It’s has almost been a year since I posted about WordPress plugins. So I thought it’s time to update my list of plugins that don’t suck. If you would like to read my previous post click here.
WPIDE
Price: Free
WP rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars
Active Installs: 40,000+
WPide is my favorite plugin by far. It helps me edit our clients sites without FTPing into the server every time I need to make a change. At Nextfly, we have multiple test and live production servers so this plugin saves me a lot of time. Another reason I love WPide is that it color codes html, css, and php. That function has saved more time then I can count. And we all know that in this busy world we live in, we all need a little extra time in the day. When I miss spell something in html or css it will turn black or if I miss a quote the text will turn green.
Advanced Custom Fields Pro
Price: $25 for Personal, $100 for developers
WP rating: 4.9
Active Installs: 1+ million
Advanced Custom Fields is still one of the best plugins out there. It allows you to add extra fields from pages to post to page templates. ACF is the backbone of many of our sites that we develop. I use ACF’s repeater field the most. It allows me to repeat the fields over and over. The best example I can give you is a team page. The team page utilizes image, text, and maybe wysiwyg depending on clients expectations.
WooCommerce
Price: Free
WP rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
Active Installs: 1+ million
WooCommerce is not my favorite plugin to use, but it’s the best eCommerce plugin by far. WooCommerce has one of the biggest community of developers of any WordPress plugin. There are hundreds of themes that support WooCommerce and hundreds of add ons. Almost every payment merchant is supported Woo. The only gripe with Woo is you have to stylize it out of the box. And sometimes Woo lacks simple functionally, but you can easily add it with add on plugins. So, it is still one that I like to use a lot.
Gravity Forms
Price: Personal License $39 year, Developer License $199 year
WP rating: N/A
Active Installs: 1+ million
Gravity Forms is my favorite forms plugin because it just seems to work correctly everytime. It’s very rare to have a problem with Gravity Forms. There are lot of extra support plugins that comes with the developer license that are life savers. You can take one time and recurring payments, submit files, and integrate WooCommerce to sell products. On the last list I had Contact Form 7 as my go to contact form. I dropped CF7 off because when we launch sites from our testing environment to live production some data is stripped so we would have to redo the work. A supporting plugin Contact Form DB has been removed from WordPress because it hasn’t been updated in years. Without CFDB you can’t archive form submissions.
These are some of the plug ins that I use most often and that tend to work. Feel free to check them out and I hope they help, like they have helped our Indianapolis Web Design company.