As a graphic designer, you have to make sure your visual concepts inspire and captivate your readers. With the increasing competition in today’s digital world and diminishing attention spans, you need to always be at your best while using the best tools that can help you create captivating websites and images. As a graphic designer, you are probably aware of WordPress (you might even use it). The best way to get the most out of it is by familiarizing yourself with the available graphic designers’ plugins.
Luckily, there are different plugins out there you can use, and there is a range of tools available to make your job easier. We compiled a list of 9 must-have plugins you should consider adding to your toolbox.
1. Under Construction and Coming Soon Plugins
UnderCostructionPage
UnderConstructionPage plugin helps you build a range of one-page sites quickly. This plugin was designed to provide your visitors with a better experience of arriving on a page and seeing your message stating the site is being re-designed and will be launched soon. This improves the user experience, which can be damaged if the visitor sees the usual 404-error page.
Using this plugin, you can create a fantastic number of landing pages using its super beginner-friendly drag-and-drop editor. This plugin comes with over 1 million free stock images and a whole abundance of pre-made templates to make the whole process faster and simpler. Plus, if any problems occur, the friendly support team will always jump in and help out.
Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode
Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode plugin helps you create a range of different pages with a friendly drag and drop builder. These pages can include coming soon pages, under construction pages, sales, or landing pages. Again, like with the previous plugin, you can choose from a library of high-quality images. You can also pick a customizable theme that you can edit to match your brand.
You will be given built-in tests and guidelines to help you achieve a good SEO ranking. This plugin supports CRM and marketing software that will collect emails from your visitors and subscribers so you can reach them later when your site is up and running.
2. WP Sticky
WP Sticky is a plugin that can turn one or more elements on your site sticky (this means they are always visible, even when a user scrolls down your webpage). You might wonder why this is important, and the reason is navigation. If your website is difficult to navigate, you’ll lose a huge chunk of your visitors as they won’t have easy access to the rest of your site. This is especially so for sites that are really content and text-heavy.
With the help of this plugin, any element can be made sticky, the menu, the header, or social media buttons, whatever your heart desires.
It also comes with so many options for customization, like a color picker, adding a scroll-down or a fade-in effect, a custom z-index, etc. Every sticky element created with the help of this plugin is fully responsive, so no matter the screen size, your site will always look great. But if you don’t want the sticky element to appear on, for instance, mobile, you can easily disable it for that screen size.
3. WP Compress
WP Compress optimizes your images for faster load times and a better user experience. It will also adapt images and scripts based on the incoming visitors, their devices, screen resolution, and geolocation. Media is loaded from the nearest server to make sure it’s always at top speed.
To use this plugin, you just have to link your website, and you are ready to start with real-time optimization. Moreover, you can create custom reports and remotely manage linked websites, which is especially useful if you have many clients.
4. Blocks Animation
Blocks Animation is a plugin that lets you add CSS animations to your Gutenberg blocks. You just have to install it, and you will see animation settings in the blocks. This will be great if you want to find a way to engage your readers. Even if you aren’t really a tech-type, this plugin will make the creation of dynamic and engaging content really simple and faster than ever.
5. Advanced WP Backgrounds
Advanced WP Backgrounds let you add impressive parallax backgrounds with images and videos on your site. It also has Gutenberg and WPBakery Page Builder support. You can choose your background type, colors, images, parallax options powered by JS, different effects (scroll, opacity, scale), visual shortcode maker, and custom CSS offsets. The backgrounds are mobile-optimized and can be adjusted to show up only on certain browsers and devices.
6. NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is a WP gallery management system with the ability to batch upload photos, import metadata, add and delete photos, edit thumbnails, and lots more. You can choose from three main styles of galleries (slideshow, thumbnail, and image browser) and two album styles (compact and extended). Each option can be customized and edited, including timing, transition, controls, size, and style. The plugin comes in a free and premium version with more features and abilities.
7. Simple Author Box Pro
Simple Author Box is a great plugin you’ll definitely be in need of as your page grows. Sometimes you’ll be working on a project with another person, and they too should be properly credited. That’s exactly what this plugin is for. It allows the user to add guest authors and multiple authors to a single post. Every author box can be customized in terms of color and style.
Plus, you can also use it to add the author’s name, gravatar, social links, etc. It’s so important that everyone involved with a project gets proper credit, so make sure you don’t miss out on this one.
8. TablePress
TablePress is a plugin that lets you create and manage tables. You can embed them into posts, pages, or text widgets. The data in tables can be edited into a spreadsheet-like interface, with no coding knowledge needed. Tables can contain any type of data and can be imported from Excel, CSV, HTML, and JSON files.
To change the styling of your table, you can enter CSS commands into the Custom CSS text areas. You can also add features like sorting, pagination, filtering, alternating row colors, and highlighting.
9. Scroll Triggered Animations
Scroll Triggered Animation is a very customizable plugin with a user-friendly interface for implementing CSS animations. It works on any theme and can animate your site within minutes. It is easy to use, and you can create your own CSS animations. You don’t need to have any JS knowledge, and you can even choose if you want pre-set animations from the default library or create your own CSS3 animations and integrate them with the plugin.
Conclusion
We hope you found this article useful. There are plenty of different tools and plugins that can help you improve your site, whether by making it more engaging or ensuring everything loads fast and is responsive on all devices. As a graphic designer, you should try to become aware of them and all the benefits they bring with them. They can prove very useful in gaining your readers’ attention and interest.