Over the course of my WordPress career, I’ve launched a couple of my own plugins to the WordPress plugin directory. I’ve gone into details on those here.
These plugins are available to download at the links below:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-webp-images/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/manual-related-products-for-woo/
The first plugin, Simple Webp Images, helps to speed up WordPress in an easy, simple to implement way. The main focus of this was on images – most images we use on computers are in one of two formats, JPEG or PNG. These formats have been around for a lot of years now, and have been completely superseded by newer formats – one of the most popular with these is WEBP.
A WEBP file is much smaller than an equivalent JPEG or PNG, without losing any quality. This is really important for website use, as the smaller the images are, the faster they will load on a webpage. So WEBP is a much better format for use on a website, but there are a couple of problems with that.
First, is that most people are familiar with using JPEG or PNG files, but not so with WEBPs – so a typical business owner is unlikely to know how to generate WEBP images for use on their website. Most digital cameras also save images as JPEG or PNG files, further complicating things.
Secondly, not all web browsers know what to do with WEBP images. Modern, up to date browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox support WEBP images, but older browsers such as Internet Explorer, or Apple Safari, don’t support them. So if a website uses WEBP images only, the images won’t show correctly in those browsers.
So, the plugin that I’ve created solves this problem. It allows website owners to upload JPEG and PNG images to their website, and the plugin will automatically create a copy of those images and convert those copies to WEBP. Then, if a user views the site in a modern, WEBP compatible browser, the images used will be the WEBP versions. If the user views the site in an older browser, they’ll still get the JPEG and PNG images. So it’s the best of both worlds, the site can enjoy the latest in performance standards on browsers that support them, and still work in older browsers as well.
The second plugin, Manual Related Products for WooCommerce, is quite a simple plugin that fills a need I’ve noticed with a few clients. In the WordPress open-source e-commerce program, WooCommerce, there’s a Related Products feature that automatically shows a set of products that it thinks are similar to the one you’re viewing. It makes this judgement based on the category that’s been added to the product, but this can lead to odd choices – for example, on a clothing site, t-shirts, jumpers, and shoes could all come under a category called Menswear, but it wouldn’t make much sense to show shoes as a related product for a t-shirt. WooCommerce doesn’t contain any other method to control what related products are shown.
My plugin solves this problem by allowing site owners to manually choose related products for any of the products on the site. If they don’t choose any related products, the automatic ones are still shown – and if they do, the ones they chose show up instead, allowing much finer control over related products, and helps with upsells/cross-sells of products.
These plugins have helped me on a few projects, hopefully they’ll be of use to you as well!