WordPress Plugins I Can’t Live Without

I work with WordPress on a daily basis. By working within my own sites, setting up new sites, and testing new things, I come across a lot of WordPress tools. As a result, I have a group of WordPress plugins that I’ve come to rely on. There are some that are site specific (like WooCommerce and LearnDash on this site), but there are also those plugins I install on every single WordPress site I set up. Here’s a list of those WordPress plugins in no particular order.

WordPress Plugins That Help with Content

There are a couple that I use to create or enhance the content of my websites. The first is Beaver Builder. Even on custom designed sites, I’ve come to rely on Beaver Builder for fast and easy advanced page creation. I’ve also starting making a full-width page template in my themes to accommodate the page builder. When I need a custom landing page, or something else to help a particular section of a website stand out, Beaver Builder is my go to.

Next up is Yoast SEO. This is the best plugin for gauging how optimized and readable your blog posts and pages are. The keyword analysis will tell you how to make your posts and pages more performant for search engines, and the readability analysis will give you tips to make your posts and pages more human-readable. It’s a win/win. Plus, the plugin is free!

I also always have a contact form on my website. Ninja Forms or Gravity Forms get the job done. Depending on my needs, I’ll pick one or the other (more on that later). Aside from simple contact forms, I need integration with ConvertKit and a couple of other tools I link to funnel contact forms to.

Plugins That Help with Finding Content

I also include a few plugins to better help with content discovery. These are especially helpful as the number of your posts grow or there are particular things you want to share! First up, one of my favorites: Better Click to Tweet. This plugin makes it easy for you to embed tweetable snippets right into your posts and pages. Great for making your content easily sharable, and very easy to use.

In a similar vein, Revive Old Posts is a plugin that will automatically share older content. The free version of this plugin is what I use to make sure older posts see the light of day via Twitter. By tweeting out posts from my 14-year archive, it’s really helped revitalize some of my better posts that were written a long time ago (especially in internet years). It allows you to select specific content, from date ranges to categories and tags. With the paid version, you get even more control.

Finally, there’s Quick Page/Post Redirect. I’m all about custom links, and if they can be managed through a single dashboard within my WordPress site, even better. There are no stats associated, but there are some nice features that can help with your post and page links. I use it primarily for branded/custom links to other websites, but if I ever change the permalink on a post, this plugin can handle that too.

Developer Tools

Finally, there are a couple of plugins I use on the developer side of things. WP Migrate DB Pro is an absolute necessity for me. This plugin is second to none when you need to move databases and files. I use it on essentially every site I work on so I can make changes in a non-production environment, and then easily move everything to a live site.

WP-CLI is another tool I use. It’s not a plugin, per say, but it is HUGE help on every WordPress site I manage.

Originally published on WordPress in One Month’s blog