Genesis is one popular theme framework that is widely used by the WordPress community. The Genesis theme framework and child themes are built ground up to be clean, customizable, secure and SEO-optimized. Though Genesis looks bare bones with its fast and secure approach, it has many great plugins to enhance and customize the themes. Here is a short list of the best Genesis plugins to customize and pimp your Genesis theme.
1. Genesis eNew Extended
Genesis eNews Extended is one of the first plugins that I always install after configuring the Genesis theme. The eNews extended plugin provides a simple way to add mailing lists to your Genesis theme. The plugin supports a variety of mailing services like MailChimp, Feedburner, Aweber, MailPoet, etc.
2.Genesis Simple Edits
Whenever you install a new Genesis theme, you might want to customize the post info, post meta, and the footer area text to suit your site. To modify these areas, you generally need to edit or add code to your theme’s functions file. If you want to make things easier, then install the Genesis Simple Edits plugin, as it will provide you with a simple GUI interface to edit those three parts of your Genesis theme.
3. Genesis Layout Extras
Genesis Layout Extras is a simple plugin that lets you change or add different layouts to different parts of your website like the homepage, archive page, author page, single posts or pages, 404 page, etc. A must-have plugin if you want to quickly customize the default layout options in Genesis.
4. Genesis Title Toggle
Genesis Title Toggle is a simple yet very useful plugin that allows you to hide the page or post title with just a click. It’s very useful when you are building custom pages (like landing pages) that do not require you to display the title.
5. Genesis Simple Share
With the Genesis Simple Share plugin, you can add simple and beautiful social share icons to all your posts and pages. The plugin works great out of the box, but if you want to you can easily customize the social icons by just dragging and dropping.
6. Genesis Simple Hooks
Genesis Simple Hooks may not look like much or may even confuse the beginner, but the plugin packs quite a punch. Using this simple plugin, you can add or insert PHP, Shortcodes, and HTML and also attach it to any of the available hooks throughout the Genesis Theme Framework.
7. Genesis Responsive Slider
Genesis Responsive Slider is nothing fancy but provides a simple slider on your homepage with featured image, title, and excerpts. As you can tell from the name, the slider is responsive which makes it fit for any screen size.
8. Genesis Simple Sidebars
Genesis Simple Sidebars allows you to create multiple and dynamic sidebar widget areas. These widget areas can be assigned to any available sidebar location and you can make them appear based on a post or page. It’s really helpful when you want to assign specific widgets to specific pages or posts.
9. Genesis Grid
Genesis Grid allows you to easily customize how posts appear in the grid format. Using this plugin you can specify the number of featured and teaser posts, images sizes, post excerpt length, etc. Moreover, you can easily enable or disable the grid loop on specific pages like homepage, archives, author pages, etc.
10. Genesis Connect for WooCommerce
If you are using Genesis with WooCommerce, then you might want to consider installing Genesis Connect for WooCommerce. This simple plugin replaces the default or built-in shop templates with custom Genesis-ready templates.
11. Genesis Visual Hook Guide
The Genesis Visual Hook Guide plugin may not be for everyone, but it is a handy plugin to visually see all the Genesis hooks and their locations inside your child theme. This plugin goes hand in hand with the Genesis Simple Hooks plugin. Of course, you can also use the web version of the visual hook guide.
12. Genesis Design Palette Pro
Unlike all other plugins in the list, Genesis Design Palette Pro is a premium plugin that makes it very easy to edit and customize any Genesis child theme without touching any CSS or code. All you have to do is point and click. The good thing about this plugin is that it has theme-specific add-ons for further theme specific customization.
If you think I missed any of your favorite Genesis plugins, then do share them in the comments form below.