When building a WordPress website, there are many WordPress plugins available that can help you reach that completion deadline faster. Through personal experience, I use these 5 WordPress plugins that help me speed up the development time for a website, and I’ll explain why you should too.
1. Duplicate Page
When creating pages for your website, you may be spending a long time creating similar posts and pages by copying the content from one page onto another. This plugin simply adds the option to duplicate a post/page in one click.
As simple as this sounds, this saves me plenty of time when creating new similar-looking pages, such as when creating new service or location pages. If you are planning to create pages which may have the same layout as pre-existing pages, this is the WordPress plugin I recommend.
2. Use Any Font
If you’re planning to use custom fonts on your website I recommend using this plugin to speed up how long it takes to add the font to your site. This plugin accepts TTF, OTF and WOFF font formats and stores them on your server so that they can be loaded faster.
Additionally, you do not need any knowledge of CSS, so beginners of WordPress can use this plugin. The free version only allows one custom font to be used, but for $10 any amount of custom fonts can be added to your website.
3. Yoast
If you’ve ever used a plugin to optimise the SEO of your website, it is highly likely that you have heard of Yoast, although you may be confused as to why I have included it in this list. Alongside Yoast’s most notable feature of allowing users to easily optimise their page titles and meta descriptions, Yoast also comes packed with other features to quickly enhance your website.
For instance, if your website is lacking a sitemap, Yoast can automatically create one for you in its XML Sitemap section, saving you time from creating your own. Also, upon installation, Yoast will automatically improve your page titles, which is helpful as your homepage may have previously used “Just Another WordPress Site”, which obviously won’t help your rankings.
Yoast comes with many other features that can improve your search engine performance, so you should definitely get this WordPress plugin if you plan to quickly improve your website.
4. Simple 301 Redirects – Add-on – Bulk Uploader
If you’re redesigning a website, you may need to implement redirections on your website so that your old page URLs don’t turn into 404s once your new site design goes live. Although this is an add-on to the Simple 301 Redirects plugin, this can save plenty of time instead of having to upload your redirects one-by-one to your website. This plugin add-on also helpfully includes an example CSV file, so you can quickly add your old URL and new URL lists to the uploader correctly.
5. EWWW Image Optimizer
If your website is quite image-heavy, then you may want to include this plugin to ensure that your images aren’t slowing your website down. In my personal experience, every time I install this plugin, the file size for my images decreases but the quality doesn’t, and it has a positive effect on site speed. Additionally, this plugin automatically optimises your images as soon as you upload them to the media library, so you do not have to spend time optimising each one.
Conclusion
If there are any 5 WordPress plugins you should install on your website, I recommend installing these ones as they can cut down your development time substantially, and may also help after your website has been launched. If you’re planning to design a website, check out our Website Design Guide, which provides a step-by-step process on designing your new website.
