Our Web Developer Shares the "Must Have" Wordpress Plugins
Looking to take your WordPress website design to the next level? Plugins are a great way for adding functions and customisations to your website. With over 50,000 plugins to choose from in Wordpress, you might find it overwhelming deciding what is best for your site. We asked our head web developer and Tech Director, Pav, to share the three “must have” WordPress plugins to add to your website right now.
Custom Post Type UI (CPT UI)
What was once just a blogging platform has turned into an effective content management system (CMS) for many businesses and eCommerce stores.
By default, WordPress offers the following five post types - posts, pages, attachments, navigation menus and revisions. If these default options to do not fit certain types of content, our web developer, Pav, recommends the plugin, Custom Post Type UI.
“This allows you to easily create new post types and taxonomies or categories with literally a click of a button,” Pav says.
Custom Post Types in WordPress are not just for blogs despite using the term “post”. They can be any type of content including pages and posts. You can create custom post types and name them any way that works best for your business. Example post types include a ‘Testimonials’ page, a ‘Courses’ page and a ‘Products’ page. Taxonomies in WordPress are a way of grouping these posts or custom post types together based on a specific relationship - for example, Categories and Tags.
“It also allows you to use every possible feature for each post type and taxonomy that Wordpress has intended for it - from being publicly searchable, to having taxonomy hierarchies, and to setting up the post to have an archive page,” Pav says.
If you have identified the need for new content types, installing the Custom Post Type UI plugin is the way to go.
“Once added, it'll simply show up in the admin sidebar - and that's it, the next step is to setup some custom fields for these new post types (or taxonomies).”
If you need any assistance with creating Custom Post Types, feel free to reach out and our web developer, Pav, can help!
Example of Custom Post Type UI from WordPress
Advanced Custom Fields Pro (ACF Pro)
For greater control over the content on your WordPress website, the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin is used to add extra information to posts and pages known as metadata. An example could be writing staff biographies and adding custom fields like their name, photo and mini biography.
“There are about 30 different field types ranging from free text fields, date pickers, repeater fields, radio buttons and colour pickers,” he says.
This plugin uses location rules to determine where to display your created fields.
“You can specify the rules around where the fields display and what fields display on those pages within the post administration page. You can specify whether the fields display at the top of the edit page, the side or even the bottom.”
Example of an Advanced Custom Fields
Gravity Forms
You will find a contact form on most websites. But if you are looking for more ways to engage with your visitors and customers, our web developer suggests utilising the Gravity Forms plugin.
“This little beast of a plugin is the best form submission plugin I have ever come across. Extremely powerful, lightweight and very customisable,” he says.
With this paid WordPress plugin, you can create any type of form, from surveys to questionnaires and quizzes. You can quickly build your forms using the visual form editor and easily embed them on your WordPress site.
“Gravity Forms comes with a host of functionalities including multiple notifications to email addresses, custom confirmation messages, verification emails, and a wide range of fields such as text, checkboxes, even pre-formatted address and phone number fields.”
One of Gravity Forms’ features, Conditional Logic, allows developers to configure forms to either show or hide certain fields and sections based on the user’s actions and input. For instance, if a user answers ‘yes’ to the question, ‘Do you drink coffee?’, a different set of questions will appear to someone who answers, ‘no’. This feature allows businesses to customise the form specific to the user’s needs.
“It also has a host of official add-ons that allow you to communicate with CRMs and other third party software such as integrating with MailChimp to build mailing lists,” says Pav.
Example of a Gravity Form from our own website!
Learn More From Our Web Developer About Wordpress Plugins - & What Might Be Right For You
Our main web developer and technical director, Pav, and his team of front-end and back-end developers are experts in all technical workings of a website, including functionality and programming languages like HTML and Javascript. To speak to our team regarding your web development needs, feel free to get in touch via email, or reach out to us on our social channels!