Marcus Burnette is a web designer and developer, amateur photographer, podcast host, and virtual event moderator.
As part of the GoDaddy Pro Events and Community Team, Marcus is passionate about helping agencies and freelancers build eCommerce sites for clients with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro and GoDaddy’s premium WordPress and WooCommerce platforms. Marcus is also the creator of The WP World, a community site to connect WordPress folks with each other.
1. Advanced Custom Fields
When I originally picked a CMS to build client sites on, I picked Drupal. Why? Because it had “content types” and “fields” built in. At that time, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) didn’t exist, but it was the introduction of ACF that allowed me to move away from Drupal to WordPress. WordPress was an easier platform to build on and ACF gave me the foundations to build in a way that I was familiar with — without the need to hand-code custom post types and custom fields.
2. Elementor
Elementor has been my go-to for page layout for many years—and continues to this day. In my experience, it is the most accurate when showing you on the backend exactly what you’ll see on the frontend. It’s easy to use and relatively easy to extend. Though a couple of them are no longer maintained, I’ve created several plugin extensions to Elementor to integrate with other plugins or enhance the core functionality.
After ACF, the Elementor plugin and their “Hello” theme are the next things I install on every site. This gets me up and running faster than any other layout system I’ve tried.
3. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is by far the largest, most popular way to add ecommerce to your WordPress site. While this is not a good reason to choose WooCommerce alone, it does mean that the community around it is also the largest.
It may be overkill for some smaller ecommerce websites, the flexibility it offers to grow and extend make it the easy pick for WordPress commerce projects. I’ve used it for membership sites, product sales, donations, invoicing, and as a catalog… and I always know I can extend it for other use cases with a few extensions!
4. Code Snippets
As a intermediate developer, I count on my coding abilities to fill in the gaps that plugins can’t cover. For larger code projects, I tend to create custom plugins, but sometimes I just need to add a handful of lines to accomplish a simple task. In these cases, I reach for the Code Snippets plugin. The simplicity of adding a snippet to the site and being able to easily toggle it on and off makes this plugin invaluable.
5. WS Form
A newer addition to my plugin arsenal, I’m finding myself adding WS Form to each site I build. Besides the common “contact us” form that just about every site needs, WS Form allows me to easily build out post submission forms, modify WooCommerce product and cart forms, and integrate with 70+ other external services.
There is a free version (WS Form LITE) in the WordPress plugin repo, but I’d highly recommend just going ahead and paying for the full version. The pricing is reasonable and the value is immeasurable. It will save you a ton of time!
Although not required, I tried to pick plugins that were free—or at least had a free version. These are five that I can vouch for and could answer most questions about, given that I’ve used them so many times!