The plethora of WordPress plugins can be overwhelming. Here is a list of my high value, simple, and elegant WordPress plugins:
- All-in-One WP Migration is a free plugin that makes moving a WordPress site from one host to another super simple. If your hosting provider uses cPanel, then you might prefer to cPanel Clone the site to another site (if remaining within the same cPanel instance), but I found All-in-One Migration easy and reliable. The free version has some site import size limits; see the documentation for increasing this.
- Broken Link Checker is a free straightforward plugin for scanning for (on a configurable interval) and alerting (both via email and Tools > Broken Links) on broken links.
- FileBird Lite is a free plugin that provides up to 10 folder in which you can organize your Media Library. You can easily upgrade to the Pro (paid) version for additional folder and more features. For the simple website with many images, FileBird Lite is an organizational life-saver.
- Gravity Forms is a free plugin that supports intuitive and flexible building of web forms. One of its greatest strengths is its affordable collection of feature-rich add-ons. We have also found the compatible Gravity Flow plugin a useful workflow enhancement to Gravity Forms.
- Page-list is a free plugin that does one simple thing extremely well: it generates a page tree-style view with links of your WordPress site. And you can’t beat the quote from Donald Knuth that accompanies the plugin: “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” This plugin does something simple and does it well.
- Post Tags and Categories for Pages is a free plugin that adds the ability to add categories and tags to Pages instead of just Pages (the WordPress default). This works especially well with the “Post Type Switcher” and “Widget Logic” plugins.
- Post Type Switcher is a free plugin that supports changing Posts to Pages and Pages to Posts — a surprisingly simple and useful feature.
- Protect Uploads is a free plugin that simply prevents uploads to WordPress from being accessed directly.
- Query Monitor is a free plugin that helps a WordPress site administrator troubleshoot performance problems.
- Search Regex is free plugin that performs regex-based search and replacement throughout a WordPress site; actions may be scoped to All Post Types, Comments, Users, WordPress Options, Posts, Pages, Media, Revisions, Navigation Menus, and Custom CSS.
- TablePress is a free plugin that presents data (imported into TablePress) in well-designed, customizable tables. It is simple, powerful, and elegant.
- TablePress Extension: DataTables ColumnFilterWidgets is a free add-on to TablePress that adds column display and filtering to TablePress tables.
- TablePress Extension: Row Filtering is a free add-on to TablePress that adds row-based filtering to TablePress tables.
- Widget Logic is a free plugin that adds conditional logic to widgets. For example, menus (very useful in sidebar menus) can be customized to display different content depending on the Category of a Page. This is especially useful when combined with “Post Tags and Categories for Pages”.
- WP External Links is a free plugin that automatically opens external links in a new browser window or tab. The plugin is customizable; external links can be easily exempted if needed.
- WP Super Cache is a free plugin and is the canonical plugin to cache WordPress pages to improve site performance.