These plugins are part of most of my project. Some play a major role when it comes to functionality others are helpful during development and some are useful after a site comes online.
Advanced Custom Fields Pro
The Advanced Custom Fields Pro plugin is in my opinion the best option to add meta fields to your posts and pages. The plugin offers a variety of field types for many use cases, let’s you define fields using PHP or save and read fields from JSON files.
There are also a lot of other useful features, such as an easy interface to develop your own Gutenberg editor blocks without any React knowledge, a simple way to define and populate option pages and many useful filters to allow many customizations.
Custom fields can be added to all post types (default and custom ones) as well as menus and menu items, option pages, taxonomies and more.
Basic fields are available in the free version of the plugin. You can upgrade to the Pro version to get access to the repeater field, ACF blocks, the flexible content field, options pages, the gallery field and the clone field.
GAinWP
Adds Google Analytics tracking to your site and displays its data in your dashboard. GAinWP is free, easy to implement and works great out of the box.
Limit Login Attempts Reloaded
Increases the security of your WordPress site by limiting the number of login attempts that are possible through all login systems (normal login, XMLRPC, Woocommerce, custom login pages).
Limit Login Attempts Reloaded is free and provides many options for customization, such as the number of retry attempts per IP, logging, white- and blacklisting and supports custom IP origins (Cloudflare, Sucuri, etc.). The plugin is also fully GDPR compliant.
Nested Pages
Nested Pages provides a simple drag & drop interfae for managing your page structure and post ordering. The plugin can be activated and configured per post type.
Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin
Adds a redirect metabox to all pages, posts or custom post types with which the post can easily be redirected to any URL. Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin also provides an option for setting up redirects for non-existant links which is very useful after sites have been converted to WordPress or the link or page structure has been updated.
Safe SVG
Safe SVG allows you to upload SVG into WordPress. The plugin checks uploaded files to stop vulnerabilities and gives you the ability to preview the uploaded SVG in the media library. This is included in the free version of the plugin and everything I need. If you want SVGO Optimization, Choose who can upload and premium support, check out the Pro version.
Simple Cache
An easy caching solution that just works. Simple Cache provides a one-click install with just an on-off switch.
If you use advanced object caching (Memcached or Redis) there is an advanced mode available that will automatically setup Batcache and Memcached/Redis for you.
The SEO Framework
An automated, advanced, unbranded and fast SEO solution for your WordPress website. The SEO Framework describes itself as the only feature-complete SEO plugin that follows the white-hat guidelines and rules imposed by WordPress and search engines. The base plugin is free and provides all features you need. There are free and paid extensions to further add structured data, honeypots, AMP, Monitoring, etc.
Updraft Plus – Backup/Restore
A simple automated backup plugin that allows backups of the database or all files to the server and some offsite storage in regular intervals. Updraft Plus allows backups directly to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, FTP and others. There is also a paid version with even more options however I only use the free version.
User Switching
Need to check access rights or user roles with ease? User Switching allows you to quickly swap between user accounts in WordPress.
WP BrowserUpdate
WP Browser Update informs visitors to update their outdated browser. Outdated browsers can be configured. I mostly use this to give users of Internet Explorer 11 a hint to update since the page might look broken if it is not optimized for IE11.
WP Migrate DB
This is my go to solution during development and testing of websites. WP Migrate DB allows an easy database export including smart find and replace on URL’s and file paths which you can then download and import in a different environment.
I usually use the free version, Pro adds direct pushes and pulls to servers, support for multisite and push and pull of media libraries and theme and plugin files.
WPML
I currently create multilingual sites using the paid WPML plugin. It allows you to translate everything, adds language switchers automatically or provides filters and actions so they can be created manually. It also integrates with many other plugins (such as ACF, Yoast SEO, etc.).