Here are a few tools that I use personally or for client projects. All of these are highly recommend. Some are free while others generally cost a marginal fee. Those that do carry a price tag are well worth their price in my experience. Note: some of these are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a commission if you decide to buy any of them. Make no mistake. I would not recommend these products if I didn’t use and trust them myself.
Genesis WordPress SEO Theme Framework
I use Genesis almost exclusively now when building WordPress sites for clients or for my own endeavors. It’s lightweight, efficient, easy to customize (from a developer’s standpoint), and extremely search friendly. I’ve had clients make significant gains in SEO rankings simply by switching them to Genesis.
Gravity Forms
You can do so much with Gravity Forms I almost don’t know where to begin. As the owner of a web business, Gravity Forms will make your life a lot easier no matter who you are and what you do. I use it on client sites to do everything from creating contact or inquiry forms, to gathering information from potential brides about their wedding day, to selling products and services through PayPal, to running email newsletters. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The best thing about Gravity Forms is that it’s friendly enough that anyone can use it. You can create your own custom forms quickly and easily through drag and drop. Gravity Forms has saved my clients hours of time and frustration.
BackupBuddy
Clients never think about getting a backup solution in place until it’s too late, and that’s… well… too late. You need backup solution in place before your site gets hacked, you accidentally delete important files, you experience a database corruption, or a server failure. You need Backup Buddy and you need it now. Backup Buddy will back up your entire WordPress site every day for you. It hooks up to your DropBox (free for smaller sites!), Amazon’s super cheap cloud storage service (S3), or an FTP account. It can also email you your entire site if you want. With Amazon S3, it will cost the average site owner around $2 a month to store a week’s worth of daily backups of their site. BackupBuddy carries a low upfront cost and Amazon gives you an extremely affordable way to keep their site and data safe. For a few bucks, you’ll will sleep better at night knowing your online business is protected.
Additional Image Sizes (zui)
This plugin is a lifesaver for photographers and creative professionals as wel as blog owners who just want a little more flexibility in how they present their images to their visitors. You can easily add new image sites to your WordPress site right in the admin (something that usually requires small hacks to your theme). It also is a great compliment to Folio Buddy since it gives you the ability to custom tailor slideshow and post grid images to your exact needs.
Regenerate Thumbnails
This free WordPress plugin is an essential tool if you ever decide to change your WordPress blog/site’s image sizes. Especially for photographers. There are a few plugins that do this, but lately I’ve found this one to be the most reliable. It really comes in handy when used in tandem with the above mentioned Additional Image Sizes plugin. WordPress doesn’t automatically create versions if your images in any new sites you create or if you change your Media settings to adjust the built in thumbnail, medium, or large image sites. This plugin will go back and do that for you so all your old images look right in with your new settings. This si extremely handy if you switch themes or designs.
