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Hey everyone,
I’m working on streamlining my standard WordPress setup for new projects and wanted to see how others approach it. What plugins, themes, or development tools do you always include? Do you have any go-to starter themes or frameworks? Which editors do you prefer (Gutenberg, Classic Editor, Elementor, etc.)?
Personally, I’m using ACF, Yoast SEO, and Query Monitor in most of my setups, but I’m wondering if I’m missing anything that could make life easier. Would love to hear about your go-to setup! 👨💻👩💻
Looking forward to your responses!
+gravity forms
If we’re building something from scratch than anymore we’re using Bricks, otherwise if a client comes to us wanting to base it off some other framework.
We’ll make plugin choices based on our assessment of the client’s current and anticipated future needs
Gutenberg, GeneratePress+GenerateBlocks, The SEO Framework, Pods or ACF, Query Monitor, FluentSMTP, Forminator, persistent object cache (redis or sqlite), a few code snippets, and other stuff as needed. Still learning and not an expert by any means.
I use only Divi and it’s served me well. Wordfence. All-in-one backups.
GeneratePress / Underscores, WordFence, UpDraft & one SEO plugin.
I use my own custom barebones theme based on Underscores for all of my builds. Regular plugins are Page Builder by SiteOrigin, ACF Pro, Autoptimize, Crop Thumbnails, Save SVG. I use Local by Flywheel as a local development environment, and some time back I created an empty site with my theme and preferred plugins installed and activated, then saved it as a blueprint. Now, when I want to create a new site, I create it from that blueprint, and within moments I have a fresh WordPress instance with everything I need already installed.
ACF Pro, Gravity Forms, The SEO framework and either fully custom theming with custom Gutenberg blocks made with ACF or GenerateBlocks / GeneratePress for smaller sites. This is the base layer, anything else depends on the project and wanted functionality.
I would add [WPCode](https://wordpress.org/plugins/insert-headers-and-footers/) for syncing snippets across sites easier. They have a private snippet cloud that I use on numerous sites.
Also I always use Duplicator for migrations and backups and WP Mail SMTP for email deliverability.
Of course there are form plugins, SEO plugin (AIOSEO) etc in the stack too and others based on the projects need.
Astra premium templates (without Elementor)
If it’s a long-term client where I can work on a project over an longterm period, I always use a combo LiveCanvas and picostrap theme.
A lot depends on your WP level and skills. My setup is that of a mid-level developer with **decent** programming skills.
In my agency, all junior devs use it and find it quite comfortable. Where they lack knowledge, they get help from their GPT agent (available from the chatgpt library), which allows us (with human supervision, of course) to write all the pieces of code we need, whether for WooCommerce or ACF or anything else…
In 100% of cases, we’ve never messed up a project.
We have a Docker image with WP in an NGINX environment, our own SEO plugin, our base function plugin where we inject all the custom functions a client may need, and our base template.
These are the [tools we use on WP websites](https://new.reddit.com/r/WordPress_org/comments/147gt1q/must_have_wordpress_plugins_and_themes/) we build, our basic choices we put together over the years and in practice, but it doesn’t mean they are the best fit for you or anybody else, but maybe they can just give you some ideas. We put it on our initial WordPress installation as our “blueprint/template” for all the sites we build so in this way we can speed up our development process very much, especially as we made initial setup for all the plugins and themes. 🙂