15 Years a WordPress Developer: Insights & Essential Plugins

Originally published: May 12th, 2023. Updated on: April 29th, 2025.

Spending 15 years as a WordPress developer has certainly taught me a great deal about this popular and nimble CMS and the genuinely amazing things it can achieve. Over these years, I’ve built a lot of websites in my role.

WordPress Has a Lot to Bring to the Table

As one of the most mature CMS platforms out there, WordPress offers, you know, a heck of a lot of flexibility. I’ve used other content management systems like Craft CMS, Statamic, and Ghost. And while those are excellent platforms in their own right, there’s something about being a WordPress developer that feels pretty unique and special.

I’m not afraid to say it’s got a place in my heart!

Even now, with so many different content management systems, frameworks, and languages available, WordPress really stands head and shoulders above the rest. There’s a solid reason it powers at least 450 million websites! I always end up coming back to WordPress as my #1 platform of choice.

Solid and Stable

The numbers speak for themselves:

• Roughly 70 million new posts are created by WordPress users every month on WordPress.com.
• WordPress.com sees more than 20 billion page views monthly.
• Nearly 3 million searches are performed for "WordPress" every month.
• It holds a commanding 60% share of the overall CMS market.

Indeed, WordPress powers a huge chunk of the internet.

Fluid and Flexible

Being a WordPress developer means building with an exceptional platform. It’s strong and solid, yet surprisingly flexible and malleable, backed by an incredible community.

It’s open source, which is, of course, awesome. It's quite easy to find answers to questions and get informative, sometimes entertaining, updates via Twitter and other social media channels. Honestly, it’s got pretty much everything I could ask for in a development package.

Is it perfect? No platform is, naturally. But throughout all the years I’ve worked with it, I’ve found literally zero issues that were insurmountable. Not a single one.

Delivering for Clients as a WordPress Developer

I consistently recommend WordPress to clients seeking a tool that lets them manage their content on a really granular level. It allows them to dig deep into their content strategies, expressing themselves and their business goals clearly and concisely.

What's more, not only is it an extremely capable system on its own, but it also boasts a huge external plugin library—over 55,000 free plugins the last time I looked. These plugins allow the core WordPress code to be customised and extended as needed, so you’re never restricted to just what comes out-of-the-box. Simply put, there’s a world of potential to deliver on expectations as a WordPress developer.

5 Absolutely Essential WordPress Plugins

Based on my experience, here are a few plugins that I always recommend.

WordPress Plugin – Elementor

WordPress comes bundled with a powerful block-based editing system known as Gutenberg. On its own, Gutenberg provides many powerful editorial functions, but it doesn’t handle everything, you see. For anything more complicated than basic article layout and formatting, I’d turn to either hand-coding a template or using a page builder like Elementor. Interestingly, the very page you’re reading was built using Elementor, although the content itself is managed via the Gutenberg block editor.

I find Elementor's power is best suited for creating stunning, fluid full-page layouts. Gutenberg, with its more relaxed, scaffold-like interface, provides a much cleaner and nimbler editing environment for writers wanting a distraction-free experience.

Elementor is available as a limited free package, or a Pro license starting from $59/yr.

WordPress Plugin – Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)

Advanced Custom Fields is an absolutely essential plugin for any WordPress developer. I’m actually using it on this very page to build out different sections, giving each its own unique content management functionality. It’s a really foundational, extremely powerful plugin that brings a whole new dimension to WordPress’ data management capabilities. An absolute must-have, truly.

ACF also integrates nicely with Elementor, allowing custom fields to be embedded anywhere within intricate layouts.

Advanced Custom Fields comes in a free flavour, or the more feature-rich Pro version starting from $49/yr.

WordPress Plugin – Gravity Forms

Another plugin that WordPress developers shouldn’t overlook, Gravity Forms brings the power of highly customisable drag-and-drop forms right into the WordPress interface. You can build pretty much any form imaginable with Gravity Forms, incorporating elements like date fields, number range inputs, financial calculators, address lookups, and many more.

