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At Liquified Creative, we love WordPress. This platform has come a long way since its humble beginnings as a blogging interface. It’s a CMS that is second to none that is backed by a massive community of developers, designers, business owners, and the like. Not to mention, this community holds one of the largest and most polished databases of plugins available.
There are tens of thousands of plugins available to WordPress users. So many, in fact, that it’s difficult to know which ones really make a difference and which are overhyped. Plenty offer useful niche solutions, but few are truly must-have plugins for all sites.
Coming from the point-of-view of a web developer, there are plugins that can really help improve your development workflow. Not only that, but they can be a great asset in terms of making your websites and apps better, faster, and more secure. No matter what kind of site you’re running, or what niche it belongs to, we have three go-to plugins that we know any web developer will love (we know that ours does, at least).
Advanced Custom Fields Pro (ACF)
When building out templates that are going to require custom entry fields in the WordPress editor, the ACF plugin provides a quick and easy method to implement those fields, and then be able to pull the content for displaying in the template. It provides an elegant and intuitive UI for developers and content editors by introducing standard input types found on the web. ACF also features a familiar, WordPress-like API so developers can rapidly display custom field data in their themes. ACF Pro also has an active community of third-party developers who are continually extending the core functionality in new and exciting ways.
Sucuri Security & Wordfence Security
WordPress is the most popular CMS on the web and therefore the largest target for web attacks. While you can follow all the “prevention” best practices at the software level, the reality of the matter is that security has to be addressed at the hosting server level; more importantly, the DNS level.
Sucuri offers complete end-to-end WordPress security. This plugin blocks attacks, handles website integrity monitoring, provides a site audit log, offers server-side scanning, and provides a malware cleanup service.
Wordfence offers much of the same attributes as Sucuri. However, Wordfence comes with its own suite of options and the dashboard offers more information that provides an overview of the whole website at a glance.
Using both plugins on your site allows you to cover all of your bases when it comes to website security. The combination of these two plugins gives you the ability to lock down sites and block out malicious traffic.
WP Migrate DB Pro
WP Migrate DB Pro is a premium WordPress plugin with the primary function of allowing you to copy a WordPress database from one location to another — both quickly and easily. This plugin essentially has three main functions, allowing you to: export your database, pull your database from a location, and push your database to a different location. If you need to keep your development, testing, and live server DB content in sync, it truly is invaluable.
We hope you find these three plugins helpful and effective in terms of the development process. Still need help with your WordPress site? Liquified Creative handles all things web design, development, and maintenance.