As a freelance WordPress developer, time is rarely on your side. A single delay can jeopardize your entire schedule, causing you to miss deadlines, which won’t make your clients happy. And once a client starts losing patience, it is only a matter of time before they drop you in favor of someone who can reliably deliver results.
To avoid this scenario, you will have to optimize your WordPress workflow, which is a goal you can achieve by using a suite of time-saving plugins. With them at your disposal, you will minimize the time required to implement common features, as well as automate a wide range of repetitive tasks.
Figuring out which plugins to use can take a while, so in order to save you the effort, we have compiled a list of 7 plugins that are guaranteed to make your life easier as a WP freelancer.
WPForms Form Builder
Creating WordPress forms is a notoriously fiddly process, and developers often end up wasting a lot of time getting them to work properly. To reduce the difficulties associated with making forms, developers can use the WPForms Form Builder plugin.
WPForms makes the process of implementing forms easy, from contact forms to subscription forms, to payment forms, and everything in between. It achieves this by offering a user-friendly drag and drop interface, which enables developers to add, rearrange, and customize form fields in an intuitive way. The plugin also comes with prebuilt form templates which you can use straight away. Forms created with WPForms are responsive out of the box, so you don’t need to put in extra effort to make project mobile-friendly.
WPForms comes with several pricing tiers, including the free Lite version, as well as Basic ($39.50 per year), Plus ($99.50 per year), Pro ($199.50 per year) and Elite ($299.50 per year) versions.
Easy Table of Contents
Content-heavy WordPress websites have to provide sufficient content navigation features to create a positive user experience. Table of Contents is a plugin that gives developers the tools they need to automatically generate tables of content at a click of a button.
Easy Table of Contents comes with a number of customization features which you can use to create tables of content for different kinds of WordPress websites. You can choose between hierarchical and non-hierarchical display modes, choose which headings to use, and chose the on-page location of the table. The plugin comes several built-in themes, the option to create your own themes, and multiple counter bullet formats.
Easy Table of Contents is fully free to use. The project is maintained by a single developer, so support options are limited.
Posts Table Pro
The new Gutenberg editor for WordPress still has limited support for creating tables. And since tables are an essential element of practically every WordPress website, developers have to rely on third-party plugins such as the Posts Table Pro to implement them in a reasonable amount of time.
Posts Table Pro is a feature-rich plugin for creating dynamic tables for document libraries, member directories, blogs with large post collections, interactive event calendars, and e-commerce product tables. You can create tables with all types of content, including text, images, video, and audio. There’s no manual data entry, as the tables are created automatically containing content already stored on your WordPress website (e.g. posts, pages or any custom post type). The plugin also supports custom fields and taxonomies, which you can implement without editing template files.
Posts Table Pro comes with a free version, as well as paid versions in a choice of three licenses.
Insert Headers and Footers
Some website features are not difficult to implement, but because you often have to add them to every WordPress website you make, they can cost you a lot of time in the long run. If you find yourself constantly editing the header and footer sections on all your projects, the Insert Headers and Footers plugin can help.
The plugin offers a simple interface for adding snippets of code required for Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel integration, as well custom CSS – no need to access theme files every time you need to change a small bit of code. You can also insert regular HTML and JavaScript code. The plugin is geared towards beginner developers, although even experienced ones will find it useful for automating header and footer edits.
Insert Headers and Footers can be downloaded for free from the official WordPress plugin repository.
Easy Google Fonts
Typography is essential for creating a coherent visual aesthetic for a website. However, finding the right fonts to use can be a source of an additional hassle, especially when there are more important features you need to implement. The Easy Google Fonts plugin is there help you save time on adding custom Google fonts to your project.
Easy Google Fonts allows you to choose from more than 600 font variants, and add them to a WordPress website without having to code anything. If you are using the WordPress Customizer plugin, you can preview the fonts live, as well as create custom font controls for later reuse. The plugin can be used with any theme, and it will automatically update the font list.
Easy Google Fonts is completely free to use, with the option to donate to developers through PayPal if you wish to support their work.
AddToAny Share Buttons
Social media share buttons can be found on any website, but the process of adding them is both tedious and time-consuming. Plugins such as AddToAny Share Buttons are therefore essential for developers that don’t want to waste their time coding them from scratch for each project.
The AddToAny Share Button plugin allows you to implement share buttons for more than 100 social media sites and apps, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, WhatsApp, and others. You can use standard and floating share buttons, and you can choose between a number of custom share icons. The buttons are mobile optimized and retina-ready by default. They can be placed next to content, in a separate bar, as a shortcode, and within template tags.
AddToAny Share Buttons is free to use, no sign-up required.
Cookie Notice for GDPR
In the wake of the General Data Protection Regulation legislation, WordPress websites serving users from the EU are required by law to become GDPR compliant. As a WordPress developer, this doesn’t concern you apart from the fact that you will likely have to place a lot of consent forms within each project. To make this job easier and less time-consuming, you can opt to use the Cookie Notice for GDPR plugin.
Cookie Notice for GDPR enables you to implement a notice informing users that the website in question is compliant while presenting them with the option to either accept or reject sharing their browsing data. The plugin will also add a banner to your website showing that it is compliant with EU Law. The plugin provides customization options for each element, so you can adjust their looks to be in line with your theme.
Cookie Notice for GDPR can be acquired for free from the WordPress plugin marketplace.
Plug-In and Start Saving Time
The continued success of WordPress as a platform can in part be attributed to the number and quality of plugins available for it. By using plugins, developers can cut the development time for each project by a significant margin, allowing them to do more work with less effort. So start saving time on your next WordPress project by using the plugins outlined above.