The Best WordPress Plugins You’re Not Using

If you are at all familiar with WordPress, then you are well aware of the unlimited resources of plugins available to web developers.

How do you navigate all the options? We are here to help! While digging through the pages of WordPress plugins over the years, we have come up with a few hidden gems that we, as developers, find very useful. Here are just a few of the best WordPress plugins.

SlideDeck

This nifty plugin deserves more attention! It allows you to easily add an image & video slider. The plugin itself is easy to install, user-friendly, and extremely professional looking. Although we don’t use the SlideDeck for all image & video sliders, it is one of our favorite choices. With only 7,342 downloads, we consider this a hidden treasure.

Adminimize

This is another great plugin that, although it has a lot of downloads, is rarely discussed as one of the major plugins. We really like adminimize because it allows you to hide rarely used tools from the backend. We also like the author, Bueltge, for his clever write-up. He describes the key functions of the plugin by saying, “[it] moves ‘Dashboard’ onto the main administrative menu because having it sit in the tip-top black bar was ticking me off and many other changes in the edit-area”. If you do a lot of work with WordPress as a web designer or developer, be sure to look at this plugin.

Login LockDown

This is an important plugin. If you have been building websites for a while, you probably already use either this plugin or one that is similar. What it does is limit the number of times you can attempt to log into the site. This obviously helps with security. Although there are a lot of options available, we recommend using Login LockDown

Jarvis

We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention one of our own handy plugins, Jarvis. Named after our favorite Iron Man AI, Jarvis is a quicksearch assistant that helps content managers and developers get to the content they’re looking for quickly. In just a couple keystrokes you can access post, pages, custom post types, plugins, settings and much more. Give it a download. We’re sure you’ll like it.

There are some great WordPress plugins hidden within the Plugin directory. I strongly encourage anyone who does web development with WordPress to spend a considerable amount of time hunting through the directory each week. We have found some of our favorite plugins by simply exploring the directory at our own leisure and not for a specific plugin.

Check our part 1 in this series: Our Favorite WordPress Plugins.

Edit: Check out an even better list of WordPress plugins we put together in January.