Favorite Wordpress Themes + Plugins

Vince

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What are your favorite wordpress themes and plugins that have saved you time and increased revenue? I'd be interested to learn more about Amazon affiliate plugins and display advertising themes that have worked best for your sites. Thanks!
 
Newspaper's very good.

It's feature-rich without being bloated; the developers understand the importance of speed and have made it a selling point of the theme.

It's a bit plain out of the box, which is magnified by the fact that a lot of sites use it (35,000 sales). With that said, it can easily be prettied up and made unique with nice fonts and quality images.
 
I love the themes from MyThemeShop....superlight, SEO optimized and sleek UX. I use them in nearly all my projects.
 
I used avada for a project last year from theme forest. It was alright did what i needed to do, probably didnt get the most out of it as I'm not a particularly artistic person.
 
Jared said:
Newspaper's very good.

It's feature-rich without being bloated; the developers understand the importance of speed and have made it a selling point of the theme.

It's a bit plain out of the box, which is magnified by the fact that a lot of sites use it (35,000 sales). With that said, it can easily be prettied up and made unique with nice fonts and quality images.
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Nat said:
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Out-of-the-box numbers; routine optimization can take it under a second without sacrificing useful features or aesthetics.
 
Avoid the "Newspaper" theme from Themeforest like the plague, because it is pretty much the plague. What a nightmare. It's bloated and messy and filled with all sorts of things that are going to slow down your site, make it more vulnerable to being hacked (Trust me on this one), and make it a pain in the ass for your developers to work with. Why not use one that already has good numbers out of the box? (Paraphrasing this from people who have helped me out with various issues with a site, I can't imagine there's a shortage of people who have had to work in-depth with this theme that don't have great things to say about it, just from my own experience using it...)

Just becasue the people who made this theme are using speed and unbloated-ness as a feature to sell the theme, does not make it true.

If you REALLY want to use a theme called "Newspaper", check out the one with the same name at MyThemeShop, it runs laps around the Themeforest one.
 
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Eh . . . after running some performance tests on the demo sites, I'm skeptical.

https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/eaxxWA...e-why-they-arent-considered-mans-best-friend/

https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/bFGGJO...he-most-fashionable-new-york-couples-in-2016/

A random article from ThemeForest Newspaper is more than double the page size (due to having ads in the demo, and the demo sidebar that won't go away, it seems), yet a faster loading time than a random article from MyThemeShop Newspaper.

Are you sure your problems were with the theme, and not a faulty setup?

By the way, the graphic from their salespage has a load time of 4.2 seconds for 2MB. The Pingdom test? 1.86 seconds for 2.2MB. Looks like they're selling themselves short.
 
Best of luck then my man, I hope you don't run into the same problems I had with that theme.
 
I've tried a ton, usually just go for whatever is highly ranked on Themeforest, but I find it matters less and less and that as I've gotten better at learning webdesign and coding, I mostly end up adding custom functionality in which case a lot of themes are difficult to work with due to all their extra bloat javascript and css.

There's also stuff like visual designers and drag and drop of various kinds now, so now the buying a them and be done with it seems to be going out more and more.
 
I use the Wordfence plugin on pretty much all my sites for added protection. CleanTalk is another great plugin for getting rid of spam comments on posts and forms.
 
It's in no way a necessary plugin, so the minimalists probably won't like it, but I like Ultimate Tweaker.

There are a lot features that can improve WordPress:

  • Remove WordPress footprints
  • Brand your login/admin bar
  • Hide/remove sections of WordPress you find useless
  • Custom menus in the admin bar (links to specific plugin settings, etc.) -- this makes navigating Wordpress much quicker.
  • Minimizing & Security
There are quite a bit more -- you can see them all in the demo link above.

The overhead seems small -- testing it with Pingdom, my requests actually went down with the plugin activated thanks to the minimizing. P3 Profiler says about six-hundredths-of-a-second is added.

If you're looking to improve WordPress, aesthetically and UX-wise, it might be worth the tradeoff.
 
I think Go Pricing is the best plugin if you want to create responsive pricing tables for amazon products.
 
