When setting up a new WordPress site, I’ve a little toolbox of light, useful plugins I frequently turn to. They’re suitable for almost any site and usually provides a handy time-saving shortcut to accomplish a particular task. Some of these you may be familiar with but hopefully there will be something new you will find suitable.
Duplicate Post
Active on more than one million installs of WordPress, this is almost an essential install for me after setting up a new site. It’s something so simple, it could and perhaps should be part of the core. It adds an extra ‘Clone’ link beneath each post and page on your site so you can easily make a duplicate without having to go in and copy and paste any source. It’s ideal if you want to make a quick copy of a page for A/B testing and keep the original as is.
Post Types Order
This handy plugin lets you drag and drop your regular posts or custom posts to re-arrange them. When it comes to custom post types it’s far more efficient than manually entering an order number for each one. It’s the kind of feature which really could be baked into the WordPress core it’s so useful. With 300,000+ active installs and an excellent rating it’s a worthy plugin to add to your site.
EWWW Image Optimizer
The EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your site. Another nice feature of this plugin is the ability to convert your images to the file format that produces the smallest image size which can achieve huge savings for PNG and JPG images. Smaller file sizes of course mean faster pages and optimizing images can save hundreds of KB per image which results in significantly less bandwidth usage.
Insert Headers and Footers
Many users will want to add some sort of meta information or Google Analytics to their WordPress site at some point. To solve this problem, there’s a really useful plugin called Insert Headers and Footers for WordPress. Not only is it extremely simple and easy to use, you can add both scripts and html to a site’s header or footer.
My Custom Functions
This useful plugin allows you to add functions to your WordPress theme without having to directly modify the functions.php file. This happens directly within the WordPress dashboard and without the need of an external editor.
It’s also very useful in case of any theme update, because any custom code added via this plugin would never be overwritten. Your custom code will keep on working, no matter how many times you upgrade or switch your theme.
Pretty Link Lite
Pretty Link enables you to shorten links using your own domain name as opposed to using tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or any other link shrinking service. In addition to creating clean links, Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the Browser, Operating System and Host.
Simple Custom CSS
Simple Custom CSS is an easy-to-use WordPress Plugin to add custom CSS styles in order to override default styles. This plugin is designed to meet the needs of administrators who would like to add their own CSS to their WordPress website. It’s ideal for quick changes and unlike modifying the theme’s CSS file directly, edits will be retained after a theme update.
What are your essential plugins?
Have you got any essential ‘must-have’ WordPress plugins? Let us know in the comments section below!
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