Gravity Forms also offers access to even more powerful integrations via paid subscription tiers, such as Stripe checkout fields, HubSpot CRM functionality, and Google Analytics for tracking form submissions (though some features require higher-tier licenses). Frankly, I use it on almost every project; it feels like a core WordPress feature to me now. Whenever a client needs something more complex than a simple contact form, I turn to Gravity Forms.

(For simple contact forms, I highly recommend the Contact Form 7 plugin – it does a great job for basic name/email forms, and it’s free!)

Gravity Forms is available as a licensed plugin starting from $59/yr.

WordPress Plugin – Yoast SEO

Yoast is one of the most widely known WordPress plugins and has rightfully earned its place in the spotlight among clients and developers alike. Anyone working in Search Engine Optimisation will recognise the name instantly. This comprehensive tool empowers users to optimize their website for search engines, helping to increase visibility and drive more organic traffic.

As soon as it’s installed, Yoast gets to work optimizing your SEO. Key features include:

• XML Sitemap Generation: It automatically generates a sitemap and updates it whenever you refresh your content. A well-maintained sitemap is vital for proper SEO strategies, you know.
• Automatic Sitemap Submission: Yoast also automatically submits your sitemap to Google and other major search engines. It ensures you don’t have duplicate URLs by setting canonical URLs correctly, which can sometimes penalise SEO rankings.
• Focus Keywords: Tracking focus keywords is a vital SEO strategy. Yoast makes it easy to monitor how well your focus keywords are used within your articles. By paying close attention to Yoast’s intuitive feedback, you can ensure your site’s pages rank highly in search results.

It’s an all-around fantastic plugin, and one that I install on every client site I build.

Yoast is available as a premium package for $99/yr, with a free version also offered.

WordPress Plugin – Redirection

Redirecting visitors is unavoidable if you regularly change page URLs or perform content overhauls. Managing SEO and ensuring search result rankings are maintained and strengthened is a vital task for any WordPress developer. Retaining your search engine ranking is crucial, and a plugin like Redirection makes that process much more straightforward.

You can manually specify URLs to redirect from/to via a clear interface, or let the plugin automatically create redirects whenever you update a post or page URL. This helps search engines understand the change and serve the new URL instead of the old one. The Redirection plugin is arguably one of the most important plugins if you’re SEO-minded. Basically, it gives you peace of mind that redirection rules are maintained and content updates are handled correctly. I absolutely, positively always make sure this is installed on any site I build. It’s a real lifesaver if someone makes a URL change that might otherwise cause a page to fall off the search rankings!

Redirection is available as a free plugin from the WordPress plugin repository.

Looking Beneath The Surface Of WordPress

What makes this powerful content management system tick? WordPress’ plugin system is powerful – it’s hard to overstate quite how powerful it really is. But this wouldn't be possible without WordPress' feature-packed and extendable core code.

Thanks to the way WordPress' internal core functionality is built, plugins can hook into vital functions using actions and filters.

• Actions take data to process and return nothing. In other words, actions make things happen at specific points during the core WordPress process.
• Filters, on the other hand, take data, process it, and return the changed data. Essentially, filters make changes to data during the core WordPress process.

This might sound simple, but together these two concepts give plugin and theme developers significant leverage over a WordPress installation and how it operates. It gives WordPress developers the ability to turn the platform into pretty much whatever they want. These clever features ensure plugins have access to the same powerful functions that keep WordPress itself running.

Instead of modifying core code (a practice that would leave websites prone to breaking during updates), plugins can attach functions that execute alongside equivalent core functions. For example, an action hook could allow a plugin to modify post content after it's saved. Or a plugin like Gravity Forms could use an action hook to update user account details after a specific form submission. Extremely powerful plugins offering event booking or tiered subscription memberships are built using these hooks.

Plugins can take advantage of, to name just a few:

• Post creation hooks.
• Filters to modify content before display (great for translation plugins).
• Actions that fire when someone comments on an article.
• Administrative hooks letting plugins introduce new admin functions.
• Hooks to build powerful APIs on top of WordPress.