Best paid themes I've used are Avada and Bridge. Lots of functionality, flexibility, and easy to use.

Plugins
Sucuri Scan
Wordfence
TinyMCE Advanced
Leadin
WP Optimize
Redirection
Broken Link Checker
Black Studio TinyMCE
Media File Renamer
WP Smush
Contact Form 7
Duplicate Post
 
For managing ads on a website, I really liked WP Advanced ads.

It's a paid plugin, but very functional. It allows you to choose exactly where ads are displayed, make ad layouts, split test ads, hide ads on certain pages, and so on.

If you want deep control over the ads on your website, this is a great choice.
 
Thrive Themes, Thrive Leads, WP All Import, probably a few others I can't remember.

Best word of advice on WP themes I can give is (other than ditching WP in its entirety), find one that's purely Bootstrap, and nothing proprietary. Then you have a solid base to build from. Life's too short to spend it !important'ing all your custom CSS and attempting to rewrite some developer's custom and proprietary design. All those countless hours could have been spent on things that actually make money.
 
For themes I always go with studiopress themes or thrive themes but my set up is very well customised. I change everything. Layouts, colours, font e.t.c is customised.

As for plugins, I have experimented with probably all the amazon affiliate plugins out there! :surprised:

I am currently using AAWP, Amazon official plugin and Azon pro. I use genuis links for geo targeting.

As for adsense and other ad inserts, I use Quick adsense.
 
turbin3 said:
Best word of advice on WP themes I can give is (other than ditching WP in its entirety), find one that's purely Bootstrap, and nothing proprietary. Then you have a solid base to build from.
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Totally agree. I spent 30 minutes and went straight back to Django. Wagtail + Bootstrap themes are so easy and solid it makes me wonder what exactly the WordPress and PHP devs were thinking.
 
Vince said:
Totally agree. I spent 30 minutes and went straight back to Django. Wagtail + Bootstrap themes are so easy and solid it makes me wonder what exactly the WordPress and PHP devs were thinking.
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That wasn't quite what I meant, though I definitely agree. What I was getting at is, if using WP, try to use a theme that is minimal and almost entirely bootstrap, not a bunch of proprietary customization on top of that. The idea being, a lot of people, a lot of marketers, don't have the time, energy, or desire to really get into the weeds with serious web development. That's totally fine, and what WP has traditionally been alright for. People on that end of the spectrum are never gonna end up on our end of the spectrum, so they need realistic options to make life easier for them.

Every single time I've bought a nicely configured, good quality WP theme, the inevitable occurs. Eventually, be it weeks or months down the line, I reach a point of needing to tweak design enough or add certain functionality enough to the point where I basically have to deconstruct all of the customization built into the theme, and recreate it in a less proprietary form. It just ends up wasting more time than is necessary. With a purely Bootstrap WP theme, you can literally go to the Bootstrap site, or a number of other good independent sites, get your copy paste on, throw in a bit of PHP, and completely redesign your entire site on the fly, sometimes in MINUTES.

With a highly customized out of the box theme, that might not quite work. Hell, you could do that copy pasting, include the Bootstrap JS and CSS files in your theme, and the existing theme's JS/CSS might still be overriding a lot of your customization. Now, you're forced to reinvent the wheel, try to override the potentially convoluted hierarchy of CSS inheritance among other things, and !important ALL THE THINGS! Shit is downright hectic.

Even better though, and back to your point, Vince, ditch WP and for the love of god ditch PHP altogether.
 
A few years ago when I was building my first "serious" site I came across the Thrive Themes videos. I watched them for a few months as I puttered around trying to actually get serious. There's some good concepts in them, but they're designed to sell product. And it worked, they were the first annual product that I bought.

And then I began to learn more about WP, CSS, PHP, HTML and SEO. As I learned more, I began to want to tweak and customize things. I remember one of the first things I wanted to fix was removing the H1 tag that it added to the CTA box. Another was trying to optimize the theme and reduce the load times. At the time, they didn't really recommend using a child theme so everytime they pushed an update I had to redo much what I had done. (Side note: Use a child theme!!!)

