Standardized Plugin Install & Setup

In this tutorial, we are going to talk about the typical plugins that Globe Runner uses, what those plugins do, and where to find them. Without further ado, our first plugin we will look at is Advanced Custom Fields Pro.

Advanced Custom Fields Pro

While there is a free version on the internet, we use the pro version at Globe Runner. We use this plugin for easy end user installation and letting account managers be able to fill in the blanks in certain areas. Our development team will use the container for the content.

Use this plugin to take full control of your WordPress edit screens and custom field data. The field builder will allow you to quickly and easily add fields to WordPress edit screens with only the click of a few buttons!

Cornerstone

We use the Cornerstone plugin anytime we use the Theme X theme. Cornerstone actually comes with Theme X. Cornerstone makes WordPress practical and simple to use. Too long have WordPress users had to use hacks like categories in menus to create a site structure.

The new content types that it includes are posts, pages, events, and others that make navigating and creating content in WordPress easy. Every so often we have to download and update the plugin from Themeco. Themeco is the author of Theme X.

JS Composer/Page Builder/Visual Bakery

This is the primary page builder endorsed by Globe Runner. There’s been a lot of mileage on this page builder by Globe Runner account managers to acquire designs and layouts that might not have been designed by the layouts in the design phase.

It is the most feature rich drag and drop page builder and one of the most popular WordPress plugins ever. This plugin does its best to ensure that everything you need to create a website is accessible to you without ever touching a line of code.

This plugin works with any WordPress theme. That means that you don’t have to switch from builder to builder whenever you decide to change your theme. This plugin can be downloaded from Code Canyon. Please do not buy anymore of this plugin, just reuse an existing license.

RevSlider/Revolution Slider

This plugin comes with 90% of all theme purchases. We also have it purchased stand alone. You can get this plugin from Code Canyon.

It’s gained huge popularity in the WordPress community due to it’s huge range of features and ease of use. The plugin is responsive ready and includes multiple slider layout options to make your life easier. First choose your slider type: standard slider, hero scene (single slide), or a carousel slider. Then select a layout: auto, full-width, or full-screen.

Ultimate VC AddOn

This is an extended version of JS composer. This plugin is downloaded from Code Canyon. You can extend WPBakery Page Builder and add more power to it with Ultimate Addon.

Ultimate Addon adds several premium elements in your WPBakery Page Builder on top of the built-in ones given by WPBakery. Every single element in the package is crafted with utmost attention to details and a simple objective to provide you an ultimate experience. Elements included in this plugin are: simple icons, info box, info list, flip box, and much more.

Adminimize

This plugin is commonly used by our team to make the admin area in the back end of Word Press more straight to the point. We use it to hide features that we are not using so account managers don’t become overwhelmed. We also use it to restrict access and prevent site breakage.

If you manage a multi-author WordPress site, there are a lot of things in the WordPress admin area that your users don’t need to see or use. This plugin helps you hide unnecessary items from the WordPress admin area. Adminimize makes it easy to remove items from view based on a user’s role.

Autoptimize

This is a speed tool plugin. We use this on sites that are struggling with page speeds. This plugin is not a part of our typical installation.

Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default (buy can also defer), moves and defers scripts to the footer and minifies HTML.

Contact Form 7 (CF7)

Contact Form 7 is our primary tool for building contact forms, which typically don’t have a lot of user functionality behind them. You can find contact forms on “Contact Us” pages and other, similar types of lead forms.

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Contact Form Database (CFDB)

Contact Form DB is a sister companion of sorts to Contact Form 7. This plugin provides the utility for when someone fills in a Contact Form 7 form. Contact Form DB will take all of these and save them to a data base. This plugin does this for safety, testing, and other reasons.

Special note: You are no longer able to download Contact Form DB straight from the repository. You have to get it from the vendor itself or simply grab it from somebody who already has the plugin.

Hummingbird Pro

This is a premium plugin from WPMU. Hummingbird Pro is commonly used by WPMU for speed enhancements on websites. This plugin is on almost all of our websites.

Hummingbird zips through your site and finds new ways to boost page speed with fine-tuned controls over file compression, minification and full-page, browser and Gravatar caching. Load your pages quicker and score higher on Google PageSpeed Insights with Hummingbird site optimization.

WP Smush Pro

This plugin is also from WPMU. It is an absolute must have. It’s a very interesting plugin. When you install it, it will optimize all of your images going forward. You can also retroactively optimize images that are already on the website.

