As developers we’re always on the lookout for “client friendly” plugins. What do we mean by this exactly?
Client friendly plugins, by our definition have the following attributes:
- They integrate nicely with the WordPress UI
- They aren’t heavily branded
- They don’t include unnecessary and frequent admin nag messages
- They don’t display ads or upgrade messages frequently
- They are also developer friendly with good documentation
Overall, they are plugins which you can feel confident in using on a client site, without ever having the questions of “why is this thing telling me to upgrade?” or “what is X?”. Clients usually aren’t massively technically savvy, they often have no opinion on what plugins you are using, but what they do care about is being able to use the backend of the site without confusion.
The SEO Framework
We love The SEO Framework. Despite using SEOPress on this site, we think The SEO Framework cannot be beat on how nicely it integrates with WordPress. It’s an SEO plugin that handles meta titles, descriptions and sitemaps amongst many, many other things.
Some key points:
- Excellent feature set
- Integrates perfectly with the standard WordPress UI
- Very little nag messages
Page Links To
“allows you to make a WordPress page (or post or custom post type) link to a URL of your choosing, instead of its WordPress URL. It also will redirect people who go to the old (or “normal”) URL to the new one you’ve chosen.”
As described on WordPress.org.
Quite simply, Page Links To does exactly the job it says it’s going to do and seamlessly integrates with WordPress.
We recently used this on a client site. They run an event for a few months a year. During this time, the events archive page is the homepage, but in the off-season it reverts to a more traditional homepage. In this case we created the homepage and used Page Links To to automatically redirect to the events page during the on-season, we’ll simply revert this change for the off -season.
Relevanssi
Relevanssi solves the age old problem of the default WordPress search producing terrible results. It allows you to expand the WordPress search to take more fields in to account and also allows you to modify how the search weighting works e.g. you can make the title text have more weight than the body text to make the top results more relevant.
It’s a drop-in replacement for the default WordPress search, which means there’s no need to worry about any code changes, and the back-end interface looks and feels just like WordPress.
It does have a premium version, but it features no heavy up-sells (t has some subtle ones which are fine) and houses its menu item within the default “Settings” menu in the WordPress admin.
That’s all, folks
That concludes our first three picks for client friendly plugins. We plan to create more volumes of this as and when we discover new plugins that meet our criteria.
Are there any we’ve missed? let us know in the comments.