Open Source · WordPress.org Author
Five published on the official WordPress.org repository and 32 more I built to ship faster, save subscription money, and avoid the bloat tax. All free, all open source, all maintained on a real production site.
Published on WordPress.org
Every plugin below passed the WordPress.org plugin team’s manual code review and lives in the official repository. That means free updates from your dashboard, real ratings from real users, and source code anyone can audit. No upgrade walls, no email gates.
Drop-in shortcodes for dates, years, months, ages, and seasons. Your evergreen pages stop reading “updated in 2021” and start refreshing themselves on January 1st. Read the guide →
Branded affiliate links with custom database tables, early redirects, and CSV import/export. The Pretty Links replacement I built after Pretty Links pushed me to a $99 Pro plan. Read the guide →
Sixteen modules for performance, security, SEO, redirects, and content management in one plugin. Toggle what you need, ignore what you don’t, delete five plugins from your active list. Read the guide →
Adds badge, highlight, and other inline format buttons to the Gutenberg toolbar. The features the core editor forgot, in 12KB of code.
A clean recent-posts widget for sidebars that shouldn’t look like 2009. No jQuery, no settings overload, no nine layout choices nobody uses.
Common Questions
There’s no magic number, but I aim for under 15 active plugins. Quality matters more than quantity. Five poorly coded plugins cause more problems than fifteen well-built ones. The issue is usually plugin overlap, not plugin count.
Rank Math. It includes features that Yoast charges extra for (redirects, schema, content analysis). The free version of Rank Math is better than Yoast Premium. I switched all my sites to Rank Math in 2022 and haven’t looked back.
In most cases, no. The WordPress block editor with GenerateBlocks or Kadence Blocks handles everything most sites need. Page builders like Elementor are fine for client sites where you need visual drag-and-drop editing, but they add significant performance overhead.
Some, yes. Rank Math Pro, FlyingPress, and Perfmatters all pay for themselves through better performance and SEO. A $99/year plugin that saves you 5 hours of work or improves conversions by 2% is an easy ROI. But many premium plugins are just premium-priced, not premium-quality.
Poorly built ones do. Every plugin adds PHP execution time, and many load CSS/JS on every page whether needed or not. The fix isn’t fewer plugins, it’s better plugins. Tools like Perfmatters let you disable plugin assets on pages that don’t need them. I run 8 plugins on this site and still hit sub-second load times.
Deactivate one at a time to isolate the conflict. Check if both plugins hook into the same WordPress filter or action. Most conflicts happen because two plugins try to modify the same output (meta tags, schema, scripts). Pick the one that does it better and remove the other. Plugin overlap is the number one cause of conflicts I’ve seen across 850+ client projects.
I build high-performance WordPress sites, custom plugins, and provide technical consulting for businesses and agencies.