These are images uploaded strictly through WordPress. This plugin optimizes everything on the website that was uploaded through WordPress. However, if you’re using images not on WordPress, you will have to use Photoshop or another application.

Yoast SEO

This is the primary SEO tool used by any and all SEO teams, Globe Runner included. This plugin can help your website get more visitors from Google and Bing.

It can also help attract more visitors from social media. Increasing your readers engagement is another benefit to this plugin. One of the best features of this plugin is the readability check.

PerfMatters

This is a premium plugin. It is similar to Autoptimize. Globe Runner installs it in case a website is struggling. We put it in place to hide stock scripts that might be coming with WordPress.

It’s primarily a tool to block scripts we are not using but can not remove from the website because, potentially, that one page is using that one special functionality.

Note: WordPress’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. When plugins are generally created they are created for utility, not necessarily for speed. This is why it is best to create a theme from the ground up. When instances like this occur, we use Perf Matters.

Custom Post Type UI

Typically, WordPress does pages and posts. This plugin expands that so that a user can have more features in the side bar. These features can include team members, events, and other features. This plugin helps out with sorting.

GTM for WordPress

This is a very important plugin. It adds very special event triggers to Contact Form 7. It enables WordPress to detect form submits more reliably and easily via Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is Google’s free tool for everyone to be able to manage your analytics. This plugin can place the necessary container code snippet into your website that that you do not need to add this manually.

Icegram

Globe Runner uses Icegram Engage, Icegram Engage Pro, and others. Technically, they are different plugins. Grab them all and install them all. Icegram is our primary go to for clients that want pop ups on their website.

Icegram is the best plugin to easily create beautiful optins and call to actions of your choice, show them to targeted visitors, and convert them to customers and fans.

Regenerate Thumbnails

This is a popular plugin. Sometimes you need to regenerate thumbnails because someone updated a ton of images in bulk. We can click “regenerate” and WordPress will sort the rest for us.

Regenerate Thumbnails allows you to regenerate all thumbnail sizes for one or more images that have been uploaded to your Media Library. This is useful for situations such as a new thumbnail size has been added and you want past uploads to have a thumbnail in that size.

Reorder Posts

A simple and easy way to reorder your custom post-type posts in WordPress. Adds drag and drop functionality for post ordering in the WordPress admin panel. Works with custom post-types and regular posts.

The best situation here is someone wants a blog post to show up before another one. The way to go about it is tricking the date and time functionality. It resolves and sorts it for you. If you want to re-order where someone is in an organization chart for a company’s website, this would be the plugin to do it with.

Store Locator Plus

There is a free version of this plugin. We have the license for the premium version so please use that. This plugin creates a Google Map where people can add multiple locations and you can find information about those locations.

Highly customizable location search and directory building is possible with premium add ons. Store Locator Plus has all the features you need to create a location finder on your website.

Unbounce Landing Pages

Unbounce is a tool used by account managers to put together wiz wig landing pages for PPC purposes for our clients. Unbounce landing pages as a plugin inside of WordPress enables it so an account manager can have the landing page for that Unbounce page be www.whateverthedomainis.com/the landing page. Unbounce by itself requires that you have a sub domain. Well, this plugin allows you to be able to skip past that step.

With Unbounce’s landing page plugin for WordPress, marketers can create fully customized landing pages for their campaigns and publish them to their existing WordPress sites.

WooCommerce

This is our primary ecommerce tool. We have sub licenses for all of its extensions. Please use WooCommerce plugins that are sold through the WooCommerce website. If you use other plugins, that’s fine, but make sure you vet the source. Ecommerce is very sensitive and if something is done wrong, a lot of people are effected.

WooCommerce is a free eCommerce plugin that allows you to sell anything, beautifully. Built to integrate seamlessly with WordPress, WooCommerce is the world’s favorite eCommerce solution that gives both store owners and developers complete control.

WP All Import Pro and WP All Export Pro

These are ways to dynamically import and export data into a CSV to provide to a client. We re-import it back into the system. This is mostly used for eCommerce clients.

People call WP All Import magical for a reason. It works with any XML or CSV file, imports images, and can easily import data to plugin and theme fields or anywhere else you need it.

Cloudflare

This is not technically a WordPress plugin. Rather, it is a DNS management tool. Also, it is a reverse proxy CDN. It’s here for speed and security.

Cloudflare coupled with Hummingbird and Smush is our standard speed optimization recipe. You can add in a couple of other utility plugins as needed.