The real power of WordPress comes from the community of developers around the globe that push the envelope with the plugins they develop. In my small attempt at sounding grateful I’ve listed below my top 10 Essential WordPress Plugins that have saved me a tremendous amount of time.

10 Black Studio TinyMCE Widget

This plugin let’s you easily add a wysiwyg editor to your widgets. It does exactly what you need it to do. I just don’t like the name they gave it.

Price: Free

09 Scissors continued

Often my clients battle with the basics of managing their own websites. Especially when it comes to imagery. Resizing and cropping can be difficult if you don’t do it often. Scissors continued adds these functions to images in the media library.
It’s not Photoshop, but it does the trick.

Price: Free

08 WordPress Access Control

With cloud computing becoming more of the norm nowadays,I’m being asked more and more to add doc-repositories to the websites I build. The tricky part about this is granting frontend password protected access to designated members.

WordPress access control gives you full control over password protecting pages and posts. The added bonus is you can grant different levels of access to different members using the existing access levels of WordPress.

If you build WordPress websites like i do you will probably only ever use this plugin once or twice. But it saved me hours of custom development.

Price: Free

07 Q and A – FAQ Plugin

This plugin adds an elegant FAQ accordion to your WordPress website. With a dedicated section in the main admin sidebar for maintaining all your FAQ’s.

Another great time saver.

Price: Free

06 WordPress SEO by Yoast

I’ve been in web design for almost 6 years now and SEO has always been a big challenge for me. This plugin is intimidating at first look, but Yoast seems to have thought about every angle of optimizing search within WordPress.

If you’re familiar with SEO I’m sure you’ll appreciate the power behind this plugin. If you’re a complete newb ( like me ) there’s a full tour available right from the moment you activate the plugin .

Price: Free

05 Catalog visibility-options ( Woo Commerce )

All the clients I work with are small or medium size companies. I’ll always advise you against full checkout cart systems unless you’re serious about having an online sales model.

With that said I often get asked ” Can we have the features of a cart system without the functionality and fuss of having a full checkout procedure?”. I’ve made the big mistake of screaming yes without doing my homework first but…

After a large amount of tiresome research:

I found a premium plugin called ” Catalog visibility options for woo commerce” . This will only work with woo commerce. You’ll just need to install and activate the plugin. Switch off checkout and pricing. And your ready to go.

Turning the woo commerce shopping cart into full email for quote catalog system . This plugin is brilliant for clients with lots of products.

Price: $35

04 WP-Filebase Download Manager

If your wordpress website has a large amount of word documents, PDFs and or excel spreadsheets. This plugin will just solve every aspect of maintaining and presenting all types of downloadable content for you.

Extremely flexible on customization and very easy to use . This is the best plugin I’ve found so far to easily manage every document you wish to place on your website.

Price: Free

03 Post Types Order

I felt so releaved when I found this plugin, rearranging posts easily for whatever reason is virtually impossible within WordPress without changing dates or reposting. It becomes a greater nightmare when you’re using posts to manage your products or portfolio.

Post Types Order solves this.

Once installed you can literally reorder your posts by dragging and dropping them.

Saves time and solves the problem in a flawless elegant way. It got my vote.

Price: Free

02 Adminimise

Good design is having unneeded functionality disappear until you need it again.

Adminimise gives you the ability to refine the WordPress admin panel. You can disable any and all menu items within the WordPress admin area.

I find it essential to tidy up and refine the admin panel before I hand a site over to a client. Like Steve Jobs learn t from his father .” You’ve got to spend just as much focus on painting the back of the fence as you’d would on painting the front.

Easily overlooked or disregarded, It’s more important than you might think.

Price: Free

01 Backup Buddy

Ever since I’ve been working with WordPress the single worst problem I’ve had is moving my websites from one place to another. All developers know moving your database with your source code = headaches. Something is always destined to fall over and when it does you have to climb into the code to fix it.

Backup Buddy takes every headache about migration away. It not only works, It really works. My jaw dropped when I first used it. It’ll take you longer to zip, download and upload your website than it will to deploy it with backup buddy.

It’s one of those you won’t believe me till you try it scenarios. But let me say the amount of time and the world of possibility this little plugins has afforded me, makes every cent I spent on it worth the investment. Not to mention it’s a great way to do systematic backups of your website without the worry that if something does happen you can easily restore it to the way it was.

Price between: $75 – $199