The Top WordPress Plugins for Developers
WordPress is a powerful content management system that millions of businesses and individuals use to create dynamic websites and blogs. WordPress does come with some basic functionality out-of-the-box, but there are plenty of third-party plugins that can give your site extra functionality or help you with website maintenance tasks, such as backups and upgrades. Whether you’re building or maintaining WordPress sites, it’s important to know the best plugins available. Here are the top seven WordPress plugins every developer should know about.
Jetpack by WordPress
Jetpack is a great all-around plugin that provides website developers with many handy features. It lets you view data and analytics, create photo galleries, and more. If you’re serious about making sure your site gets as many hits as possible, then Jetpack will be an essential tool in your SEO arsenal. Oh—and if you love it so much, why not donate to Jetpack directly? There are plenty of additional features on their way!
Yoast SEO Plugin
The Yoast SEO Plugin enables you to optimize your site with just a few clicks. As one of our favorite SEO plugins, Yoast helps make sure that you follow SEO best practices on every page on your site—seemingly no matter what theme you’re using. With their active community and detailed documentation, it’s clear that they care about providing a high-quality plugin for all users. It’s worth checking out if you want to get started with good SEO principles on your new WordPress site!
VaultPress
Backup plugins are like airbags. They’re one of those things you don’t think about until you need them, at which point they can be a lifesaver. VaultPress is one of my favorites because it saves all your data in multiple locations and automatically updates it every time you publish a new post or page to your site. So, even if your site is hacked, you can restore it quickly. One caveat: VaultPress has a premium option that will keep backups of your non-WordPress sites as well, so if that’s important to you, check out other backup plugins before making up your mind on VaultPress.
Broken Link Checker
Broken links can be detrimental to your site’s performance since visitors expect everything to work as expected. Fortunately, Broken Link Checker is a WordPress plugin that makes it easier to track broken links and fix them. By checking your posts weekly, you’ll reduce broken links on your website and improve user experience. To get started, log into your website admin dashboard, find Settings > Broken Link Checker in your admin menu and enable it by selecting an option from Check posts on these days of the week: and choosing either Sunday or Monday.
Pretty Link Lite
No matter how good a developer is, there’s no way he or she can keep up with all of WordPress’ new and changing features. Even those developers who do their best to stay on top of things will inevitably miss some crucial updates to core functionality. So what happens if you need a developer to edit your site or add something new? You’ll likely have to fork over more money, as every change made without a custom plugin requires extra time and skill. With Pretty Link Lite, you can buy and sell pre-built links between domain names—making it easier for developers, designers, bloggers and anyone else who has built an online presence to monetize it.
BackupBuddy
Just because you don’t want to spend big bucks on a content management system, doesn’t mean that you’re not going to work hard creating your website. It’s important to think about how you’re going to protect all of that time and effort before it’s too late. Luckily, there are plenty of free plugins available for WordPress users who are looking for an easy way to back up their data in case something happens. BackupBuddy is one option; another popular alternative is Updraft Plus. What’s great about these tools is that they give you control over what gets backed up (database files or specific file types). You can even choose whether or not you want your backup stored in a secure offsite location.
Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin is another extremely useful tool that every developer should use. Not only does it simplify your website’s optimization and page indexing, but it also makes sure that Google can find all of your pages quickly. Once installed, you can set up automatic updates through Google Webmaster Tools so that Google always knows when you have a new post or page ready to publish. And, of course, XML Sitemaps helps with internal search engine optimization as well since each one of your posts will be found in addition to any keyword phrases you’ve already included on each post.
Duplicate Page Detection
There’s nothing worse than accidentally creating a duplicate of your website when you’re developing a new section. Thankfully, there are plugins to keep you from making that mistake. Duplicate Page Detection searches your site for other pages with similar content and notifies you of them so that you can fix them before going live. There’s no reason to end up with multiple sites when one will do just fine. And it might be one of those things that keep your company out of legal trouble!
W3 Total Cache Plugin
A caching plugin is a popular option among web developers and website owners who want to squeeze as much performance as possible out of their sites. The free plugin uses static Html files to serve pages quickly, reducing load times. It’s important to note that W3 Total Cache comes with some settings, but it can be an extremely powerful tool when properly utilized. If you’re setting up a new website or trying to speed up your existing one, W3 Total Cache should be on your list of plugins to install. (Instructions are available here)
Gravity Forms – Actionetics Integration (optional, but worth it!)
One of our favorite plugins is Gravity Forms, which helps you create forms without any code. It’s great because you can easily add custom fields to your forms. The best part about Gravity Forms is that it integrates seamlessly with Actionetics, which helps turn visitors into leads and sales. If that isn’t a win-win, I don’t know what is! This integration will allow you to automatically add new subscribers to Actionetics as soon as they complete one of your forms on your site. This way, no one slips through the cracks—and if they do, it’ll be easy for you to follow up and capture them in another way (email or social media).
