Love them or hate them, WordPress plugins are necessary to building a website efficiently.

What should I tell you about WordPress plugins? Well for starters they make life easy, but they can also break an entire and make you want to pull your hair out at the same time. There are millions of plugins to choose from and even more coming every day, but not all are created equal.

In this blog post, I’m not going to give you my top 53 plugins that I use or 204 plugins that are great for e-commerce sites. Today, I’m going to tell you about a few key plugins that I used for my current website project of a local brewery and how they help with producing the content that is needed for the site.

Once again, grab a coffee or today maybe grab yourself an iced latte get crazy, and let’s dive into these plugins.

Contact Form 7 & “Use Any Font”

Contact form 7, oh I do dislike you, but being the industry-standard plugin for contact forms, I will deal with it. Contact form 7 is a custom form builder with over 5+ million installations that supports CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering. As long as you are quite handy with CSS, then you can design this form quite easily and the form overall is pretty lightweight as far as code is concerned. The main problem is the amount of spam that still gets through these contact forms, but unfortunately, there is only so much we can do to prevent this from happening.

“Use Any Font” is a straight-to-the-point no non-sense plugin that does exactly what the name implies. With this plugin, you can import your standard font files in order to use your custom font on your website. In my case, I needed to use the new custom font for the rebrand that I created and thus this plugin was a lifesaver in order to bring that font into WordPress.

OxyMonster Framework & Recoda

Since the builder that I used for this site was Oxygen, it only made sense to bring some plugins that were designed for Oxygen users. OxyMonster Framework is a CSS framework based on the Tailwind CSS framework and you don’t what that means, don’t it’s okay as it basically just means that it’s utility-based framework that will make your life easier when it comes to designing the site. The framework includes design kits and 500+ blocks that you can use for your website. It’s both lightweight and packed full of features.

You can think of Recoda as a workspace that you can place inside of Oxygen to make things flow better with designing the site. Everything from one click interfaces and easily switch between interfaces to a number of additional shortcuts that recoda makes possible to use inside of the Oxygen builder. Recoda can significantly speed up the overall design flow and I highly recommend this plugin when building with Oxygen.

Modern Events Calendar Lite & Rank Math SEO

Can’t find when the next beer release is for your favorite brewery? Perhaps you should tell them to hire me to install a new events calendar for their website!

The modern events calendar lite is by far one the best events plugins that I’ve seen that you don’t have to pay an arm, a leg, and your soul for. This plugin makes it super easy to set all of the upcoming events for different days, weeks, or yearly events. You can color code everything to easily navigate through along with daily, weekly, or monthly calendar views and sorting options.

Rank Math SEO, I know, I know. It’s not Yoast, but hear me out. I’m quickly realizing how much I love Rank Math SEO and how easy they really make things for the fast-paced SEO team. Rank Math takes all of the guesswork out of what you should be doing for SEO and recommends/guides you through it all. The setup wizard is top notch along with a clean interface makes this my preferred SEO plugin.

There you have it

I know this list wasn’t that long, but sometimes you don’t need a million plugins on your site. You just need the important ones that can get things done. Which were your favorite? Do you use any of these plugins on your site?

Curious to learn more?

There are a ton of plugins out there and I would love to go through more of them. Let us know in the comments if there is a plugin you think I should dive into next time.

If you are thinking of having a website built or you are designing a website for your company, keep these design resources in mind and let us know in the comments if you have any additional resources to add?

Is your website meeting current design standards? Email me for a free consultation. 

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