We’ve built a few websites on WordPress over time and have installed, tested and uninstalled our fair share of plugins too, so we thought we’d give you the run down on five of our favourites.
We’ve not included the ‘big ones’ that boast 1+ million active installations, such as Wordfence, Yoast etc. because they speak for themselves. Instead we’ll give kudos to the ‘smaller players’ that maybe aren’t as well known.
So, in no particular order, here are five of our favourites…
Current Menu Item for Custom Post Type
If you have an archive page that’s using a template and you want to display it in your main menu, then WordPress doesn’t add the ‘active class’ to that menu item. This plugin fixes that issue by assigning a parent page to the custom post type and as a result of this the active class will be added to that archive page item in the main menu.
Current Menu Item for Custom Post Type plugin page
CAOS
If you have Google Analytics installed on your website and you use their PageSpeed Insights tool to measure page speed you will almost certainly see the ‘Leverage Browser Caching’ warning relating to their own Javascript file. To fix this issue and speed up the load time of your website, CAOS hosts your Google Analytics javascript-file (analytics.js) locally and keeps it updated using wp_cron(). It’s also GDPR compliant so that box is ticked too.
Simple Page Ordering
Although quite popular with 200,000+ active installations we thought we’d give this plugin the thumbs up anyway. It simply allows you to order your pages and other hierarchical post types with simple drag-and-drop right from the standard page list. Something that isn’t (weirdly) built into WordPress by default.
Simple Page Ordering plugin page
Delete Original Image
This was one we discovered recently. It only has 700+ active installations but it’s really useful in that it allows you to set it up to automatically delete the original image after upload. This is great if you have limited server storage space.
Delete Original Image plugin page
Smart Slider 3
In our opinion, the best slider plugin out there. And it’s free. It comes with a really nice visual editor with mobile, tablet and desktop editor and preview modes so you can optimise the content for any screen size. Massive thumbs up to Nextend, the developer.