10 Genesis specific plugins that you may not be aware of

We use a lot of different plugins in all our themes but there are actually more Genesis specific plugins that are available that most people don’t know about.  I’m sharing 10 of my top go-to Genesis specific plugins today, and hopefully, I’ll introduce you to a few you didn’t even know existed. To get even more resources check out our guide here. 

Genesis Simple Share

If you need social media sharing icons on your site, the Genesis Simple Share plugin is a great solution.  If you’re looking to customize the colors, Brian Gardner shares the CSS and instructions for doing that.

Genesis Portfolio Pro

If you need to add a Portfolio to your site, the Genesis Portfolio Pro plugin is the way to go!  Instead of having a Portfolio built into your theme, add this plugin and then no matter which theme you use, your Portfolio will always remain.  We do get asked a lot why we don’t put Portfolios in our themes any more, and this is primarily the reason.  If you want to change your theme to something else, I don’t want you to loose your entire Portfolio!  Install this plugin instead.

Genesis Simple Hooks

This plugin is great for adding snippets in specific places on your site without the coding knowledge of creating widget spaces.  I see this plugin used a lot for disclaimer notices and signatures.  Again, since this is a plugin and not built into the theme, this will remain if you choose to change your theme a few months later.

Genesis Responsive Slider

We’ve all heard of this one and it’s used in most of our themes, but this can be used with any Genesis child theme!  You can add this slider into any widget space on your site, whether it’s on the home page or on your sidebar. There are plenty other slider plugins available in the WordPress repository, but this one is specifically for the Genesis Framework.

Genesis Simple URLS

This plugin is probably my favorite of this bunch and one most people don’t know about.  This plugin allows you to make your links look pretty with your own URL and then see how many times that link has been clicked.  I use this plugin here on the Restored 316 to mask links for our affiliates since most affiliate links are long and crazy looking.

Simple Social Icons

Every single one of our themes includes the Simple Social Icons plugin.  This plugin allows you to display your social media icons in any widget space on your site.

Genesis Author Pro

If you are an author and need to have a dedicated space for your books with links to purchase, this is absolutely the plugin for you.  Our Novelty theme showcases this plugin right here if you want to see it in action. Even though our Novelty theme showcases this feature however, it can be added to ANY theme!

Genesis Custom Footer

We have 2 questions that we consider our top 2 questions here at Restored 316, and how to edit the footer credits is one of them.  I’ve recently worked with Anita and Andrea (who created this plugin) to get this plugin up to date so that you can install it and update your footer credits without ever having to touch a line of code!

Genesis Title Toggle

If you have specific pages on your site that you don’t want the actual page title to appear on, then you’ll want this plugin.  Once installed, it adds an additional box to your page editor so you can easily turn the page title off.

Genesis Columns Advanced

If you’ve seen that massive list of code on how to use the Genesis Column Classes, then you know that a plugin is a welcome addition to your site in order to use that feature.  Even though I can code in my sleep, this plugin is still a great tool to use for clients so they can easily update their own sites using columns.  If you have a need for columns on your site, like a services page for example, this is the plugin for you!