Since becoming a freelance web designer, I’ve built a fair number of websites — around 90% of them in WordPress. The rest are a mix of static sites and the now sadly neglected Perch CMS.
With that many WordPress builds under my belt, I developed a personal starter framework that includes a set of plugins I install on every project. Here are six of my must-haves — the plugins I swear by.
💡 Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
An absolute no-brainer. ACF is hands-down one of the most powerful and flexible plugins in the WordPress ecosystem. It lets you add custom fields and meta boxes to anything: pages, posts, users, taxonomies — whatever you need.
Want to build flexible templates, add repeatable groups, create maps, image galleries, conditional logic forms? Done.
📬 Gravity Forms
It came down to this or Contact Form 7. While CF7 is solid (and free), Gravity Forms is in another league. It handles everything from simple contact forms to sprawling multi-page application forms with ease.
It also stores submissions in the dashboard, which CF7 doesn’t do by default, and has a library of powerful extensions for payments, conditional logic, calculations, and more.
🚀 All-in-One WP Migration
This plugin replaced my clunky old workflow of exporting databases and running find-and-replace scripts to update URLs. With All-in-One WP Migration, moving a site from local to staging to live is one-click easy.
The free version has a 512MB upload limit, but the premium version bumps that up to 5GB — well worth it.
🖼️ Imsanity + WP Smush
Clients will upload 20MB photos of lampposts. It’s a fact of life.
Imsanity automatically resizes uploaded images to a sane size, and can even block monster uploads completely. WP Smush then compresses everything that gets added to the Media Library. The free version of Smush only optimises images under 1MB, so Imsanity makes sure all uploads qualify.
⚡ WP Super Cache
One of the most downloaded plugins in the WordPress directory — and for good reason. WP Super Cache turns dynamic PHP pages into static HTML, which speeds up load times significantly.
With site speed now playing a role in SEO rankings, this one’s essential for performance-conscious builds.
👀 Honourable Mentions
These didn’t quite make the “top 6” but they’re still in my toolbox:
- Wordfence Security – Locks down WordPress and adds an extra layer of caching. Might one day replace WP Super Cache for me.
- Yoast SEO – Goes on nearly every site, though whether it’s used effectively is up to the client.
- Regenerate Thumbnails – Great during development when tweaking image sizes. Usually hidden by launch.
That’s my essential plug