WordPress continues to lead the market by a wide margin. In 2020 it still is the simplest, most popular way to create your own website or blog. In fact, WordPress powers over 35% of all the websites on the Internet.

Its user friendly interface and open-source technology have conquered the trust and likes of million of individuals and businesses. However, WordPress could get quite limited in its functionality. Here's where a plugin called Advanced Custom Fields come in handy to play with when building a website.

What is Advanced Custom Fields plugin?

Advanced Custom Fields is a WordPress plugin which allows you to add extra content fields to your WordPress edit screens in a simple and logical way. These extra content fields are more commonly referred to as Custom Fields and can allow you to build websites faster and educate your clients quicker. It’s available as a free plugin as well as a premium version (called ACF PRO) which I'm gonna talk more about later.

What Are WordPress Custom Fields?

Custom fields is a feature that allows you to add, store, and display additional information about a piece of content in WordPress. You can also create your own custom fields to store information that’s relevant to your unique needs.
This feature was built for theme designers and developers, so they can extend the power of WordPress.

Now, you might be wondering why you even need custom fields in the first place. For example, if you want to post an event on your WordPress site, couldn’t you just put all that information as regular text in the WordPress editor?
Well, yes, you could. But using custom fields is a better approach for a few reasons:

• Easier input — rather than typing things from scratch, a well-laid out custom field group will make it much easier to input data. For example, instead of typing a date, you can just select the date from a date picker;
• Consistency — the information you enter in your custom fields will always display according to your setup, which means it’ll be consistent across your entire site;
• Easy updates and maintenance — if you want to change something about how that information displays in the future, you can just update one thing rather than having to edit each post individually.

Why use Advanced Custom Fields?

Advanced Custom Fields makes it a lot easier to work with custom fields in WordPress in… pretty much all aspects. It simplifies the interface for adding and managing custom fields in your WordPress dashboard and it also simplifies the process for displaying information from custom fields on the frontend of your site. That fact only helps explain why it’s active on more than 1 million websites with an excellent star rating on over 1,000 reviews. On the backend, it will let you create user-friendly meta boxes that include pre-selected field types on key/value pairs. In total, Advanced Custom Fields offers 30+ different field types that you can add to any area in your dashboard, including posts, users, taxonomies, media, comments, and even custom options pages.

It's helpful to mention that WordPress already includes built-in functionality for adding custom fields to your content. It's native functionality it's pretty decent to operate with, but it’s not the most user-friendly way to do things. This is why a lot of people find Advanced Custom Fields plugin a better alternative.

Advanced Custom Field PRO: why paying?

Advanced Custom Fields comes also as an affordable premium version called ACF PRO. For most basic uses, the free version is completely fine. It gives you access to almost all the field types, as well as all the time-saving and user-friendly features outlined above. If you just want to store some extra information about your content, the free version is all you need. With that being said, the Pro version does add some pretty convenient features that help you use Advanced Custom Fields in more interesting ways:

• Repeater fields — these let you repeat certain fields/groups of fields on a post-by-post basis. For example, if you were adding information about a speaker to an event, a repeater field would help you handle the situation where there’s more than one speaker (you could just “repeat” the field(s) for the speaker as many times as needed, which lets you handle edge cases where there are multiple speakers).
• ACF blocks — display your fields as a block Gutenberg, rather than a meta box. This is especially convenient if you’re building a site for a client and want to give them an easy way to input and visualize custom field data.
• Flexible content field — create layouts from other fields. It’s kind of like a lightweight page builder based on custom field information.
• Gallery field — upload multiple images to a single field.

There are also some other differences, like options pages, the ability to clone fields, improvements to the relationship fields, and other smaller tweaks.
You can see all the ACF PRO features here.
ACF PRO starts at $25 for lifetime use on a single site. Or, you can pay $100 for lifetime use on unlimited sites.

Still not sure whether Advanced Custom Fields is the right tool for boosting your website? When in doubt, start with the free version until you figure out exactly what functionality you need. You can always upgrade later if needed.