SpicePay News

10 great WordPress plugins for designers

Are you a designer or photographer looking for the easiest way to build a portfolio website in WordPress? There are plenty of WordPress portfolio plugins that allow you to easily build beautiful portfolio websites. So check out our choice list of the best WordPress plugins available below, to add functionality to your website.

Envira Gallery

Envira is a premium WordPress gallery plugin. It allows you to create beautiful image galleries and albums. Already used by thousands, Envira Gallery is the best WordPress plugin for photographers and designers. Creating a portfolio with Envira Gallery is quite easy. Simply create galleries containing your portfolio items. Group galleries into Albums, and you are good to go. You can add your portfolio items anywhere on your WordPress site with the click of a button.

WordPress ships with some limited abilities to host image galleries, but for a truly customisable and flexible solution, a plugin such as Modula offers a far better experience for both the web designer and website maintainer, and for the visitor to your site. This WordPress plugin offers a host of different options that allows for true customisation rather than forcing you to adopt a visual style that matches every other gallery on the web.

Speed Booster Pack

Website visitors have always been reluctant to hang around for a slow-loading website, and as the primary consumption platform has moved from desktop and laptop computers towards smartphones accessing over 3G and 4G, this has only increased. If you want your visitors to stick on your website, you need it to be quick to load as well as engaging and useful. Speed Booster Pack helps with the loading speed by automatically minifying your scripts, removing blocking scripts, optimising database calls and loading assets asynchronously. The results can be quite dramatic, giving the impression of a huge loading-speed boost.

Nimble Portfolio

Nimble Portfolio offers an easy way to add portfolio to your WordPress site. You can upload your images or other digital works by creating a new portfolio item. Portfolio items are a custom post type where you will need to set portfolio item photograph as featured image. Nimble also allows you to group different images into filters. The base Nimble Portfolio plugin is free and comes with limited skins. For more skins and features, you will need to purchase premium add-ons offered by the developer.

WordPress Portfolio Plugin

WordPress portfolio plugin is another free portfolio plugin. It allows you to automatically generate thumbnails of websites you add to your portfolio using ShrinkTheWeb API. You can customize the appearance of portfolio items using custom CSS and HTML. You can group different portfolio items by adding them to Groups.

Google Analyticator

If you want your WordPress blog to become more popular, you need to start thinking about promotion. If you know the keywords that visitors are using, you can use those in your post. The Google Analyticator plugin adds the JavaScript code necessary to enable Google Analytics on your WordPress dashboard. After you enable this plugin, go to the settings page, input your Google Analytics UID, then authenticate your Google Analytics account with Google Analyticator.

NextGen Gallery

NextGen is a popular WordPress plugin for creating image galleries. It can also be used to create your portfolio. You can create your image galleries and albums. You can also tag your gallery items and display your portfolio with lightbox popups. The free version of plugin comes with good balance of features and functionality. However, you will need the paid version to get support and more features.

Portfolio by BestWebSoft

Portfolio by BestWebSoft is another popular choice for WordPress portfolio plugin. It can work for any kind of portfolio, but it is designed to focus on web development agencies.

JetPack

JetPack brings some of the functionality of WordPress hosted blogs to self-hosted WordPress installations.The features are wide and varied, and include cloud-hosted stats for your site, email subscription to your site, a built-in URL shortener service, social network-based commenting, inline spelling and grammar checking and an enhanced gallery system.

Wordfence Security

Security is a massive issue for WordPress websites, just as it is for any site on the web. One of the biggest issues is that as WordPress is such a popular CMS, there’s a lot of knowledge out there about how to compromise it, and exploit security holes. While this WordPress plugin wont solve all of these for you, it does allow you to monitor attempts to maliciously access your site, and adds in support for the likes of two-factor authentication, which is a security must-have in the modern era.

It’s only fair to share…Share on FacebookShare on Google+Tweet about this on TwitterShare on LinkedInPin on PinterestDigg thisShare on RedditEmail this to someone