WordPress has thousands of Plugins, so many that it can be hard to find the one you are looking for – even if you know it’s name.

From an ease-of-use perspective, this is actually a bad sign. WordPress is supposed to be a customizable software package, and everybody wants to customize their site this way and that – yet even programmers have such a hard time figuring out how to do what they want, that plugins exist to either expand WordPress’s basic functionality, or to perform certain functions outright.

Ideally WordPress would be easy enough to customize that fewer plugins would be necessary, but the fact remains that WordPress sort of has it’s head up it’s own ass, and therefore plugins are necessary.

So here is a list of my favorite plugins. I’m not going to rate them most or least favorite, because that wouldn’t make any sense. Different plugins serve different purposes, and will be used for different reasons on different projects.

Customization

Advanced Custom Fields

This is a great plugin, but I can’t help but feel WordPress should support this out of the box. Yes, WordPress supports custom fields, but the interface is poor, and there is no ability to customize the field types or available values/options. I do have some gripes with Advanced Custom Fields, such as the poor placement of the “Add Field” button that causes me to keep clicking it after adding a field instead of the “Close” button, and the fact that both field options under Admin > Custom Fields, and the edit fields themselves on Edit Post have way too much white space, maybea small issue to some, but it causes me to do a massive amount of scrolling even if I just have a few custom fields.

Media

Gallery

TBD

Image Rotation Fixer

Shouldn’t be necessary, but if you are uploading images from a smartphone, you’ll want this.

SEO

Google XML Sitemaps

Nothing incredible, but a good solid plugin for generating & submitting XML sitemaps.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Great SEO plugin with tons of options. I actually hate tons of options, it seems like it has too many – I don’t even know what they are all for, but you need an SEO plugin of some sort, and this is one.

Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast

Don’t store your Analytics code in your theme, because if you upgrade your theme it will get erased. Use a plugin so you are sure it stays in there. If you aren’t worried about upgrading your theme and erasing customizations to your theme, go ahead and just put it in your theme – it’s much lighter weight than using a plugin.

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