Recommended WordPress Plugins and Themes

Posted: April 14, 2021

WordPress Themes

Astra / GeneratePress - Technically the lightest and fastest themes; they pair comfortably with Elementor. Pairing them with Elementor is the best free stack you can currently get.
Avada - A great theme that is reliable, fast, and has the lowest price. It’s also the #1 most sold theme on Themeforest, the biggest marketplace for WP Themes.
Divi - Fast and reliable, with a small learning curve for a lot of features - with advanced capabilities to scale large sites.
Sage - The most modern WP Boilerplate, designed to work like other modern stacks.
Underscores / Understrap - The best starting points to build your own WordPress theme. Underscores aka _S is just like Understrap, except it comes with Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS. In general, boilerplates advance the development workflow to build from scratch.
X Theme - With the option for Pro, X is currently sensational for integrating Loops and Queries directly into pages and layouts.

General Plugins

Advanced Custom Fields - For easily extending WordPress
Elementor - The most powerful website builder
Gravity Forms - For simple and advanced form features. Gravity Forms is the longest running and most robust form plugin on WordPress. It is not free, but I carry an Elite license.
Yoast SEO - The most popular and longest-running SEO plugin for WordPress. Most people use the Free version, while the Pro version($99/year) comes with some advanced perks.

WP-Engine Premium Managed WordPress Hosting

Speed Plugins

WP Rocket - A paid caching & speed plugin.
Autoptimize - A free and advanced solution to optimize CSS and JS code. It works well with others and has recommended plugins to pair with for extreme speed.
WP Super Cache - The fastest free caching plugin that also includes page caching.
Imagify - For bulk image compression, made by the same developers as WP Rocket.

Choosing a Theme

Which WordPress theme should I choose?

It’s an age-old question that has no correct or wrong answer. Every WordPress theme runs on WordPress - a grand CMS. The best ones are multipurpose so you can achieve anything on most of them.

Since every situation is different, talking with an informed developer is the best bet for determining a good stack.

Most crucial is how well a theme is maintained and the developers behind it. Sticking to the most popular and familiar software comes with high assurance.