The point of all this was the day that I finally had enough. They released an update that broke being able to create links. How was I supposed to build my site without links? Well, enough was enough, I was going to show them and remove their builder and theme. I found a theme that looked like it was basic enough for my needs and hit that Deactivate button with a great deal of happiness. Now to go check out how my new theme looked on my site.

My gleeful happiness slowly turned to horror as I went from my home page to every page on my site. I couldn't understand what happened to the thousands of words that I had painstakingly written. The landing pages which were supposed to be conversion centers were instead cleanly cleared.

Those of you who have been around for a bit are most likely nodding your heads in sympathy (or not), but for those that don't here's what happened. I was a victim of theme-lock (also called plugin-lock). The tons of content that I had dropped paragraph by paragraph into the Thrive Content Builder were not stored in the same tables that content is saved when using the default editor. Instead they are stored in the plugin/theme tables. Remove the plugin/theme, and you remove the content.

Thrive sells a subscription-based product, it's in their best interest to make sure that you can't easily quit once they've convinced you to buy.

It took me weeks to go through my site and redo all of the pages. I know now to look at what happens when you decide to stop using a theme or plugin. You never know when you might have to switch to a different plugin or theme.

It's hard to say which are the best themes and plugins, so let me add some value by saying which I would never use again on one of my sites.

  1. Thrive themes - see above. theme-lock
  2. Divi - theme-lock
  3. EasyAzon - I could never get it to look like I wanted and it created a ton of extra links that I thought were unnecessary.
  4. WooZone - fun fact - if Amazon removes a ASIN this plugin will remove the item that was created if you have it set to sync. It's by design, but when your product pages disappear you'll regret not having a backup.
  5. Most of the schema plugins. - I have yet to find one that does what I want.
I'm sure I have more but my therapist says I shouldn't dwell on things that make me angry. For more on theme lock check out this awesome article on page builders from Pippin's plugins. (I can't post links yet, but just google it.)

Does anyone know of a good page builder that leaves the content in place if you decide to remove the plugin? I know Beaver Builder does but it's not quite for me. Or if you don't like page builders what's the easiest way you use to create landing pages? I'm not a developer, but I'm comfortable enough to break my site by mangling some code.
 
I wouldn't say they intentionally designed their stuff to "theme-lock" you. That makes them sound fairly predatory, which I've never gotten that sort of impression from them at all. No, the fact of the matter is, visual page builders vs. the standard WP post editor are fundamentally different in how they function. What this means is, typically, these highly customized page builders store their content in custom tables, within your WP database. In most cases I've seen, the content is actually still there (in the database), even when you deactivate something like the Thrive Visual Page Builder. It's just not visible, because there's no longer a plugin to send those calls to those custom SQL fields.

I tested this quite awhile ago. Deactivated the plugin, the custom page content disappeared entirely. Reactivated, the content was back on the page. I felt the need to say all of this, as I've personally found Thrive Themes to be one of the better quality Wordpress developers out there. People could do significantly worse, to be sure, like one-off Themeforest themes from no-name developers, that disappear a month later, never to support or update the product again. No, Thrive is good, IMO. Unfortunately the issue is that Wordpress is simply built on a foundation of mile-high piled sh*t. When people say that about WP, the reason is for several factors:
  • PHP is an extremely flawed language, that has massive potential for security issues and technical or performance issues that eventually may become a significant liability for a business
  • WP's usage and reliance on SQL, in the manner it is implemented, has many flaws that, again, leave much potential for exploitation.
  • The framework has become significantly bloated, and is only becoming more so by the day. The mentality seems to be "make-it-do-all-the-things"...which is quickly becoming diametrically opposed to the original concept of simply being an easy "presser-of-words". For writing purposes, you would never believe the sheer freedom felt from using a good static site generator combined with simple Markdown syntax. ♥ Because fighting the post editor not to randomly format your stuff incorrectly...in 2017. Ain't nobody got time 'fo that!
  • Too many other reasons to list...
Anyways, enough ranting from me.
 
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