WordPress Plugins I Can't Live Without
Having used WordPress for years, and on dozens of projects, I have become partial to a handful of plugins that make the sites I build better. Any seasoned WordPress developer will likely have heard of these plugins, but hopefully this will be useful to those new to the WordPress world.
Advanced Custom Fields Pro
Advanced Custom Fields, and the premium Repeater and Flexible Content Fields are must haves if you want to turn WordPress into a true CMS. Out of the box, WordPress is a great blogging platform, but even simple blogs can take advantage of these plugins to help shape the way information is presented on the front end.
Gravity Forms
Collecting visitor information is a common need for most websites. Gravity Forms makes it easy to build forms, send notifications to administrators, as well as send notifications to the person who filled the form out.
WordPress SEO
WordPress is already pretty great with SEO out of the box, but if you're looking to have fine grain control over your site's title and description tags, WordPress SEO by Yoast is the way to go. Not only does it make it very easy to customize these tags, but it gives feedback on the length of your tag as well as the quality based on the key phrases you are optimizing for.