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Ilya Komarov
pro
• Jul 7
10 WordPress Plugins I Install on Every Client Site (and why I'll never drop #1) I've built 20+ custom WordPress sites for clients across Norway and Europe. No page builders, no bloated themes. Just clean code and the right plugins. Here are the 10 I keep coming back to on every single project:
Advanced Custom Fields PRO The backbone of every custom theme I build. ACF Pro turns WordPress into a real CMS where clients can edit anything without breaking the layout. Flexible content fields, repeaters, options pages. If I could only keep one plugin, this is it.
Yoast SEO Does the SEO fundamentals right out of the box: meta tags, sitemaps, Open Graph, breadcrumbs. Clients love the green/red readability scores. Saves me from writing custom meta logic on every build.
Contact Form 7 Lightweight, no bloat, endlessly customizable with hooks. I pair it with Cloudflare Turnstile for spam protection. It just works, and it's been working for 15 years.
WP Fastest Cache One-click caching that actually makes a difference. Static HTML generation, minification, browser caching. My go-to when a client asks "why is my site slow?" and the answer is "you had no caching."
Imsanity Clients upload 5MB photos from their phone. Imsanity auto-resizes them on upload. Invisible to the client, saves gigabytes of hosting space over time. Set it once, forget it forever.
SVG Support Modern logos and icons are SVGs. WordPress blocks them by default. This plugin fixes that and lets you inline SVGs for CSS/JS animation. Essential for any design-focused build.
WP Media Folder Once a site has 500+ images, the default media library becomes chaos. Folder structure keeps everything organized. Clients actually find their own files instead of re-uploading duplicates.
Filenames to Latin I work with Norwegian and Latvian clients. They upload files named "ørret_fjord_bilde.jpg" and WordPress chokes. This plugin auto-converts Cyrillic, Nordic, and special characters to clean Latin filenames. Small plugin, saves real headaches.
Simple Custom Post Order Drag-and-drop reordering for posts, pages, and custom post types. Clients always want to rearrange things manually. This is the cleanest solution I've found.
Kadence Security Basic Login protection, firewall basics, and vulnerability monitoring without the bloat of Wordfence. Lightweight security foundation that doesn't slow down the site. What's your must-have plugin that most developers overlook?
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