With so many WordPress plugins on the market, it’s can be hard to know how to create your own package of plugins that you want to be installed on every WordPress site you develop.
When building your first couple of WordPress sites, a lot of people use themes to make the building process easy. This is a fine strategy when starting, but this can end up in too many plugins that slow down the backend and frontend of your website.
5 WordPress Plugins I Always Install
As you become more and more familiar with the functionalities of your WordPress plugins, you will start finding plugins that you feel like you need to install before you can any work.
The WordPress plugins I always install are:
- Yoast SEO
- Advanced Custom Fields
- Custom Post Type UI
- Redirection by John Godley
- Elementor Page Builder
In the rest of the article, I will explain exactly how I use these plugins and how they are able to work together in my WordPress installs.
Yoast SEO
This plugin is one of the best SEO-focused plugins for WordPress because of it’s full and seamless integration with WordPress. Using this tool, you can edit how pages are indexed by Google allowing you to “no-index” pages meaning they won’t be crawled or listed on Google search.
This may not seem useful, but it’s important to no-index content on your website that is irrelevant to keywords you are targeted. The most common pages to no-index in WordPress are author pages and archives.
Yoast gives you full control of the title tags and meta descriptions for your pages. This helps you make sure you are displaying content on Google search that is optimized, not just pulled from the on-page content. Updating your title and meta tags can also help boost ranks or start ranking your website for new keywords.
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
This plugin adds to the existing custom fields functionality inside of WordPress. ACF allows you to create custom fields that can plug directly into the PHP code of your website.
When building any custom WordPress website, ACF is one of my first installs. Most WordPress developers will be familiar with this plugin, whether they love it or hate it.
Custom Post Type UI (CPT UI)
This plugin, much like ACF, is commonly used to add extra Post Types to your WordPress install.
Adding custom post types makes it really easy for people who don’t understand WordPress, to add custom content. With standard WordPress, you only get 1 post type, those being part of the stock blog.
If you want to add more post types to your WordPress install to build out more functionality for other users, CPT UI is exactly the plugin you should use.
Redirection
Whenever I start working on a new client site, I can feel my heart drop when they don’t have Redirection, or a plugin like it, installed on their WordPress site.
This plugin is essential because if you allow it, it can monitor pages and posts that are deleted or changed to ensure that redirects are set in place.
Setting up 301 redirects is an important part of maintaining your SEO ranks, and I did a case study on how skipping 301 redirects can drop traffic to your website.
Elementor Page & Theme Builder
If you aren’t a WordPress developer but you are the one designing the front end of your website, a plugin like Elementor could be a great way for you to easily build the front-end of your WordPress website.
I have used this plugin on several occasions, and I even pay for the Pro version. I like the pro version for its ability to edit WordPress theme structure and their recent release of the Hello Theme has added to the tools that Elementor developers have.
Try These WordPress Plugins Out
These plugins are some of the best WordPress plugins out there, with thousands of reviews and over 100 million installs combined. Try these plugins out on your first WordPress build and let me know how they work out for you!
