Plugins are a vital component of WordPress websites. The WordPress base install offers limited capability with the primary features focused on creating page and blog content. Although this is a very important part of every website, there are times when your site may need greater functionality. This could include;
To have a WordPress developer create this functionality from scratch would take a considerable amount of resources in both time and financial investment. For this reason, plugins exist. For a small upfront or yearly cost, you get the functionality you need without needing to worry about development.
Over the years we have amassed a large plugin library that we can use on our client's websites. Everything is legal as we have purchased the appropriate licenses. Clients that join any of our maintenance plans get access to the plugins below.
Please note: some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, which can provide compensation to us at no cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan. These are products we’ve personally used and stand behind.
Page builders are a great tool that allows your website to be built visually and helps clients to easily update content and images.
 | Oxygen Builder is a unique site builder for WordPress that completely removes the use of WordPress themes. Because of this, it creates websites with optimised code that loads fast. It is powerful and full-featured but is targeted toward developers. Visit Oxygen Builder |
 | Bricks Builder is a powerful WordPress theme that has a built-in drag-n-drop visual site builder. It is intuitive and produces clean SEO-friendly code. Like Oxygen Builder, it produces optimised frontend code that loads quickly. Visit Bricks Builder |
 | Zion Builder is a visual site/page builder for WordPress that works alongside your current theme. This is great as it works well with other plugins that require an active theme and support template overrides. Zion Builder is feature rich and is our choice when working with WooCommerce. Visit Zion Builder |
Form builders are a powerful tool that every website can benefit from. They allow sites to capture leads, send form data to third-party services such as Email Marketing Systems, and allow to capture payments and subscriptions. Create powerful forms using darg-n-drop without needing to write any code.
 | Fluent Forms is the mack-daddy of form builders for WordPress. Its capability is truly amazing and the developers are adding new features all the time. The plugin offers a drag-n-drop form builder, integrates directly with many third-party services, calculations, conversational forms, surveys, payments, and many other great features. If you are needing a robust form solution for WordPress, then Fluent Forms Pro is a must. Best of all it’s lightweight and won’t slow down your WordPress site. Visit Fluent Forms Pro |
 | Piotnet Forms is another feature-rich form builder that offers a visual builder to create highly customised forms. Although not as mature as Fluent Forms Pro, it still is a great solution. It offers many integrations with third-party services, conversational forms payments, and a lightweight code base. Visit Piotnet Forms |
 | Paymattic Pro is built by the same developers as Fluent Forms and is a form builder that focuses primarily on creating payment forms. With this key focus, you get features such as tax rates, subscriptions, donations, advanced reporting, and support for many payment gateways. If you need to create simple or complex payment forms, then this is a great plugin to have at your disposal. Visit Paymattic Pro |
Although WordPress offers some great tools when working with content and media, it does lack some helpful features when it comes to organisation and display. This is where plugins can be very helpful.
 | One area that has always been lacking in WordPress has been asset management. By default, all files uploaded to the media manager sit together which makes it difficult to easily sort and find an asset. Happy Files helps solve this issue by allowing users to create folders inside the media manager so files can be grouped together. There are a couple of plugins that achieve a similar thing but Happy Files is by far the best. Happy Files is also able to create image galleries that can be added to your page and blog content. Visit HappyFiles |
| When you add content to your WordPress sites such as blog posts, products, or events, you have limited control over which order they appear on the front end. WordPress offers the typical ordering capabilities of software but for complete custom control of content order, you will need the Post Type Order plugin. Visit Advanced Post Types Order |
 | Tables can be a powerful way to display large volumes of data. By default, WordPress only supports basic tables that must be created manually. Ninja Tables Pro is a fantastic table plugin that allows users to import data from different streams such as Google Sheets, WooCommerce, and your WordPress posts. It also gives you the ability to style your forms and filter form data on the front end so users can quickly find the data they need. Visit Ninja Tables Pro |
 | Mega menus are a great way to create intuitive and visually appealing navigation systems for your WordPress website. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t support these with the base install and would otherwise require a lot of custom coding. Max Mega Menu expands on the WordPress menu functionality and allows the user full flexibility on how they would like to display their website navigation. The plugin allows you to assign icons to menu items, create menu columns, include widgets in dropdowns, and much more. Visit Max Mega Menu |
 | If-So is a simple WordPress plugin, allowing you to add or replace content on your website based on the visitors’ profile or interaction with the site. For example, you can show visitors that come directly from clicking a Google Ad some unique content or show an offer to users who have a certain product in their cart. Setting up conditions requires no coding and works on all WordPress themes and page builders. Visit If-So |
 | WP Social Ninja is an all-in-one social plugin that can display reviews and feeds directly on your website. Display reviews from all your favourite platforms such as Google, Facebook, TrustPilot, Trip Advisor, Amazon, and many more. The plugin gives you complete control over the reviews displayed through powerful filtering. You can also embed your social feeds from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YoutTube. Visit WP Social Ninja |
 | Restricted Content Pro is a membership plugin for WordPress that offers highly customisable subscription levels. It allows you to restrict areas of your website to only paying customers based on subscription levels and has many third-party integrations. It is lightweight and has the ability to be highly customised by WordPress developers. Visit Restricted Content Pro |
 | Tickera is the best way to sell event tickets with your WordPress website. Not only does it sell tickets but it is also capable of attendee management, check-in tracking, and seat allocation. It has its own checkout built-in or you can integrate directly with WooCommerce. Tickera can also be highly customised by developers. Visit Tickera |
Some plugins are purposely built to enhance the base functionality of WordPress’ development APIs. Below are some of the best on the market. These plugins will reduce overall website development time, reflecting cheaper development costs.
