No doubt, Genesis Framework is a flexible framework with an SEO-friendly design and clean code, which results in fast website loading times.
Genesis Framework is the heart and soul of developers and WordPress enthusiasts looking to build stunning themes and professional websites with ease. We have covered an in-depth review of the Genesis Framework on WPCity.
While Genesis Framework is an efficient framework, as it takes a minimal approach to clean code and other features and options, Genesis Framework still lacks some customization options and additional features that frameworks like WordPress have.
Genesis Framework, when blended with Genesis child themes, makes it easy to create professional websites. The problem arises while customizing the Genesis child themes, especially for beginners. Because of the performance-oriented approach, most of the child themes lack customization options and other basic settings.
In such cases, the Genesis Framework plugins can be your savior.
To extend the functionality and capability of the Genesis Framework and Genesis child themes, you can make use of quality Genesis Framework plugins.
In this post, we have compiled a handpicked list of the 15 best Genesis Framework plugins to take Genesis Framework to the next level.
So let’s dive in.
List of the Top 15 Genesis Framework Plugins in 2023
1. Genesis Design Palette Pro Plugin
The Genesis Design Palette Pro plugin enables you to make quick and clean changes to your Genesis powered WordPress website. Genesis Framework themes make it easy to build professional and responsive WordPress themes with ease.
One issue beginners face while getting started is that they find it challenging to customize the look of the Genesis theme if they don’t know how to code. Genesis Design Palette Pro helps you to easily modify your StudioPress HTML5 child theme without writing a single line of code.
Genesis Design Palette Pro comes with a live visual composer for your Genesis powered websites. You can preview the changes while customizing your websites. Also, the plugin allows you to switch between desktop, mobile, and tablet live preview.
With this plugin, you don’t need to write a single line of code to modify the header or footer, navigation, content, or any aspect of your Genesis child theme. The plugin works with all StudioPress themes to make it super easy for you to customize them.
Overall, the Genesis Design Palette Pro plugin has everything to help you customize every aspect of your Genesis powered Website.
Price: The basic plan costs $49 for a single site license. The plan includes one year of customer support and plugin updates.
Download Genesis Design Palette Pro Plugin
2. Genesis Extender Plugin
Genesis Extender is one of the best Genesis plugins that help to extend the functionality of the Genesis Framework. The plugin is power-packed with a powerful framework extending features. Genesis Extender Plugin makes it super easy for users to edit the design and extend the framework’s functionality simply.
The plugin enables you to make changes to the Genesis child theme in real-time with ease. You can make changes to every design aspect of your theme, such as layouts, colors, static homepage, and so on.
The Genesis Extender Plugin helps you customize your website design with a powerful and intuitive front end CSS builder. With the help of the front end, the CSS builder tool allows web designers of all levels of skill to tweak their website styles with ease. The CSS builder intuitively writes CSS codes and showcases real-time results.
The plugin also powers the Beaver Extender, which offers an intuitive Frontend Visual Hooks Map feature, which provides developers an easy way to decode precisely where the various hooks are located inside the Beaver Builder theme.
Price: The Genesis Extender Pro plugin costs $49, which includes unlimited license activation included. The plan also includes one year of customer support and plugin updates.
Download Genesis Extender Plugin
3. Genesis Simple Edits Plugin
Genesis Simple Edit is one of the most popular Genesis Framework plugins, because it makes it super easy to edit import aspects of your Genesis powered Website. With this plugin, you can make changes to some common areas of your Website, including the byline, post line, and footer section.
The plugin creates a new Genesis settings page that enables you to modify the post-info (byline), post-meta, and footer area of your Genesis theme. You can use shortcodes along with HTML in the text boxes that provide the admin screen. These are the three common modified areas in which the area is actually editable.
The plugin enables you to make changes to all three areas by altering any filters, hooks, or PHP code. Overall, it’s a reliable and free Genesis plugin to help you customize the look and feel of your Genesis powered WordPress website.
Price: Free
Download Genesis Simple Edits Plugin
4. Genesis Simple Hooks Plugin
The Genesis Simple Hooks plugin comes with more than 50 action hooks that are useful for your Genesis powered Website. This plugin mainly creates a new Genesis settings pages that allow you to insert various types of code: HTML, Shortcodes, and PH.
You can attach any of the HTML, Shortcodes, and PHP to 50+ action hooks throughout the Genesis Theme Framework from StudioPress. The plugin solves the hassle of the tedious and unfamiliar process of creating functions in your theme file.
