Quicklisp is great and I recommend using it along with a brief introduction in both my Common Lisp setup guides for Vim and Emacs:

https://susam.net/lisp-in-vim.html

https://github.com/susam/emacs4cl

However, for my personal projects, I usually just download the package versions I need from GitHub with curl within a simple while loop:

https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.4.0/Makefile#L83-L...

https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.4.0/meta/cldeps/fo...

Then I point ASDF to the download directory with CL_SOURCE_REGISTRY and load it in my Lisp program using good old ASDF:LOAD-SYSTEM:

https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.4.0/etc/form.servi...

https://github.com/susam/susam.net/blob/0.4.0/form.lisp#L5

The last four links I have shared above all get automated by a simple QL:QUICKLOAD call if we're using Quicklisp, and that's one of the reasons Quicklisp has become almost a de facto standard in the community.