There’s a very good chance that if you see something happening in WordPress, you can add a hook to it and extend that functionality however you like. There’s a lot to cover here, more than I could detail in this summary. If you’d like to know more, check out the official WordPress documentation or get in touch if you’d like to know more about plugin development. Bespoke plugins can be created for commercial or personal use, offering significant scope for interesting new ideas.

Building Custom Templates

Bringing a client’s vision to life sometimes requires digging into template code. Sometimes, a page builder like Elementor isn’t quite enough on its own. Custom WordPress design services often use various techniques. These might include:

• Building a custom template from scratch using PHP, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
• Using an existing feature-rich template from sources like Themeforest.net (though finding one that isn’t bloated can be tough).
• Using a bare-bones template designed for rapid scaffolding, such as Elementor’s Hello theme, WordPress block themes like Ollie, or a WooCommerce theme like Flatsome if building an online shop. Elementor also offers a cool kit library with hundreds of ready-made themes open to customisation.
• Making use of a starter theme like Underscores if you like writing everything yourself but appreciate guidance.

Depending on how designs are provided – perhaps via Figma, Invision, or even exported from a tool like Webflow – a process of converting those designs into a working template will occur.

WordPress’ Template Hierarchy

At its core, WordPress uses a flexible template hierarchy that tells the internal code how to map URLs to specific page templates. For example, for a URL like https://mysite.com/blog/category/news-updates, WordPress will:

1. Check for a template file named category-news-updates.php. If not found...
2. If the category ID is 123, look for category-123.php. If not found...
3. Look for category.php (the generic category template). If not found...
4. Load the higher-level archive.php. If that’s not available...
5. Load the main index.php template file.

Using this approach, WordPress developers can build varied and extremely powerful site structures. This method works not just for categories, but also for blog posts, articles, author pages, and custom post types. Fundamentally, developers can build all sorts of complex website structures using WordPress’ powerful internal template architecture. You aren't restricted to the standard approach that page builders sometimes encourage. Feel free to explore, innovate, and experiment with whatever your imagination can conjure up!

This might be desirable if:

• You have a particularly innovative or creative design that’s hard to represent in the literal, grid-based designers offered by Elementor and other page builders.
• You want to include a lot of animation or dynamic functionality. Features like these often benefit more from lightweight, scaffold-like structures with more focus on interactivity, something page builders might struggle with as complexity grows.
• You're building data-heavy websites. Page builders are natively designed for static content and don’t cope well with tasks like creating fluid administrative portals or complex multi-user SaaS apps.

Custom Post Types

You can also leverage a powerful WordPress feature known as “Custom Post Types” (CPTs). Using the CPT system means you can define new types of data beyond the default post and page types. For instance, you might create a “Property” post type for a real estate website or a “Document” post type to track specific documents internally.

Adding this extra layer of flexibility on top of the existing template hierarchy and plugin system means there’s almost unlimited scope for building extremely useful and engaging websites for personal use, businesses, customers—whoever you want to build for, really, the tools are there.

Benefits Of Hand-coded WordPress Templates

There are many reasons a WordPress developer might choose to build a template from scratch using code:

• Some clients appreciate the ease of administration that comes with a more direct, hand-coded approach. Page builder tools like Elementor can sometimes be more time-intensive, especially when editing many pages at once. Loading each page, making changes, and repeating can take time. With a custom approach, content can be edited directly via uncluttered fields designed specifically for your requirements.
• You can think outside the box and harness the raw power of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without limitations. This allows for incredibly dynamic, visually appealing, and engaging 3D visuals or interactive animations.
• The code can be kept lean and efficient, guided by precise requirements, without sticking to guidelines imposed by pre-existing templates or builder systems.

There are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches (page builders vs. hand-coding), though both can be used to build extremely powerful and engaging websites. Ultimately, it all comes down to the needs and wishes of your customers or stakeholders. Whatever you’re looking for, we can figure out the best approach together.

WordPress – An All-Round Champion

Whatever your website requirements are, WordPress can likely offer solutions. Feel free to speak to Solarise about custom WordPress developer services if you’d like to learn more.