Plugins are pieces of code that allow you to add features and functionality to your WordPress website. There are 1000s of them (many free) out there so it can be hard to know which ones to choose and whether you really need them. So, we’ve enlisted the help of our expert developers to tell us their favourite ones and why:

Oxygen Builder

Oxygen is a WordPress plugin that enables you to visually design your whole website, from the header to the footer, without the need for coding. It is a typical drag and drop builder that provides access to an extensive library of elements and widgets to work with. It gives you total control over the appearance of your WordPress site.

SEO plugins work in the same way that they do with standard WordPress themes and because your design is saved in the database, upgrading Oxygen will have no effect on it. You can also move oxygen-created designs from one site to another easily. The pricing is very reasonable and the features are powerful. Most importantly, you have complete control over your site.

OxyExtras

OxyExtras is a plugin that adds new components to Oxygen Builder. It is lightweight and flexible and makes your workflow faster and easier. In the words of our top-secret coding ninja John it “ adds more functionality to Oxygen Builder and you have the ability to choose what function you want to enable, thus ensuring that your website is not bloated with unused Javascript.” You can read more about John here as long as you promise to keep everything you read to yourself! (?)

Kali Forms

Kali Forms is a WordPress plugin that is designed to make building forms hassle-free. Any lead generation website needs forms whether that be a good old contact form, an order form or something entirely different. Kali Forms makes collecting information all too easy and here’s how:

• SMTP Settings mean you can send and receive emails coming from one website without the hassle
• Useful one-click layouts help you achieve the look and feel you want from your forms quickly
• Handy templates that you can use right out of the box
• You can install extensions and add-ons individually so you don’t slow your site with unnecessary features 

YOAST SEO

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps your site perform better in search engines like Google. It offers you loads of features that influence the SEO of your whole site or optimise individual pages and posts. 

Once installed on your website, the Yoast SEO plugin will appear on each of the pages and posts you create. It analyses the page’s content and provides suggestions on how to use it. If you aren’t familiar with SEO best practices, using Yoast SEO is great training. By using the plugin regularly, you’ll start to write your page and post content with optimisation in mind, more instinctively.

Relevanssi

Relevanssi is a fantastic WordPress plugin that gives you complete control over search within your site. The key goal of Relevanssi is to help visitors to find relevant content on your website quickly. It does this by allowing partial keyword matching, as well as giving the ability to search for exact phrases using quotes and showing search terms in search results. Relevanssi supports all WordPress post types, but it also allows visitors to search through comments, tags, categories and custom fields. 

WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a premium cache plugin for WordPress. WP Rocket caching ensures websites will load super fast, which is essential to improve SEO rankings and increase conversions. On top of its default features that will make your site faster, WP Rocket also offers a set of advanced options to boost your performance even more, including delayed JavaScript Execution, unused CSS removal, minification and LazyLoad (basically makes your site lightning fast doing lots of smart stuff).

Code Snippets

Code Snippets is an easy, clean and simple way to run code snippets on your site. A snippet is a small chunk of PHP code that you can use to extend the functionality of a WordPress website; essentially a mini-plugin with less load on your site. Most snippet hosting sites tell you to add snippet code to the active theme’s functions but this can get rather long and messy after a while. Code Snippets changes that by providing a GUI interface for adding snippets and actually running them on your site as if they were in your themes' functions.

The list of plugins available is overwhelming but these ones are tried, tested and recommended by SMK, we’d love to know which ones you love?