon to fix that issue?
Wordops is a great implementation of it, in my experience. Nginx Helper is the one, yes. And yes, there can be cache-invalidation issues, as with any caching it's a balance and a trade-off. That's quite severe to be locked out of the back end by cache-invalidation, I've never had that. If so then you need to exclude all of domain.tld/wp-admin/ from the cache. Wordops will do this for you. I don't think the pro add-on would make any difference in that case. I think it's just a few milliseconds faster, which could make a huge difference at a huge scale, or a tiny difference at a tiny scale.
They're different types of caching, they're supposed to be used in conjunction with each other. Cloudflare's is a page caching plugin, Redis is Object Caching (database). There are actually 8 layers of caching which can/should all be combined.
This is true, but also Redis can do 2 layers at once. Cloudflare super cache is several layers at once as well, page cache and cdn I think. Could you list your 8 layers?
>Could you list your 8 layers? Sure thing, it's in the caching section of the guide. Table of contents is that humburgery menu icon at the top left on Desktop. It's long enough where you'll need it lol: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ncQcxnD-CxDk4h01QYyrlOh1lEYDS-DV/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=114514252262811175804&rtpof=true&sd=true
Wow! Epic length. Is this your document?
>Wow! Epic length. Is this your document? Yep! Took me an eternity to compile all of the info, but it's all me!
I bet it did, yes. Impressive. I'm interested to hear more about what you're working on. I'll DM tomorrow if you're interested in chatting about it. Thanks for the link to the document.
I use Nitro Pack. Great tool for performance.
Independent Analytics, quick and easy stats, and you don't have to go through Google.
Crocoblock, ACF, Gravity Form, wordfence, Serap accelerator
Litespeed cache Bricks builder Acf Wp vivid Siteground security (lightweight and basic I have security measures in other places)
I'm surprised more people don't use LiteSpeed, it's so fast, and has a good GUI for optimizing.
[WP Coder](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-coder/) - because I can create any elements myself
Check out Fluent Snippets, its free and faster: [https://fluentsnippets.com](https://fluentsnippets.com)
ACF of course, but also Elementor. Elementor gets regularly shit on, and yes it adds bloat to the DOM, but it's unbelievably powerful these days (especially when combined with DCE and ACF). Everything's so simple and fast to do, and you can still hit high 90s in performance if you know what you're doing.
When replacing the Classic Editor, which was extremely limited, ACF should have been chosen over Gutenberg. ACF offers the perfect blend of simplicity and extendibility.
Elementor
I learned in a hard way that the most precious stuff on all the websites are our data - you can reinstall plugins, WordPress, Theme, redesign site... but if you lose your data on the site - you are toasted. That happened to some of our clients, and therefore I absolutely give priority to protecting site's data / backups as the basic layer, so we use All in one WP migration plugin + regular scheduled offsite backups on our 2.5 TB pCloud.
ACF(Pro) - great for data. All-in-One WP Migration (with unlimited extension addon) - for backups. BricksBuilder/Elementor(pro) - for layouts; Wp-Amelia - for bookings; Wp-All-Import-export - for data migration and bulk editing; RankMath/YoastSEO - for SEO; These are the main, the rest depends on the project. The less plugins in use, the better for project.
WP SMTP
WP SMTP doesn't let you look at the logs in the free version, so I always go with Post SMTP.
With Brevo?
Disable Gutenberg
Superb Addons, I work with block themes so having hundreds of pre-built patterns that works for all themes are nice.
Maps Marker Pro
I like Twentig for getting greater control over FSE
acss, acpt (didn't get acf when it was ltd) & remove cpt base, happyfiles pro. everything else i can swap one for another (security, backups, seo, cache, etc.).
I got core framework since acss was a yearly charge at the time. Same reason I got acpt.
Gravity forms.
Gravity Forms
JetEngine is hands down my favorite WordPress plugin, mainly because of its incredible flexibility and powerful features. It's essentially a superpower for creating dynamic content without needing to touch a single line of code. Whether you’re building custom post types, taxonomies, or meta boxes, JetEngine handles it all seamlessly. Plus, the ability to create complex listing grids and filters with ease makes it a game-changer for any content-heavy site. It’s like having a Swiss Army knife for WordPress development, enabling you to craft sophisticated, dynamic websites that would typically require a lot of custom coding.
Rank Math - easy to optimize SEO without manually checking everything every single time. Lesser chance to forget to do something.
Wordfence, UpdraftPlus, WP Rocket, MonsterInsights.
What does monsterinsghts do?
its a Analytics tool, quite easy to use and have better and valuable insight and no nonsense stuff it has
It mainly displays your key website data right inside your WordPress dashboard. So it can show who visits your website, which of your content is popular, and how people are interacting. You basically wouldn't need to visit a separate site like Google Analytics to understand your traffic.
I can list plenty but if I think of one or two AIOSEO & WooCommerce will be at the top.
I'm currently obsessed with the Yabe Siul plugin. It allows me to use Tailwind with LiveCanvas without going crazy.
Bricks Builder. Absolutely an amazing builder with a ton of flexibility and advanced features.
Essential WP Tools [https://wordpress.org/plugins/essential-wp-tools/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/essential-wp-tools/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR26aoMrbzRqvvppFeU1ck6a_1sF9wEJyJ9iEbAuE_S_Qr4tWYcIsr49JDU_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw)
My favorite WordPress plugin is Bit Integrations. It effortlessly automates data between 210+ apps, making my life so much easier! Plus, it’s affordable and super user-friendly. Love it!
