These plugins are included by default in our installations

The beauty and power of WordPress is its endless ecosystem of plugins and themes. While of course everything can be solved with custom solutions, it doesn’t always make sense to reinvent the wheel. So whenever possible, we like to lean on plugins that make our lives easier without unnecessarily impacting your website. These are some of my favorite plugins that are (almost) standard in our installations.

With the many projects we take on at Brendly, over time a standard set of things naturally develops that we like to fall back on. As a WordPress website development agency, the same plugins that we love to use come up time and time again. To share that knowledge a bit, I’ve listed my favorite plugins for you:

Our page builder: Elementor Pro

In recent years, one page builder in WordPress has made huge strides and that, of course, is Elementor. Meanwhile, we too have made the step to this page builder and it is thus the basis of our new WordPress projects for us. For us, Elementor offers the possibility – despite its drag-and-drop functionality – to create beautiful custom designs.

In our case, this involves using the paid Pro version of the plugin, which makes more options available. For example, we like using the templating options, Pro widgets for blog posts and built-in forms tool. It serves as a base for every new project we start.

Want to read more about why we use Elementor? Then read this article I wrote about it earlier.

Never oversize photos with Converter for Media

The file size of the images on your website can be disastrous for the speed of your WordPress installation. While we obviously try to take this into account beforehand, it doesn’t always work. Fortunately, there are several plugins that help with that, including one of my favorites: Converter for Media. This plugin automatically converts new images to the WebP file type that is better optimized for the Web.

Those who want to be even more advanced can also use the paid version to get started with the AVIF file format. Regardless of which version you use, this plugin can also help you optimize and resize all existing images. This way you can easily make all of your media library a lot smaller, even if it already contains thousands of images!

New fields and post types with Advanced Custom Fields

WordPress’ posts and pages system has been the foundation of the platform for years, but we too see that these two types are far from always sufficient. Sometimes you need an extra post type for jobs, employees or cases, for example. Or the posts are sufficient, but you want an extra field to show specific data in your post? In that case, we actually always turn to Advanced Custom Fields.

This popular plugin allows us to create new post types, additional fields and even custom taxonomies with a few clicks, without having to write long pieces of code. For us, this makes the process faster and, in doing so, ensures that we can spend more time and attention on the pages that this information will appear on – which, after all, is ultimately what you want as a customer.

One place for all your snippets with Code Snippets

In addition to the endless amount of plugins and themes, there are also thousands of snippets online to customize your WordPress installation with. Although these snippets are more error-prone than your average plugin, they can be very useful. So to make sure we don’t have to put these snippets in the website source code, I like to use the Code Snippets plugin.

The Code Snippets plugin makes it child’s play to create new snippets and control where they are loaded. That goes for PHP as well as HTML and JavaScript snippets that can further enhance the website. And if something goes wrong in the implementation, you can easily bypass the plugin temporarily with a special URL to disable the misbehaving snippet again.

No surprises with Activity Log

Even when a website is completed, it often remains under development. Especially when an entire team starts working on the website, it can sometimes happen that a page is suddenly gone, a message is renamed or a plugin is suddenly installed. Then I get asked how that happened or who did it.

To avoid having to start a scavenger hunt through the website’s database, I like to use Activity Log. This plugin neatly keeps track of what things are created in the WordPress website, so we can easily see what has happened. Plugins updated, posts modified or users created: all in a clear overview.

Migrate and backup with All-in-One WP Migration

“Just making a quick change” can have far-reaching consequences for your website just like that. Especially when things break down significantly, panic sets in quickly. That’s why I always like to make a thorough backup when I start making big changes. For that, I like to use the All-In-One WP Migration plugin – a plugin that easily runs a full export of your website and offers it as a bundle for download.

This is also the tool we use when we migrate websites from our development environment to the production environment. Or on the contrary, we use it to clone a production environment to a development environment when we are going to do major maintenance. After all, nobody likes to see their website go offline because a semicolon was forgotten somewhere in the code.

Should you be interested in this plugin yourself, note that for larger installations you will probably need the paid Unlimited version of the plugin.

Of course, there are other plugins around the corner in WordPress, depending on your wants and needs on your website. Looking for more advice in which plugins are best for you, or need help with a new website? Then get in touch with me or one of my colleagues – we’re happy to help!