Brad Williams Blog

Over the years I have used a lot of WordPress plugins. From free, to paid, chances are at some point in my WordPress career I’ve probably tried it. Below is a list of my current favorite premium plugins for WordPress.

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Gravity Forms – Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past 3 years, you’ve probably heard of Gravity Forms. Arguably the most successful premium plugin, Gravity Forms is hands down the best WordPress plugin for content and submission forms of all types. Not only is Gravity Forms amazingly easy to create contact forms, it does so much more. One of my favorite uses for GF is to create a form for content submission. A visitor to the website can easily fill out the form fields and that data is submitted and saved as a post or custom post type entry. This includes the post categories, metadata, images (including setting it to a featured image) and more.

That’s just one small example of what this extremely powerful plugin can do. You can even extend the feature set using a number of Gravity From add-ons. Since its release, I have never built a WordPress site that wasn’t using Gravity Forms.

BackupBuddy – One of the first tips you hear when learning how to use a computer is save often and make backups. Running a website is no different. How would you feel if you lost all of the content you’ve created on your WordPress site over the years? One word, terrible.

BackupBuddy is the leading automated backup plugin for WordPress. You can easily create a schedule backup (nightly, weekly, monthly, etc) to generate a full (database + files) backup of your WordPress website. The backup generated can also be sent offsite via FTP, Email, Amazon S3, Dropbox, and more. What good is a backup if it’s stored on the same server as your website, right? If you are serious about your WordPress website, make sure you have solid backups using BackupBuddy.

WP All Import – A lesser known premium plugin that I absolutely love is WP All Import. If you do a lot of content migrations into WordPress, like I do, stop everything you are doing and go buy this plugin. WP All Import makes it incredibly simple to import data into WordPress from a CSV or XML file.

The plugin features a nice drag and drop interface to map the data to the appropriate fields in WordPress. You can easily import content, metadata, taxonomies, images (which are side-loaded to the post created), dates, and more. WP All Import also features some more advanced features like support for processing massive import files, recurring imports, updating existing imports, and filtering data based on specific criteria. This plugin has literally changed our process for migration projects to WordPress.

Soliloquy – If you create a lot of websites using WordPress, chances are you’ve also tried a lot of different sliders or rotators to feature content. Well your search for the best WordPress slider has ended, enter Soliloquy. ( Side note: This is the one plugin on this list I can never pronounce correctly )

This premium plugin, is in my opinion, the best WordPress slider on the market. Not only is it dead simple to use, but is completely responsive out of the box. The plugin allows you to create an unlimited number of sliders using a custom post type. You can easily embed those sliders in your posts, pages, or in a sidebar using the included slider widget. Not only does Soliloquy support images, as you would expect, but it also fully supports videos as well. This plugin also features a nice set of add-ons to integrate additional functionality into Soliloquy.

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There you have it, a list of my current favorite premium plugins for WordPress. To be fair, this isn’t an exhaustive list of every premium plugin I use, but these are the plugins I use most often.

As an added bonus, every premium plugin I listed here is licensed under the GPL software license, which is the same license WordPress is released under. If you use any of these plugins (and I think you should be using all of them) I promise you will not be disappointed.

You probably also noticed there are no affiliate links in this post. In the words of Don Davis “I don’t want to make any money. I just love to sell guns plugins.”