Regarding the themes that you can use to build a WordPress website, you have a lot of themes to choose from. Some gratis or paid themes are specialized, some are general-purpose. We will only recommend the gratis version of the following general-purpose themes, although they can be difficult to customize:
We don’t recommend using page builders, unless you have to build websites quickly and the page loading speed is not so important.
Regarding the plugins that you can install in a WordPress website, we should mention that they are so numerous and difficult to test one by one, that it’s difficult to choose the best plugin for a specific task. We can only recommend the WordPress plugins from below. They are not perfect. Their quality ranges from acceptable to excellent. However, we consider that for the moment, they are the best for their task.
You may notice that the plugins that we recommend below are not always the most popular ones. There were always good reasons for why we didn’t choose the plugins with the largest number of installations, such as bloated code, negative impact on page loading speed, etc.
| WordPress plugin | Function |
|---|---|
| WPS Hide Login | Change URL of WordPress login page |
| Nginx Cache | Purge Nginx cache when content changes in WordPress |
| Captcha Them All | Add an independent captcha to WordPress forms |
| Contact Form 7 | Add contact forms and other types of forms |
| Widget Context | Show or hide widgets depending on the page |
| Cookie Notice & Consent Banner for GDPR & CCPA Compliance | Cookie notice for GDPR & CCPA compliance |
| SEOPress, on-site SEO | SEO helper plugin |
| CC Child Pages | Display child pages as images with titles on parent pages |
| Responsive Vertical Icon Menu | Vertical menu that can be displayed in a widget |
| Master Slider – Responsive Touch Slider | Responsive slider with touch navigation |
| Max Mega Menu | Create an elegant, user-friendly and touch-ready menu |
| Grid/List View for WooCommerce | Toggle grid/list view of WooCommerce products |
| WooCommerce Product Image Flipper | Flip WooCommerce product image on hover |
| Custom Shipping Methods for WooCommerce | Set up custom shipping methods in WooCommerce |
| Currency Switcher for WooCommerce | Switch currency of displayed prices for WooCommerce products |
| Membership & Content Restriction – Paid Member Subscriptions | Implement paid member subscriptions |
| KB Support – WordPress Help Desk | Implement help desk services |
| WooCommerce | E-commerce platform |
All the recommendations from above are based on our experience and on the experience of other honest users.
We have to point out that Double Bastion has no affiliation with the companies or developers that created the themes and plugins recommended above.
