WordPress is the most popular of the current website and blog creating platforms. There is one key reason for this popularity. It is its ability to support a huge number and variety of plugins and templates.
WordPress has the ability to integrate the useful design instruments. It makes it the most highly flexible and customizable web-building tool on the market.
Thousands of themes and plugins to select from is certainly good news for designers. But there is also a downside, and it is this. How do you go about separating the wheat from the chaff in your attempts to find the right plugin? You need the one that has the functionality you are looking for to perform a certain task and do it well.
We’ve saved you the time and trouble of sifting through hundreds of possibilities. We did so by presenting these nine WordPress plugins; the best of the best with respect to what they can do for you.
wpDataTables
Web designers take great pride in their ability to produce tables and charts that will impress clients and users alike, but the work involved can sometimes be quite tedious and time-consuming. The wpDataTables WordPress plugin makes table and chart building almost ridiculously easy; even if a massive amount of complex data is involved.
The fact that well over 16,000 companies and as many or more web designers use wpDataTables attests to its popularity. It is an excellent tool for those tasked with managing and presenting financial, statistical, or scientific data, as well as for those who may work with lesser amounts of data and simply want to produce informative, responsive, and easily editable tables and charts for clients or web visitors.
wpDataTables accepts input from many different sources and in many different formats. It is a powerful data organizing and management tool. Of its many features, one that particularly stands out is Conditional Formatting. This feature allows you to highlight or color code columns, rows, or cells containing information of special importance to the user.
Sliders are often used to enhance a website’s UX and highlight or promote key product or service information. LayerSlider provides a variety of customizable layouts from which to create sliders, but this WordPress plugin can do so much more.
LayerSlider is a multi-purpose animation platform on which you can build impressive sliders, construct striking image galleries or portfolios, design animated popups and page blocks, and even create landing pages and complete websites!
LayerSlider is totally device-friendly, responsive, and developer-friendly as well. Your designs will look great whether a user views them on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone. The visual drag and drop editor enables you to do what you need to get done quickly and easily. User support is excellent, and the supporting documentation is first-class.
NextGEN Gallery and NextGEN Pro are the top plugins of their type on today’s market. NextGEN Gallery has in fact served as the industry standard for gallery design and building tools for the past ten years. NextGEN Pro with its assortments of gallery-building extensions, simply offers more of the same.
Both are open source software solutions, NextGEN Gallery is free, and NextGEN Pro is available on a subscription basis. Both plugins are easy enough for a newbie to use, and powerful enough for the most demanding of users who wish to showcase huge numbers of images.
Either plugin can be used to create albums, manage and/or display thousands of images, or allow customers to select individual or groups of images for purchase or download. Functionality is included that allows PayPal or Stripe payments, or payments by personal check.
Essential Grid WordPress Plugin
An important addition to our collection is Essential Grid. This plugin qualifies as the #1 WordPress grid design solution. This ThemePunch plugin’s customizable grid capabilities enables you to display content in virtually any format you can visualize.
Essential Grid is especially useful when the task on hand is building an image gallery, creating a blog, or setting up an online shop.
This WordPress plugin is a “must have” for building review-type websites for products, movies, books, etc., or incorporating review sections in eCommerce or consumer information websites.
WP Review Pro features include 16 pre-made templates, 14 types of snippets, and a choice of star, point, circle, percentage, and thumbs rating systems. WP Review Pro is compatible with all WordPress themes, it’s mobile friendly, and you can expect 24/7 support.
The Map SVG plugin enables you to take any SVG file and convert it into an interactive vector map. A worldwide selection of vector maps comes with the package. Since these maps are geo-calibrated, you can easily add markers by entering addresses in the search field.
This is the only WordPress plugin that can be used to create all three types of interactive maps: vector maps, image maps, and Google maps.
This all-in-one social media automation solution enables you to cross-promote content, schedule, and share your social media posts on Facebooks, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, and 11 other social media networks.
Different social media platforms have different rules and approaches to the type and format of content they accept. The Blog2Social solution allows you to take than into account when you post your messages.
FAQ sections don’t always get the attention from web designers they deserve, in part because most of those designers lack an understanding of how important an FAQ section can be to a website’s success, along with how to put one together.
Heroic FAQs resolves those problems by helping designers create comprehensive, non-repetitive FAQ sections that can add value to any website.
With this WordPress plugin you get one of the most flexible gallery-buildings solutions on the market today. PhotoBlocks Grid Gallery allows you to mix horizontal and vertical images and mix images and text within the same gallery. The grid systems you employ will be properly justified and pixel perfect in position.
PhotoBlocks Grid Gallery offers special effects including different hover effects, it’s responsive and is superfast in its operation.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you’ve come across one or more design solutions you’ve been looking for. Unless there’s a plugin or two that you have no use for, you might even select all nine.
Whether you select one or nine, you’ll get your money’s worth. You will also experience a positive impact on your workflow. In addition, you will be on the receiving end of some high fives from clients and users.
About the Author
Mirko Humbert
Mirko Humbert is the editor-in-chief and main author of Designer Daily and Typography Daily. He is also a graphic designer and the founder of WP Expert.