WordPress is popular as a CMS, and not only are designers being asked to work with it, developers are as well. And while, as a content management system, WordPress does it seem like it would make it easier, the challenges of customising WordPress to meet a site’s needs can be difficult.

Here are five tools we’ve found that should be able to help you with your WordPress development, whether you’re building an entirely new site, working with an existing one, or just trying to add more features on your own site.

User Switching

When you’re building a plugin or a site, you might want different features for different users, and having to constantly repeat the process of logging out and logging in under a different user can take up a lot of time.

User Switching lets you instantly switch between user accounts, letting you check features and permissions for all your different user types.

WP Reset

Need to wipe everything and start again? WP Reset resets your site’s database to the default values, removing all customisations and content and leaving you with a mostly clean and empty site.

It has a built-in snapshot feature that saves your existing site before you delete everything. However, you’ll have to remember to create that snapshot because once you hit that button, it’s gone. And it won’t delete media files, site title, search engine visibility settings, or plugins. But when you’re looking at thousands of posts, it might be an easy way to clear everything out.

Activity Log

If you have several people working on your site remotely, manage a team of developers, or just have a tendency to forget what you did the night before, Activity Log is a great little plugin that gives you plenty of information about what’s happening on your site.

Whether it’s seeing who’s activated a plugin, double-checking when you changed that one setting, or making fun of that colleague who took 20 minutes remembering their password, Activity Log gives you the details you need when you’re working with WordPress.

Toolbelt

An all-in-one plugin that provides day-to-day functions you need on your site, packaged together with a focus on privacy and speed. Whether you want to lazy load images, add in a quick cookie banner that points to your privacy policy, or tweak your admin panel to make it a little more usable, Toolbelt has plenty of options available to make your life easier, and includes the impact on loading times as well.

It’s a fairly new plugin, so we’re hoping for even more features in the future. And we’re using it on our blog, so let us know what you think!

FakerPress

You need to populate your test sites with content, it’s a pain to keep doing it by hand, so why not use FakerPress to give you everything you need?

Get posts, images, users, tags, comments, and more, and then quickly and easily get rid of the content after you finish. It’s great for when you’re checking your blocks and making sure everything’s working just as it should be.

With these tools, I hope you’re able to make short work of some of the trickier problems WordPress developers face. Good luck, and have fun!

Written 4 December 2019 by Kate Bolin, our Marketing Director, originally on the Eco Web Hosting blog.
Cover image by Joshua Aragon on Unsplash.