My favorite WordPress plugins and utilities

This is a subjective list of my personal favorite WordPress plugins; some I use on every single WordPress site I develop, and some, although not always needed, I think are great plugins with great development teams behind. Probably don’t install them all, but if you think you can use one of them, you can’t go wrong with these:

Advanced Custom Fields Pro is my favorite WordPress plugin of them all, and the only paid plugin in the list. But it has a really really good free version.

WPBruiser to prevent spam comments and also brute force attacks. Alternatively: good ol’ Akismet.

Slim SEO is a no-config SEO plugin that works out of the box, for those who don’t need much. Alternatively: The SEO Framework has more options, while still fast and without bloat ot ads.

WP Super Cache is a simple and reliable cache option. Alternatively: Cache Enabler is even lighter and quite fast. And with WP2Static you can output a completely static site (if you know what you’re doing).

Better Search Replace for easily making quick search/replace changes on the database

HTML Forms for simple forms, with flexibility to make them just as you want them. Alternatively: Contact Form 7 doesn’t have the best code base, but it’s easy to find support for anything you need to do.

EWWW Image Optimizer is what I use for automatic image optimization, since it’s the only plugin who does it on your own server. Alternatively: TinyPNG, or ShortPixel Image Optimizer maybe.

Stream for tracking changes on a WordPress install, specially on a client site.

Redirection to place url redirections and fix 404 errors on your permalinks. Alternatively: The even simpler Safe Redirect Manager.

Really Simple SSL make the site run on https without headaches. Particularly useful when taking over an old site.

UpdraftPlus for making backups.

Classic Editor, because I don’t think Gutenberg is ready for most users yet. This one is a personal preference.

And a custom functionality plugin, for any theme-agnostic script I need to include, like custom post types and taxonomies.