We all have our must haves in our day-to-day lives and processes. Today I want to talk a little bit about my must haves in the form of WordPress plugins when I’m designing websites.
1. Page Duplicator
There are a number of similar plugins that will accomplish the same functionality but this is the one I primarily use. If you need to create a website quickly or if you are developing a large website with a large number of pages you need to use this or a similar plugin. Page duplicator will allow you to duplicate or copy any current page or blog post on your website. So that means, you can create 1 page with a specific layout and then copy that same layout for your other website pages. It’s a time saver!
2. Yellow Pencil (Visual CSS Style Editor)
Visual CSS Style Editor or Yellow Pencil as it was previously called is a great tool to help with CSS and HTML styling of your WordPress website. This plugin is perfect for those who may not know or understand CSS, styling elements, or coding in general. Or those of us who like to style elements quickly. Visual CSS Style Editor will allow you to select a specific element of your website (headers, footer, logo, menu navigation, buttons, etc.) and apply a specific style to that element. For instance, if you wanted to change the color of a button, text, or footer on your website, this is the plugin for you.
3. Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
Optimize Database is a great plugin for removing unneeded page drafts and page revisions accumulated from designing your website or maintenance. If you make a lot of changes to your website pages over time the number of page revisions will increase. WordPress will automatically save these revisions to your database. These revisions are typically not needed. This plugin will delete them all or you can set how many you’d like to keep or how many days you want to keep the revisions. You can also setup the plugin to perform the deletion a schedule such as once a week, once a month, etc. This is a great feature.
4. All In One WP Migration
Whenever I need to migrate a WordPress website to a new domain or host, or backup a website I use All In One WP Migration. It basically exports all your WordPress themes, plugins, files, pages, posts, and databases to a single file. You can download that backup to a file, send it to dropbox, or other various applications. But the plugin does have its drawbacks such as the size limitations when uploading to a new domain or host. But there are ways around that as well. Like the other plugins listed here there are other options out there but I prefer this one.
