10 Useful WordPress Admin plugins

A list of Wordpress plugins that can really help in the Admin side of Wordpress. From security to custom fields to editors. It’s all here.

There’s a lot of plugins available for WordPress and you often miss out on some of the gems, purely because there’s so many to trawl through and you might not know what you’re after until you stumble upon it. Here we’re focussing on those plugins that can help with the behind the scenes part of WordPress – the CMS Admin. In no particular order…

Category Order and Taxonomy Terms Order and Post Types Order both allow you to change the order of posts, categories and terms so that’s how they’ll end up appearing in the front end. There’s a few of these drag and drop ordering plugins around but these also allow you to order custom post types and custom taxonomies. The company behind these also have premium versions available  which give you more options to filter things.

Admin Menu Editor allows you to change the order of the WordPress menu that appears on the left side of your browser. Really useful as it allows you to group commonly used buttons and sections as well as creating new ones and dividers.

Better WP Security is a all in one security plugin that gives you suggestions for what you should change to make your site more secure as well as monitoring your site for changed files, Error 404 pages, Incorrect login attempts and lots lots more.

Catch IDs is great when developing template files and you need to quickly know the ID’s of pages, posts categories and anything else that has an ID.

Codepress Admin Columns gives you the option to add and remove columns that show up in the CMS. For example if you want a thumbnail of the featured image appearing next to the post name in the CMS then you can. Basically you can add various columns and this can be incredibly useful when you have custom post types with taxonomies atttached to them. WordPress doesn’t show these as columns and so you need this plugin in order to do just that.

Login Logo allows you to replace the WordPress logo with your own. This is what is seen when logging into the CMS.

Simple Image Sizes shows you the image sizes that you have for you theme and allows you to add more sizes, show those sizes when inserting into a post and regenerate the the images when you’ve tweaked those settings. If you know what you’re doing, then you can do all of this via the theme’s functions file but this is still great because you can see, at a glance, what’s what.

Advanced Custom Fields goes way beyond the standard custom fields that WordPress provides as standard. You can add all sorts of fields including images, text fields, date pickers, checkboxes, radio buttons – to be honest the list is almost endless. If you’re accustomed to building theme templates then the coding behind this is fairly straightforward to impliment into your templates and really does allow for some pretty amazing stuff.

Types is another custom field management plugin but also allows you to create custom post types. We use it just for the post types as I don’t find the custom fields as flexible as Advanced Custom Fields. With that said if you are building a multilingual site then this used in combination with WPML works a treat.

Hopefully that gives you a few plugins to be getting on with. You may have heard of most of these but hopefully there’s some you haven’t. If theres’ any you use frequently and couldn’t do without then please leave a comment below for others to see.

2 replies on “10 Useful WordPress Admin plugins

  1. Avatar for Frank Cruz Frank Cruz says:

    Really helpful collection. Many of these I haven’t heard yet, but surely I’m gonna suggest it to my friends.
    As admin I’m using User Activity Log WordPress Plugin. This lesser known plugin provides great security facilities to track users all activities occurs on the admin side. Also I can set their roles.

  2. Avatar for CarlosWPGuy CarlosWPGuy says:

    Thank you! Category Order and Taxonomy Terms Order kicks ass! Easiest way to move Woocommerce categories around on the front end and easy for the client to use. Great plugin!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *