I’ve seen many web developer or best known as web builder rely most of the time to ready made plugin on shelf. Either they buy from well know developer or marketplace. These will surely bloated their website with tons of plugins. Sometime, you are equipped with unnecessary features from those plugins.

Should be no problem, but this will effect your overall web performance. And the most annoying thing is to maintain the website. There are a lot of plugins need to be kept updated and sometime it will break your whole website if there is a big version gap.

As developer, I am prefer to develop a custom plugin to customize the features I need. Some people would say, why re-invented the wheel? Actually, you don’t build everything from scratch. You improvised.

Know Core Plugins

There are many good and well developed plugin available in the WordPress repository. You just need to know what the features you want to use. I’ll list some plugins that I am always use to develop a website.

• Woocommerce
• Advanced Custom Field Pro
• Elementor
• Post SMTP
• Contact Form 7
• Gravity Form
• Custom Post Type UI (CPT UI)

Woocommerce

For e-commerce website, WooCommerce is very well known and widely used by developer to build e-commerce website. It has a lot of flexibility to extend the functions. In many plugins I will review on, the term ‘flexibility’ is the key. Plugins with flexibility are preferable.

Back to the woocommerce, there are a lot of hooks available and this is why there are many woocommerce extensions developed either it is free or paid version.

In the e-commerce website market, the customized features is on high demand. If you can customized or extend the features of woocommerce, surely you will get buyers. In my observation, most of the woocommerce extension plugins are in paid version.

Advanced Custom Field Pro

Additional data to post or object in WordPress is commonly known as meta data. If you see this post, there are a few meta data shown here. These data store as meta data in database. When I customize the function, sometime additional data need to be stored and linked to the post object.

This plugin also known as ACF is the most easiest to use and manage meta data. There are many type of meta data in field form can be attached to WordPress object such as text, number, richtext, images url, document url, relationship, nested array in repeater form and many more. You can explore this more here.