Most Useful WordPress Plugins in 2022
Chigozie Orunta
Senior WordPress Engineer @ X-Team | Enterprise WP, Plugin Development.
Plugins are an invaluable tool for today’s WordPress websites. There are extremely few websites that exist today that do not have some form of plugin added to them to help provide functionality that WordPress doesn’t provide by default.
The following are a couple of plugins I found extremely useful for use for most WordPress site owners & developers:
WordPress is well known for its easy-to-use Classic Editor that provides a simple way of editing and saving posts in WordPress.
Amazingly, WordPress?has made advancements in the way it allows users to add, edit, save posts with the introduction of the Gutenberg Block Editor which gives them a way to drag and drop things into the web pages. However, many WordPress designers still prefer to use and work with the Classic Editor due to its ease of use.
One of the remarkable features of WordPress is its ability to create custom post types to enable site owners to store data that are not part of WordPress’ original type of data such as posts, pages, attachments, and so on. This plugin is extremely useful if you need to store information that WordPress doesn’t support by default. For example, with CPT UI you can store bookings, appointments, hotel reservations, and so on.
A Custom Field provides a way for WordPress site owners to add more info to a post type beyond WordPress’ default title, content, and excerpt. The ACF plugin provides you with a way of capturing custom text, date, time, image, select controls from users that are beyond the capacity of WordPress’ default metadata. An alternative to this is a plugin called Carbon Fields, which developers also find very useful.
Almost everyone who owns or runs a website must have heard of this plugin at some point. Chances are, if you've never heard of WooCommerce, then you might be living under a rock! When it comes to E-Commerce, Carts, Sales, Subscriptions, Coupons, Variable Products, and so on, only one name comes to mind - and that's WooCommerce!!! WooCommerce has it all and much more. The plugin has been around since 2011 and ever since its release has gained more users over time. In 2015, WooCommerce was acquired by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.
Most websites provide a way for customers to send feedback on the quality of their products and services through feedback forms. One of the most common plugins that helps WP designers and developers build forms easily is called Contact Form 7. It provides a way for us to create forms that could have input text fields, text areas, select, file, and checkbox controls. Contact Form 7 also recently launched its sister plugin for capturing sent messages to the WP dashboard so that site owners can read them later. You can create forms using other popular form plugins like Gravity Forms & Ninja Forms, the list is endless.
This plugin comes in handy by making sure your website is fully Search Engine Optimized. In today's world, it is extremely important that your site is fully ready & compliant for indexing by popular search engines and robots. RankMath provides a simple, verbose, and efficient way of getting this done today. I personally prefer it to the more popular Yoast SEO that many WordPress owners have become accustomed to.
Data Security is a very important concept in today’s world. A recurring theme in the WP ecosystem is the hacking of WP sites due to the lack of safety best practices. Fortunately, we have iThemes Security to thank for providing security features that can now help site owners configure stop-gaps and safety protocols to prevent their websites from being hacked. Very convenient and must-have for WP sites.
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Sometimes, you just need your website to load up quickly and avoid the bottlenecks of loading CDN assets afresh for every page access. My favorite for solving this problem is WP Super Cache. It helps you configure site cache settings that help optimize site load times and speed. Other Cache plugins that also come in handy are WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache.
Ever worked with a page builder such as Elementor or Divi and you’d quickly notice that it becomes difficult to replicate UI designs on new pages. A very simple solution to this would be to replicate pages designed already. We can do this quickly and easily by using the Duplicate Pages plugin. It's lightweight and comes in very handy.
A core part of most websites is their ability to send e-mails, newsletters, reminders to clients. WP Mail Bank helps us configure mail server settings, username, the password for SMTP.
By default, WP websites come with REST API endpoints that give users ways of retrieving or scraping data from our website. This poses a problem, especially if our website contains sensitive user data, which we wish to keep private unless authorized. WP Disable REST API does a good job of disabling our default WP REST API as well as authenticating end-points.
Want to add last-minute scripting to your WordPress website? Say no more, Insert Headers and Footers plugin is your best bet for doing this. When I first discovered this plugin I couldn't believe how extremely easy it was to use and ever since, it became one of my favorites.
Here's a plugin that handles database migration perfectly for WordPress site owners without you ever needing to leave your WordPress admin dashboard. You might be wondering why WP Migrate DB Pro? What's so special about it?
Well, it turns out that getting to successfully migrate your live WordPress site to a remote (local) one looks simple and straightforward, but in reality, is a tough nut to crack for most site owners and developers too! Anyone who has ever tried to clone an existing WordPress site or just simply make a backup site of an already existing WP site will tell you that it is by no means an easy feat. You'd have to grapple with MySQL database backups, WP local installation, htaccess and wp_options syncing, uploads folder and so much more.
This is where WP Migrate DB Pro really shines through. With just a click of the button, you can literally clone or make a copy or back up of your existing site on your local machine in minutes. And when you're ready to run your website locally it will just be a spitting image of the replica you have on production.
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So there you have it, folks! Are there other plugins I may have missed? Please let me know in the comments section and I'll be more than happy to add them to the list.
Thanks.