Essential WordPress Development Tools You Should Know About

WordPress is the most popular and widely used content management system in the world. It grew from being a blogging platform to one of the most robust website development platforms.

As a WordPress developer, there are sets of Plugins and tools you should have in your webs development arsenal. You need to equip yourself with the best website development tools for efficiency, optimization, and development of robust applications. Here are some of the top WordPress Development plugins every WordPress developer should have to improve efficiency and workflow.

These sets of WordPress development plugins are a must in every website developers toolkit. Start by understanding the importance of these tools and you will know when and where they will come in handy. These are our top website development plugins.

Theme Check

Theme check is a free utility plugin that checks and ensures your theme is void of errors. This plugin helps check for errors in your theme ensures they meet WordPress theme acceptance standards. This ensures an error and bug-free website. The Theme Check will run through and check if your site meets all the prerequisite standards that WordPress uses for Theme Submission.

It lets you test your theme based on the current WordPress coding standards and ensures that the theme meets the WordPress best coding practices.

To test your WordPress theme, install and activate the Theme Check plugin, navigate to your theme check settings, select the theme you are trying to test from the dropdown, Click Check it! And wait for it to run the test. This tool comes in handy when building a theme or when you buy a theme from a third party site and you are not sure of the standard, you can quickly run it through the Theme Check.

WPBakery Page Builder

The WP Bakery Page Builder (formerly well known as Visual Composer) is one of the best page builders which offers easy web page building application. If you are looking for a drag and drop WordPress page builder to take your website development skills to the next level. The WordPress WPBakery Visual Composer is your best choice. It offers easy to use components that makes website building easy. It is a powerful WYSIWYG page builder.

The Visual Composer provides website developers with drag and drops feature that makes website creation easy. To get started install and activate the plugin navigate to your post and pages editor and start making changes with the WP Visual Composer. However, a little practice would be required to fully understand how the block page builder works.

Regenerate Thumbnails

Regenerate Thumbnails is a powerful tool that allows you to generate the default image thumbnail for all images on your site. This happens when you need to change the default image dimension of images already posted on your site, Instead of having to do them manually, this plugin gets it done at the click of a button.

This comes in handy when you need to change the dimension of your images to match that of a new theme. This saves you the stress of doing this one by one. Rather, you can reset all the dimensions using this plugin.
WordPress Reset

For one reason or the other, you may want to reset your WordPress site to default. This single button will erase all the files on your site back to how it was when WordPress was just newly installed. It will delete all contents, pages, posts, customization, etc. from the database. Caution, however, needs to be taken before doing this as you cannot undo this action.

Make sure every file on your website is properly backed up before hitting the reset button.

RTL Tester

When your website is targeted at the International audience, you will get visitors from different parts of the world including countries that read from right to left. The RTL Tester helps you test your site for that mode. This is to ensure that your content loads properly to users in such an environment. When it comes to WordPress development, testing is very important. The Right to Left language tester automatically adds the RTL stylesheets to your theme and the option to stimulate the RTL development environment by the click of a button.

This is a way of making your site more appealing to international audiences who uses the RTL writing systems. To get started, install and activate the RTL Tester which tests your site to make sure it is compliant.

Debug Bar

Debug Bar is a development plugin that adds a debugging menu to your admin panel. It can detect both PHP and MySQL errors.

Often times, It is difficult to track all the bugs and activities in a WordPress site, with the Debug bar, provides a powerful tool which contains warnings, cache information, queries and debugging information. The Debug Bar helps keep an eagle eye on bugs that are hard to see or notice during web development.

Install the Debug bar, run the application to detect errors within your page. Look out for errors or notifications then you can fix. The Debug bar is easy to use and customize.

Developer for Proper Optimization

As a WordPress developer, the developer plugin (by Automattic) should be one of the first on your list. It helps you automate and optimize your development environment by providing you with different options during development. Once you install, you get a pop up asking you to choose the type of project you would like to create.

These are the three options.

• Plugin for a self-hosted WordPress installation
• Theme for a self-hosted WordPress installation
• Theme for a WordPress.com VIP site

Once you make a selection, you will get suggestions of plugins to install based on the choices you made which provide all the most suitable plugins for your project. Once you make your selection you will save time by trying to figure out which plugins will be needed for such a project as it will be automatically updated.

Note: It’s one of the best plugins for optimizing your development environment. But it hasn’t been updated for a long time and also not tested with last 3 major releases of WordPress. So, have a look at the issue before using it.

BackWPup

This is one of the most important tools for any WordPress developer, It ensures that your files and content is backed up and up to date. It5 also ensures that your website files are secured in the case of website crash or loss of data. It saves your entire site to a third party system like Dropbox, Google drive, etc.

Click on BackWpup settings, set up your backup option. Then It automatically backs up your files and database from time to time.

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is one of the best tools for optimizing your WordPress site performance. It does not only optimize the speed it also makes your website light by allowing fast loading when users visit your site. Activate the W3 Total Cache, then enable the page cache which is not enabled by default.
W3 Plugins is a must have website development plugin as it ensures your site loads faster and gives a good user experience with options to increase your site speed.

WordFence

Security is one of the most important parts of every website design. The cyberspace is a very delicate one, therefore, you need to put in measures to secure your site. It serves as a firewall that shields your site from attacks. It also serves as a malware scanner which scans your core files, plugins, and theme for malware, malicious codes, and redirects, code injection, etc.

WordFence has several features that you can activate to increase the security of your WordPress site. For example, you get messages when there is an attack on your site, it blocks IP of suspected spam, etc.

The higher the numbers on the dashboard, the more your site is protected. Apply more measures to ensure your site is fully protected.

Yoast SEO for WordPress

Yoast SEO is the most popular and advanced WordPress SEO plugins for all Search Engine Optimization practices. It is the best WordPress development plugin for improving the visibility of your in search engines. The Yoast SEO helps you improve the searchability and readability of your website and website posts. The Yoast SEO helps to improve readability and SEO analysis of your site by proffering tips and steps to take to ensure that your site is SEO compliant.

Install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin to get started, on all your pages and posts. It shows you suggestions on how to make your posts better and more SEO compliant. Improve all the suggestions to make your posts SEO friendly.

WP Project Manager

WP Project Manager is one of the most powerful website development plugins. As you know the success of every project depends on proper project management. WP Project Manager is one of the most important tools for every web development project. It comes with an easy to use and robust functionality for projects. Project Manager is an all in one project management tools that help throughout the project management life cycle.

It is not just an all in one project management tool it also gives room for collaboration and provides project tracking tools that help web developers in tracking timelines, prioritize task, set deadlines and most importantly manage milestone in real time.

It provides web-based task tracking for effective management of task, an advanced reporting system that provides reports on the go. Start by installing the WP Project Manager, create a new task, assign milestones to users, send personalized and general messages.

Conclusion on WordPress Development Tools

These are the top WordPress development tools and plugins that will make your website development easy, however, you need to try these plugins to know how they really work. You may not need to install all these plugins at the same time but you will find them handy at one point or the other throughout the development lifecycle.

The WP Project Manager comes in handy in managing communication and timelines.

From a professional point of view, It is important to understand these tools and know when they will come in handy. There is a big difference between understanding the functionalities of these tools, knowing how they work and when they are needed.