6 Best WordPress Plugins to Streamline Your Design Productivity

written by Juana Steves on April 24, 2015

WordPress is not just a popular blogging platform but also a powerful and the most preferred Content Management System (CMS). The popularity of WordPress can be attributed to a lot of factors, however, one of the biggest reasons that makes it the widest used CMS platform is the tons of great and remarkably useful plugins it offers. There are a dozen of free as well as premium WordPress plugins available online, which makes WordPress a highly flexible platform.

If you’re a designer and searching for suitable plugins to streamline your workflow, there are plenty of free WordPress plugins you can use to suit different design needs. In this post, we’ve compiled a list of 6 great WordPress plugins for designers.

Mockup

Mockup wants to present your designs to the clients in a professional manner and want them to be approved quickly by clients? If that’s the case, then Mockup is worth a try. It is a lightweight and easy to use plugin that gives you complete control over how your work is presented to your clients. With the help of this plugin your customers can approve designs, give their comments regarding your designs, can easily view related designs and so on.

This plugin works with WordPress version 3.8 and higher.

Zedity

If you want to unleash your creativity, then Zedity can prove a viable option for you. It’s a simple to use editor that lets you create visual content naturally just like you are drawing a sketch on a piece of paper. And, the best part is you do so without having to fiddle with the code. Most importantly, this plugin facilitates design freedom by giving you flexibility and tons of possibilities to create a design according to your wants and needs.

This plugin is compatible with WordPress version 3.5 and higher.

Simple Custom CSS

As designers, you’ll certainly like to play around with the CSS styles of your WordPress website theme and plugin. This is where the Simple Custom CSS plugin comes in handy. The plugin helps in overriding the default styles of plugin and theme of your site. What’s more, the Simple Custom CSS plugin enables you to add your own CSS to the WordPress site using the Moreover, it helps in making quick CSS tweaks, which includes a changing color scheme, font size, and other bothersome yet simple changes that aren’t allowed in WYSIWYG editors.

The plugin can be installed in WordPress version 3.0 or higher.

Manual Image Crop

This WordPress plugin makes the process of cropping an image super easy. This plugin allows users to crop the images of all sizes manually – that are registered in your WordPress theme (i.e. in the featured image section). In order to use the plugin, you just need to click on the “Crop” link provided along with an image in your media library.

This plugin requires WordPress version 3.0 or higher.

Smooth Slider 2

If you’re a designer, but don’t have the coding skills required for creating responsive sliders for your WordPress website, then Smooth Slider 2 plugin best suits your needs. The plugin can be used for creating many different types of sliders like full-width slider, carousel slider, layer slider, etc. It comes with a user-friendly admin interface with a live preview option. One best thing about Smooth Slider 2 is that it enables you to create your own slider design using the slide layout creator.

The SlideDeck 2 plugin is compatible with WP 3.3 or higher versions.

WordPress Call To Action

Almost every site owner aim is to increase their website conversion rate, and WordPress Calls to Action can provide you an excellent way to help achieve such an objective, by helping you create beautiful-looking call to action (or CTA) for your site. It’s a well-known fact that call-to-action can help in converting your site visitors into potential leads. Using this plugin, lets you build and implement your own customized call to action designs. Besides this, it even helps in tracking conversion rates of your CTA’s.

The plugin works well on WP 3.8 or higher versions.

Conclusion

Designers often are unable to let loose of their creative potential because of lack of coding skills, inability to create CSS styles and so on. If you’re working on any WordPress projects, then there are some great plugin such as the ones discussed above that can help boost your design productivity.