WordPress is already pretty great, but the plugin ecosystem catapults it to an entirely new level.

It dawned on me the other day that in selling a premium WordPress plugin that our team spends the majority of each day continually using WordPress, many of the interactions being from a support perspective. Whether it is managing our own support systems, troubleshooting a customer’s site, or testing on our development environment – we are knee-deep in WordPress.

It only stands to reason that over the course of time we have grown an affinity to certain plugins (outside of LearnDash, of course). 🙂

Below are five WordPress plugins that we feel you can’t live without. For each one you will find a brief description about why it holds a special place in our hearts!

1. User Switcher

Every WordPress install should have this. If you are building out your website (or learning program) then this plugin makes it easy for you to switch from your Admin account to a Subscriber account so that you can see how everything will look for regular users.

2. Query Monitor

Something not working right on your site? Install query monitor and see if any errors are being thrown. If something is wrong then you will see it highlighted in red. You often can take these errors and report them to your host who (in most cases) can easily rectify whatever may be happening.

3. Check Email

Not sure if your WordPress site is sending emails? This plugin will check and help you diagnose the issue.

4. WP Crontrol

This displays all of the cron jobs that you have on your site, including their general schedule and when they are set to run. If a schedule cron isn’t working then you will be notified on the dashboard.

5. Sucuri Security

There are many security plugins for WordPress, and a lot of them are really good. For the past few years we have been very satisfied with Sucuri as a compliment to our existing security configuration. The security audit functionality alone is worth the quick install of Sucuri.