We’ve been building websites with WordPress for a long time—long enough to have tested our fair share of plugins. With thousands available, it can be hard to know which ones are truly worth using.
At Gilligan Group our website developers leverage packages of code or plugins to help us build user-friendly and appealing WordPress websites.
What is a Plugin?
Plugins are small pieces of software that can be easily ‘plugged into’ your site to add new functionality or extend existing functionality of your WordPress website. They can range from simple tools such as SEO enhancements to complex solutions for optimising security, speed and performance.
Here’s the top five plugins we consistently rely on to improve performance, functionality, and SEO for our websites. These aren’t just nice-to-haves, they’re tools we consider essential on almost every project.
ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) (free/paid)
As the name suggests, Advanced Custom Fields or ACF allows you to create and manage custom fields and content types used across your website. Whether you’re building flexible page layouts and product templates to dynamic landing pages, ACF enables you to define exactly what content you need and where it should appear in a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI).
Out of the box, WordPress only provides basic content fields like titles, post content, and featured images. That might be sufficient for something as simple as a blog post, but for a brochure or eCommerce website, you’re going to need more flexibility. That’s where ACF comes in.
This is the single most important plugin we use on every single site we’ve created. From custom data tables and quote calculators to custom eCommerce functionality, ACF provides flexibility to deliver tailored content solutions for our clients.
Yoast SEO (free/paid)
While WordPress gives you the absolute basics of SEO tooling by default, it doesn’t tell you how to structure your content. This means unless you have a deep understanding of SEO, your pages are likely going to miss the mark.
Yoast solves this by offering real-time content analysis, XML sitemaps, and social previews so you can optimise your content before it goes live.
We find that it strikes a great balance between being a comprehensive SEO solution and being simple to configure and use. Once you’ve done the initial setup, Yoast gives you the tools to clean up your content and even offers a scoring system, so you know when you’re meeting Google’s expectations.
Gravity Forms (paid)
We use a WordPress form builder plugin to ensure it’s easy for potential customers to make contact. Gravity Forms is the most popular form builder plugin in the WordPress ecosystem. It lets you create everything from simple contact forms to surveys and multi-page workflows using a clean, intuitive interface.
We love the drag and drop GUI which allows for quicker build times and a host of advanced features out of the box. We could code every form from scratch, but honestly? We’d be wasting time. Gravity Forms has been around the block and can handle anything you throw at it.
Regardless of the type of website you’re creating, you’re going to need a form builder plugin. Despite being one of the most useful components of a website, WordPress does not offer a way to create a form natively.
Smush (free/paid)
Smush is an image optimisation plugin that compresses and resizes your media files automatically to reduce file size without sacrificing quality.
One of the biggest contributors to slow loading times is high-resolution images.
If the user’s browser must load a larger image than it will display, that time is being wasted when it could be loading other parts of your website. This impacts your page speed scores, which can affect SEO, conversion rates and bounce rates.
Smush is straightforward to set up and works in the background to compress your images. It supports lazy loading, WebP conversion, and automatic resizing so you don’t have to manage your images manually. Smush is a staple that we add to almost every build to keep sites lean, fast, and user-friendly.
WP Rocket (paid)
WordPress doesn’t include much in the way of built-in performance tools, which means most sites end up loading slower than they need to. WP Rocket solves that by handling caching, file optimisation, and lazy loading.
We’ve tried a lot of performance plugins over the years, and to be honest, a lot of them are just too unreliable. WP Rocket is the one we trust to just work. It does what it says on the tin and is compatible with nearly every theme and hosting provider. That’s what we look for.
Find the right plugin for your next website project
If you’re looking to level up your WordPress site, these five plugins are a solid place to start. Here’s a quick recap:
- Advanced Custom Fields for custom content fields and cleaner editing
- Yoast SEO for real‑time optimisation and better search rankings
- Gravity Forms for robust, code‑free form building
- Smush for automatic image compression and faster load times
- WP Rocket for powerful caching and performance gains
Need help with your website? Let’s chat.
