My favorite WordPress plugins

While I was slowly getting back to WordPress and as soon as I wanted to do something new, people were answering me : “there is a plugin for this…and there is also a plugin for that!”.

While I have to admit that it’s cool that a lot of people can heavily customize their WordPress installation without writing a single line of code, for me being a developer, plugins are usually synonyms of bugs, frustration and dissatisfaction.

I also agree that code recycling is not a bad thing and that you can’t reinvent the wheel each time you develop a website therefore plugins are a necessity and can be useful. In the list that follows you’ll find all the plugins that I use in most of my projects, that I’ve deeply tested and that I love hoping that it will help a developer like me getting into WordPress’s awesomeness!

Feel free to bookmark and come back as I will update this list as I discover new useful plugins

Advanced Custom Fields

advancedcustomfields.com

What it is:
Fully customize WordPress edit screens with powerful fields. Boasting a professional interface and a powerful API, it’s a must have for any web developer working with WordPress. Field types include: Wysiwyg, text, textarea, image, file, select, checkbox, page link, post object, date picker, color picker and more!

Why I love it:
I use this plugin on nearly all my projects. It allows you to effortlessly leverage one of WordPress most useful features: Custom fields. Mix it with custom posts (another amazing WordPress feature) and you have a tailor made WordPress install for your project with incredibly User Friendly back-office.

WordPress Multilingual Plugin

wpml.org

What is it:
WPML makes it easy to build multilingual sites and run them.It’s powerful enough for corporate sites, yet simple for blogs.

Why I love it:
I haven’t tested all the multilingual plugins out there but WPML is certainly a great one. It includes most of what your can expect and is a very powerful and well maintained plugin. It certainly worth the investment if you are going to build several multilingual websites.

Yoast WordPress SEO

yoast.com

What is it:
The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more.

Why I love it:
If you are not a SEO specialist but you still know what you’re doing, this is an amazing plugin! All the SEO basics are covered.

Regenerate Thumbnails

viper007bond.com

What is it:
Regenerate Thumbnails allows you to regenerate the thumbnails for all of your image attachments. This is very handy if you’ve changed any of your thumbnail dimensions (via Settings → Media) after previously uploading images.

Why I love it:
This plugin had a really missing WordPress feature. If you decide to change or add an image format/size won’t automatically regenerate the thumbnails. But the real problem is that there is no way to easily do it manually either! This is why is plugin exists and is incredibly useful!