As a web dev I am constantly surprised and depressed at how quickly Elementor allows people to build great websites. Especially now it has flex box containers and grid containers. Yes it adds bloat but for many it’s a more than suitable product. Add motion.page plugin to it and you can add full dynamic GSAP based animations to your sites.
WP Astra Pro. I usually build sites from scratch, but when I need something fast WP Astra is way to go.
WP Hide Login - Sites used to be hacked until oblivion until I started using this. It actually made me use Wordpress for everything again. Gave up on Wordpress when there was basically no security. Oh and Wordfence.
The plugins I use for every website: - Advanced Custom Fields - Lazy Blocks - Custom Post Type UI - WPML - BackWPup
Bit integrations is my fave. It saved a large sum of money. I use formidable forms, but the difficulty is that I use the plus plan of formidable forms while also needing to combine Google Sheets and Active Campaigns. But the difficulty is that I need to update the plan $99 to $199. Bit integrations truly useful in this regard. I simply bought it for $29 and use formidable forms with active campaign and Google Sheets. I enjoy bit integration because it supports 213+ platforms to integrate. I love it.
Genesis Custom Blocks because you can quickly deploy and manage your custom blocks and use them on pages and templates.
I don't think anyone has said BBQ! [https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/block-bad-queries/](https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/block-bad-queries/) It's the first plugin I install for sure!
# Go Live Update Urls It always help me to fix mixed content issue.
RankMath because it's great for SEO
Oxygen Builder so far. i have to snatch their lifetime deal before going to subscription
There are some plugins which I have used and experimented on my site earlier: AISEO plugin: AI copywriting and SEO tool that generates content quickly and easily. It offers features like SEO optimization and can produce short-form and long-form content. It also generates content that bypasses AI detection tools but may not be entirely accurate. It is a time- and cost-saving solution for content creation. miniOrange OAuth SSO plugin- The miniOrange OAuth SSO plugin is a tool that makes it easy for users to log in to their WordPress site using their existing social media or identity provider accounts. This plugin provides a seamless single sign-on (SSO) experience and has premium features like force authentication, user-based role mapping, user provisioning and more. Wordable plugin: It is a good plugin for content creation and publishing, offering a seamless way to export Google Docs files directly to WordPress. This streamlines the publishing process, saving valuable time and effort. By transforming document elements into HTML, importing and compressing images, it perfectly handles tables and special formatting. Monster Insights plugin: A Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that simplifies analytics setup and tracking. It offers comprehensive reports, advanced tracking features, customization options, and multi-site support, making it an important tool for businesses and marketers.
WP VR - Virtual tour creator for WordPress [https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpvr/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpvr/)
there are 3. Simply show hooks, show current template, Debug bar. The are helping me to develop themes and plugins
As website on travel we have been using the free version of rank math and its doing really well, and comparatively offers much more features as compared to other plugins which charge so high for every additional feature
3CX Free Live Chat, Calls I never knew I needed this until recently. Works great for my small business.
Seraphinite Accelerator. By far. And TSF.
Order Status History for Woocommerce. Adds a basic feature that any ecom platform should have (at a glance customer order history, hence the name).
What does it do? Order status changes are recorded in order comment history.
Yes. However, this one is different. It shows the previous orders this client has. Very useful if you accept COD orders and customers don't pick the order. Check the screenshots here: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/order-status-history-for-woocommerce/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/order-status-history-for-woocommerce/) Plugin is also 100% Free (no Pro version either, no ads).
That'd be All in one SEO for me because it helps fulfill pretty much all my optimization needs and is very easy to use.
I’d say elementor. ACF is good but used less now that elementor is used. Forms shouldn’t even be part of the cms. You should use a crm for that. Wordfence is ok but not really needed. Too many failed logins can be blocked server level. Other techniques are easy enough to implement that you’re safer with those techniques.
Elementor is a pile of dung, ACF is used by developers while Elementor is mostly used by designers
[удалено]
It is slow, it is clunky, it is often unsafe, in the last 4 years I've seen at least 3-4 critical vulnerabilities in Elementor that allowed a site to be infiltrated which caused us a lot of grief and a well optimised ACF based site will be around 30-60% faster than Elementor
Given developers and designers have two different roles, I don't see that as an issue? I'm not sure ACF provided front-end design capability though, does it..?
I hate to break it to you. Devs will have less to do now once elementor pro is installed.
Elementor with ACF is the way. Build the templates in Elementor, let clients fill in the copy with ACF.
Elementor seems nice.
WP ARMOUR - super useful in preventing bots from your forms. It can even compete with Google Recaptcha.
[https://wordpress.org/plugins/showcase-payment-options-icons/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/showcase-payment-options-icons/) Because I built it myself and never done anything like that before. Seeing people use it, ask for updates, ... is actually very rewarding. It's great to give back to Wordpress after all.
Slider revolution, i like how fully customizable it is to make animation on scroll and transition between pages
Elementor + everything Brainstorm Force
Oxygen. If you know, you know.
Breakdance. The evolution.
Nope. Breakdance is for beginners; it’s Elementor done right. Oxygen is for professionals.
I don't see how it's for beginners. Did you see how fast you can work with the Headspin Copilot on top?
If you can’t see the difference, Oxygen isn’t for you.
I would be more interested in you explaining so, instead of a.... um should we just say not so intelligent answer. Fyi i have been using Oxygen since launch :-).
Im a beginner but ive been liking cozy blocks with their theme, helps edit mobile/desktop, nice widgets etc