I have been using WordPress for most of my client sites, as well as personal sites for donkey’s years now – at least 12, which is insane to be honest as the market for content management systems has grown wildly with lots of new options. Still, I love using the software and find the ability to add new functionality via plugins is is an absolute god send.

Below are the main plugins I install on every new project.

Advanced Custom Fields

I have the PRO version of ACF and it’s the first thing I install on every site I build. It adds so much functionality to WordPress it’s quite unbelievable. Want to add some custom fields for a ‘team’ page, great Gutenberg blocks, or build options pages in no time at all? get this plugin.

Rank Math

I previously used Yoast but jumped ship last year for a few reasons. I switched to Rank Math – It provides the usual options for onsite SEO as well offering extra free modules for getting alerted to 404s, structured data schema, and many more. it basically just rocks for SEO.

Akismet Anti-Spam

This essential anti spam plugin should be used on every site you build. Akismet protects websites from spam comments and has saved me countless hours of moderating tons of these spam comments.

LiteSpeed Cache

LiteSpeed Cache is my go to plugin for speeding my websites up. It’s easier to use than W3 Total Cache and includes lots of caching options from minifying my HTML/CSS/JS to combining my scripts, and stylesheets.

Custom Post Type UI

Way back in the day when custom post types were brand new to WordPress, we had to code them up by hand, Custom Post Type UI makes it easy to set new post types up (and taxonomies) with a few clicks.

WooSidebars

WooSidebars Makes creating and assigning new ‘sidebars’ or widget areas easy peasy. No more messing about with that functions.php

WP-PageNavi

I have been using WP-PageNavi for all of my pagination needs for years now. It creates a beautiful 1, 2, 3 page links.

Wordfence Security

This security plugin has saved my bacon on a number of occasions. It can scan my site to alert me of any malware, protect against bruteforce attacks, as well as many many other features.