While WordPress offers a ton of features and flexibility, there is still a lot of functionality missing from the core software. The best way to fill in the missing pieces, of course, is to get yourself the right plugins.
Plugins offer all kinds of customization for site admins, however, with almost 40,000 options to choose from it the WordPress Plugin Directory, not to mention all the premium products available, it can be difficult sorting the good from the, well, not so good.
Jetpack simplifies managing WordPress sites by giving you visitor stats, security services, speeding up images, and helping you get more traffic. Jetpack is a free plugin.
Traffic Growth & Insights
Jetpack tells you how many visits your site gets and helps you get more traffic with tools like Related Posts, Publicize, Enhanced Distribution, and Sharing.
Security
Jetpack protects your site against brute force attacks and unauthorised logins. We also monitor your site for downtime and keep your plugins updated.
Image Performance
Jetpack automatically optimizes and speeds up images using the global WordPress.com content delivery network. This saves you hosting costs by reducing bandwidth.
Centralized Management
With Jetpack comes a centralized dashboard on WordPress.com. Manage plugins and menus, publish posts, and view enhanced site stats for all of your sites.
A few more things that our users love
Jetpack includes other features that help you customize your site including Custom CSS, Contact Forms, Galleries and Carousels, Notifications and Subscriptions, Configurable Widgets, and many more.
2. Duplicator
The Duplicator gives WordPress administrators the ability to migrate, copy or clone a site from one location to another. The plugin also serves as a simple backup utility. The Duplicator supports both serialized and base64 serialized string replacement. If you need to move WordPress or backup WordPress this plugin can help simplify the process. For complete details visit lifeinthegrid.com.
3. Visual form Builder
Visual Form Builder is a plugin that allows you to build and manage all kinds of forms for your website in a single place. Building a fully functional contact form takes only a few minutes and you don’t have to write one bit of PHP, CSS, or HTML!
Features
- Add fields with one click
- Drag-and-drop reordering
- Simple, yet effective, logic-based anti-SPAM system
- Automatically stores form entries in your WordPress database
- Manage form entries in the WordPress dashboard
- Export entries to a CSV file
- Send form submissions to multiple emails
- jQuery Form Validation
- Customized Confirmation Messages
- Redirect to a WordPress Page or a URL
- Confirmation Email Receipt to User
- Standard Fields
- Required Fields
- Shortcode works on any Post or Page
- Embed Multiple Forms on a Post/Page
- One-click form duplication. Copy a form you’ve already built to save time
- Use your own CSS (if you want)
- Multiple field layout options. Arrange your fields in two, three, or a mixture of columns.
Field Types
- Fieldset
- Section (group fields within a fieldset)
- Text input (single line)
- Textarea (multiple lines)
- Checkbox
- Radio (multiple choice)
- Select dropdown
- Address (street, city, state, zip, country)
- Date (uses jQuery UI Date Picker)
- URL
- Currency
- Number
- Time (12 or 24 hour format)
- Phone (US and International formats)
- HTML
- File Upload
- Instructions (plain or HTML-formatted text)
Entries
- Manage submitted entries in WordPress dashboard
- Bulk Export to CSV
- Bulk Delete
- Advanced Filtering
- Search across all entries
- Collect submitted data as well as date submitted and IP Address
Customized Confirmation Messages
- Control what is displayed after a user submits a form
- Display HTML-formatted text
- Redirect to a WordPress Page
- Redirect to a custom URL
Notification Emails
- Send a customized email to the user after a user submits a form
- Additional HTML-formatted text to be included in the body of the email
- Automatically include a copy of the user’s entry
SPAM Protection
- Automatically included on every form
- Uses a simple and accessible, yet effective, text CAPTCHA verification system
4. Simple css
Need to add some custom CSS to your site? Simple CSS gives you an awesome admin editor and a live preview editor in the Customizer so you can easily add your CSS.
Want your CSS to only apply on a specific page or post? Simple CSS adds a metabox which allows you to do just that.
Features include:
- Full featured admin CSS editor
- Dark and light editor themes
- CSS editor in the Customizer so you can live preview your changes
- Metabox for page/post specific CSS
5.Cyclone Slider 2
Cyclone Slider 2 is an easy-to-use slideshow plugin with an intuitive user interface. It’s simple yet extensible.
Why Use It?
- Simplified workflow: 1.) Add slides 2.) Set slideshow properties 3.) Choose a template 4.) Publish! You can choose between a shortcode or a php function (for themes) to display.
- Supports 5 different slide types: image, YouTube, Vimeo, custom HTML, and testimonial slides.
- Translation ready and RTL support. Ideal for languages other than English.
- Comes with 4 core templates: Dark, Default, Standard and Thumbnails.
- Advance template system. Not happy with the core templates? The template system allows developers to customize the slideshow appearance and behavior. Perfect for every client projects. More info on templating here.
- Selective loading. Load only the scripts and styles that you need.
- Import/export selected slideshows. Moving your slideshow to a different website? No problemo.
- It’s FREE!
More Features
- Ability to add per-slide transition effects.
- Customizable tile transition effects.
- Unlimited sliders.
- Unique settings for each slider.
- Supports random slide order.
- Shortcode for displaying sliders anywhere in your site.
- Ability to import images from NextGEN (NextGEN must be installed and active).
- Ability to use qTranslate quick tags for slide title and descriptions (qTranslate must be installed and active).
- Allows title and alt to be specified for each slide images.
- Comes with a widget to display your slider easily in widget areas.
- Ability to fine tune the script settings. You can choose what scripts to load and where to load them.