Genesis Simple Hooks provides you an attractive and easy to use interface for modifying your Genesis theme via the hook system. Also, the plugin accepts HTML, Shortcodes, and PHP, giving you access to all 50+ hooks built into the Genesis themes. Addionatially, it has a few built-in WordPress hooks as well.
What’s more, with this plugin, you don’t need to create custom functions in order to insert content into the hooks.
Price: Free
Download Genesis Simple Hooks Plugin
5. Genesis Visual Hook Guide Plugin
Genesis Visual Hook is another important Genesis plugin which enables you to use hooks with ease. The Genesis Visual Hook plugin adds a dropdown menu to see the hooks in their actual locations right on your current Genesis child theme.
Once you install and activate the plugin, it will add a dropdown menu to the admin bar, which enables you to switch between three views – Hook, Filter, and markup. You can also select an option or all three options in order to see the hooks in their actual locations.
The plugin can potentially help you quickly and easily find the actual location. This helps you have smooth website development, and it even helps you with rapid development.
Also, each hook and the default functions will have links to tutorials right there on how to use the function, how to filter it, or remove and replace the snippets.
Price: Free
Download Genesis Visual Hook Guide Plugin
6. Genesis Author Pro Plugin
The plugin suits your purpose well if you’re willing to create a book library using the WordPress and Genesis Framework. Genesis Author Pro enables you to add a library module to your website with ease.
After installing and activating the plugin, it creates a library that lets you add books to your website. The books you add to your website have the information needed, including featured text, price, ISBN, publisher, editor, edition, and so on.
The Genesis Author Pro also provides a widget so that you can use it to feature a book anywhere on your website. You can add any book in the widgets area by simply selecting a book from the library to show and drive more traffic towards it.
On the widgets area, the optional output from the widget includes widget title, book title, byline, book image, featured text, and a custom link to the single book page.
Price: Free
Download Genesis Author Pro Plugin
7. Genesis Connect Plugin for WooCommerce
Genesis Connect can be your savior if your Genesis child theme doesn’t support WooCommerce by default. Genesis Connect for WooCommerce enables you to easily integrate WooCommerce with the Genesis Framework and Genesis child theme.
The plugin also replaces WooCommerce’s built-in shop templates with its own Genesis-ready version. You can customize and display these templates on the single product page, main shop page, product category area, and product tag archive page.
Additionally, the plugin also adds Genesis layouts and SEO support right onto the WooCommerce product custom post type. It provides three fully customizable and Genesis-ready templates to display shop pages, which is located in the plugin’s templates folder.
Price: Free
Download Genesis Connect Plugin
8. Genesis Layout Extras Plugin
Genesis Layout Extras is a robust Genesis Framework plugin that provides an easy way to customize the layout of your WordPress powered Website.
This lightweight plugin enables you to change the default layout of the Genesis theme easily. You can customize various layouts, including the homepage, single pages, archives sections, author pages, attachment pages, etc.
The plugin also enables you to add the layouts meta box support for post types. You can also enable the Genesis Archive Settings for set post types. Overall, if you’re looking for a reliable and free option to change the layout of your Genesis powered Website, this plugin is worth a try.
Price: Free
Download Genesis Layout Extras Plugin
9. Genesis Responsive Slider Plugin
Adding responsive sliders using a Genesis child theme isn’t everyone’s’ cup of tea, especially for newbies. No doubt, a slider helps you showcase products, posts, and pages in a stunning way. If you’re looking to add a responsive and stunning slider to your Genesis powered Website, Genesis Responsive Slider is worth a try.
The Responsive Slider Plugin enables you to create a simple responsive slider that you can display on your website with ease. It includes options for the maximum dimensions of your slideshow and allows you to choose to display posts or pages.
The slider you add includes next/previous arrows and the option to turn both on or off. Also, the plugin allows you to place the slider into a widget area, which makes it super easy to display sliders anywhere on your Website. The sliders you add are responsive on all screen sizes, and will automatically adjust to fit any screen size.
The only thing to note is that the Genesis Responsive Slider plugin only supports Genesis child themes.
Price: Free
Download Genesis Responsive Slider Plugin
10. Genesis Simple Sidebars Plugin
Creating widget areas by writing code and using conditional logic to showcase it isn’t very easy, especially for beginners. The Genesis Simple Sidebars plugin solves this hassle and makes it super easy to add sidebars without writing a single line of code.
Genesis Simple Sidebars is a flexible plugin that allows you to create multiple, dynamic widget areas with ease. You can add widgets to various locations within the Genesis Framework on a per post, per page, or per tag/category archive basis.
From the WordPress dashboard, you can create widgets and assign widgets areas to your WordPress website’s sidebar locations. The plugin also adds a dropdown menu when adding the widgets within the posts/pages edit screen.
All in all, the Genesis Simple Sidebars plugin is worth a try if you’re looking for a robust yet free sidebar plugin for your Genesis powered Website.
Price: Free
Download Genesis Simple Sidebars Plugin
11. Genesis Simple Menus Plugin
The Genesis Simple Menus plugin enables you to easily add a secondary navigation menu to your Genesis powered website. The plugin allows you to assign flexible WordPress navigation menus right to the secondary navigation menu within the Genesis Theme Framework.
With this plugin, you can add a secondary navigation menu per post, per page, or per tag/category archive. The per post, page, and category settings override the existing settings you have in your Genesis theme settings.
To enable such menus, you need to make sure that Secondary Navigation is enabled in your Genesis Theme settings. No doubt, Genesis Simple Menus is by far the best menu plugin for Genesis-powered WordPress websites.
Price: Free
Download Genesis Simple Menus Plugin
12. Genesis Grid Plugin
Genesis Grid is a robust and useful plugin that allows you to easily turn your normal posts into a stunning grid-based layout. The Genesis Grid plugin is designed to display WordPress posts in grid formats.
The plugin enables you to set the number of Features and Teasers both for the homepage and the inner page. You can also control how many columns the teasers are broken into. The ‘Features‘ are the full-width posts at the top of the listing, whereas the ‘Teasers‘ are the posts broken into columns.
With this plugin, you can also specify the image sizes used for the Features and Teasers. What’s more, you can also specify where the grid loop is used just by checking home, category archives, tag archives, taxonomy archives, author archives, and search results.
All in all, Genesis Grid is the best option for showcasing your WordPress posts in a grid format.
Price: Free
13. Genesis Optimized Social Share Plugin
Adding robust social share systems enables you to get more social shares to your posts and pages, which could potentially help you get more traffic and exposure form social media channels.
When you add many social sharing buttons to your WordPress posts and pages, it slows down your pages and posts. This creates a high impact on the website’s loading time.
The Genesis Optimized Social Share plugin is an optimized plugin that helps you by reducing the load time of your WordPress posts and pages by loading the social share buttons asynchronously.
With this plugin, you can easily add as many social media share buttons as you want, and all social share buttons are perfectly optimized for better performance and loading times.
Price: Free
Download Genesis Optimized Social Share Plugin
14. Genesis Custom Headers Plugin
If you’re looking to add responsive headers to your Genesis powered WordPress website, this plugin enables you to easily add custom headers to your posts, pages, or to other custom post types.
Genesis Custom Headers includes minimal styling so that the custom headers you add look stunning and adapt to your website. The Genesis Custom Headers plugin even enables you to display a custom image, featured image, slideshow, custom content, or HTML code on the custom headers you add.
Overall, Genesis Custom Headers is the easy way to add robust custom headers to pages, posts, and public custom post types as well.
Price: Free
Download Genesis Custom Headers Plugin
15. Genesis Simple Share Plugin
Genesis Simple Share was created to allow you to easily add a responsive social button to your Genesis-powered website. The creators of the plugin tried to focus on making default options and initial set up a breeze.
With this plugin, you can easily add the social share icons to your posts and pages and make social sharing easy for your visitors. By default, the plugin enables the sharing buttons for each post. However, it even allows you to customize the plugin settings by navigating to your WordPress dashboard Genesis >> Simple Share.
Once you open that menu, you can choose which posts or pages you want to enable the social share buttons on and which social icons to enable. You can even drag and drop icons into the order you would like the social share icons to display on your website.
If you’re willing to add robust social share buttons to your Genesis-powered WordPress site, this plugin is worth a try.
Price: Free
Download Genesis Simple Share Plugin
Conclusion: Best Genesis Framework Plugins
This is our handpicked list of the best Genesis Framework plugins, all of which can help you to easily customize and add various functionality to your Genesis-powered website.
The reviewed Genesis plugins can help you to take your Genesis-powered website to the next level with ease.
Have you tried any Genesis Framework plugins form the list mentioned above? What’s your experience with these plugins?
Feel free to drop your thoughts in the comments section below.
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