As a WordPress developer, whenever you build a new theme, plugin or even if you are testing out new features of WordPress that you might not be familiar with. There’s one task that get’s extremely repetitive, cumbersome and mundane.
You will always need to create some custom dummy data to test whether your plugin is working as expected, and as developers ourselves we have had this problem quite a lot. Thankfully, there are easy ways to solve it.
The usual way people tend to do this is either hire someone on Fiverr, to create all this dummy text or as a WordPress developer you’ll need to perform the task of filling up an empty theme with dummy content yourself.
Our goal with this post is to help you to alleviate this time-consuming aspect of the development process by covering a list of plugins that help you achieve this goal in just a matter of seconds.
Not only does the test data have to be comprehensive enough to capture all the possible post scenarios, it has to be as close enough as possible to real world data. This way you can effectively test the features you are building and luckily, these plugins do just that.
1. FakerPress
With over 900 downloads and a consistent five start rating. FakerPress is currently the leading and a very popular test data generation plugin which provides a clean way to generate fake and dummy content to your WordPress which is perfect for developers who need testing.
FakerPress gives the option to set the number of posts to generate, it also allows the creation of various post types such as a regular post, pages, users, categories, attachments etc. Additionally, the plugin allows you to select the image service to use for creating the featured images. It’s able to interact with major image hosting services such as 500px and Unsplash.
2. WP Dummy Content
The next of the list is WP Dummy Content. Whilst not as often updated as FakerPress, it is still a very good WordPress Plugin to generate dummy content on your blog. It automatically creates posts, pages etc with single or multiple paragraphs of text. You can also insert unordered lists, shortcodes, block-quotes, links etc with just a click.
3. Better Lorem Ipsum Generator
Better Lorem Ipsum Generator is yet another dummy content generator for WordPress. This plugin has some additional features when compared to the rest above, the most important ones are its ability to generate custom taxonomies and custom post types automatically. Install this plugin and generate posts, pages, comments, tags, categories etc with ease.
4. Lorem Ipsum Post Generator
Lorem Ipsum Post Generator is a simple plugin that generates posts and comments automatically. It’s also super easy to use, All you need to do is to just specify the number of posts and number of comments per post, rest of the job will be done by this plugin. One thing missing in this plugin is that it doesn’t have the ability to generate pages, categories, tags etc.
5. WP Lorem Ipsum Generator
Just as the name suggests, this plugin helps to add lorem ipsum text to any post on your blog. A button will be displayed in the toolbar of post editor (WYSIWYG editor), which helps to insert dummy text inside the post. Apart from generating dummy text, it doesn’t have any further options. It simplicity makes it useful when you need to go a little testing without generating a lot of random posts.
6. WP Lipsum
WP Lipsum is yet another dummy data generator WordPress plugin, it allows you to add dummy text using Shortcodes and Template tags. This is a great plugin for generating dummy text on your WordPress Blog with ease. We recommend trying this awesome plugin when you need to do some light testing
7. WP Dummy Post Generator
WP Dummy Post Generator is also a very simple dummy content generator plugin for WordPress. The plugin allows you to add dummy posts and dummy categories to your WordPress blog. The plugin also lets you specify a Blog Name and Title to be set.
You can export the settings of the plugin on another blog as well. The plugin will generate a predefined set of subcategories and categories and creates random posts in them.
8. Demo Data Creator
Demo Data Creator is another popular test data plugin generator for WordPress. The plugin allows a WordPress developer to create demo users, blogs, posts, comments and blogroll link. If you’re testing out your site with BuddyPress or Multisite enabled then Demo Data Creator is the right plugin for you.
The plugin allows you to add dummy content for both of these setups. Adds and lets you control the number of users, categories, tags , posts, comments, pages etc. Deletes all the dummy data from your website. On BuddyPress, it adds and lets you control the number of Groups, wire messages, friends, member status.
9. Lorem Ipsum Generator Shortcode
Lorem Ipsum Generator Shortcode is another best dummy content generator plugin available for WordPress. The plugin enables you to generate dummy content in posts and pages on your WordPress website. It is a very simple plugin and does not provide many options.
In other words, you can add dummy text in your post or page using shortcodes. The plugin is easy to set up and doesn’t require many configurations.
10. WP Example Content
WP Example Content is one of the simplest plugins that helps you to generate dummy content on your WordPress website. The plugin adds dummy text that helps you in developing a new themes or website. You can delete the whole content with the help of this plugin.
One of the disadvantages of the plugin is that it only adds dummy posts. It doesn’t category, tags, comments etc. to your website. Add six types of posts like multiple paragraph post, image post, post with links, Blockquote post, UL and OL post and post with header text from H1 to H5.
Allows you to remove all the dummy content in just a single click. Format posts with different styles.
We hope you learnt something new from this post generating test data for WordPress development. Feel free to reach out to one of our experts to talk about the best ways we can help you speed up your website and troubleshoot any website issues you might be facing.
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