 | Custom fields are a great way to capture more information in a WordPress post or page. Unfortunately, the default functionality to do this in WordPress is somewhat limited and doesn’t provide the best user experience. Advanced Custom Fields allows content creators to add unique data in a range of field types such as text, dropdowns, checkboxes, Google Maps, file upload, colour picker, date and time picker, and much more. Fields can be added all over WP including posts, users, taxonomy terms, media, comments, and even custom options pages. You can then display custom field values anywhere on your website. Visit Advanced Custom Feilds |
 | Meta Box is another great plugin that creates custom fields. It is also capable of creating much more including, custom post types, custom taxonomies, frontend template views, Gutenberg blocks, and many other helpful development features. Although not as popular or integrated with other plugins as ACF, it is quickly becoming a popular choice by developers to speed up build time and create backend interfaces that are easy for website admins to use. Visit Metabox |
 | Advanced Scripts is a tool that allows for code to be injected into various areas of your WordPress site. Code can be added to your WordPress site without needing to access the web server and snippets can easily be deactivated when needed. This is perfect to add tracking scripts for third-party services or perhaps display a notification or promotion on the front end of the site for a short period of time. Access to Advanced Scripts could be given to a marketing team so they don’t need to directly modify your site files. This plugin can also be used as a great development tool to change the key functionality and behavior of your website. Visit Advanced Scripts |
 | WPCodeBox is another great tool that allows for code injection. Similar to Advanced Scripts, the main difference between the two is the ability to quickly share and import code snippets across multiple sites. It also has great support with page builders and has the ability to export your code as a native WordPress plugin. Visit WPCodeBox |
 | WP All Import is the best import plugin for WordPress. You can bulk import content into your WordPress site from an XML, CSV, or Excel file with a simple user interface and powerful field mapping. Imports also handle images, categories, custom fields, and support popular plugins such as WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields, Toolset Types, and Gravity Forms. Imports can even be automated through scheduling. Visit WP All Import |
| WP All Export is the counterpart of WP All Import. It allows you to quickly export any data out of your WordPress site. It has powerful filters to control exactly what data gets exported and allows you to rearrange and rename columns and combine fields. WP All Export also has a migration feature that allows you to quickly create an export profile that can be imported into another WordPress site. Visit WP All Export |
Plugins that fall in our Other category are utility plugins that provide powerful functionality to your site that isn’t visible on the front end.
 | SEO is one of the most important aspects of any website and we use the best plugin on the market. SEOPress is a simple, fast, and powerful SEO plugin that will have your website ranking higher. It offers all the Premium SEO features you need in one plugin: WooCommerce SEO, schemas, local SEO, video and news XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs, redirect manager, broken link checker, 404 monitoring and so much more. SEOPress will also display your Google Analytics, and Matomo Analytics stats directly in your WordPress dashboard. Visit SEOPress |
 | WP Rocket is the number 1 WordPress caching plugin. It will decrease your load time in a matter of clicks which will result in better organic SEO rankings, user retention, and higher conversions. It supports popular eCommerce plugins such as WooCommerce and has a full suite of tools dedicated to optimising your website's performance. Visit WP Rocket |
 | UpdraftPlus is the most popular backup plugin for WordPress and for very good reason. It offers great capability and support for cloud storage providers and has a simple restoration process for when things do go wrong. It has great features such as automated schedule backups, off-site cloud storage to popular providers, incremental backups, and much more. UpdraftPlus is a great plugin and is our choice when defining a strategy for offsite backups. Visit UpdraftPlus |
