On today’s episode, we are going to talk about nine lesser known plugins that maybe you haven’t heard up, but they’re extremely popular. And we’ll talk about them right here on Your Website Engineer podcast, episode number 380.

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Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. I’m excited to be here with you just like I am every single week, and there’s always so many things that I want to share about WordPress, and the list that I have in OmniFocus of all the topics that I want to talk about just is like infinitely long. And so, each week it’s like, okay, what’s gonna bring the most amount of value in this coming week?

And today, what I want to share with you is some plugins that have just been kinda piling up in my OmniFocus list, and it’s like, okay, maybe it’s time to do an episode about them, some of these plugins that I haven’t had a chance to talk about. So, let’s go ahead. I’ve got two announcements, and then we’ll dive in to all of these plugins.

The first announcement is, I kinda mentioned it last week, but I just want to make sure that you heard it and you’re aware of it, but WordPress now is used on 30 percent of the top ten million websites. And so, it was, on March 1st, we were at 29.9 percent and it was very, very, very close, and now it is to the fact that 30 percent of all of the top million websites are built on WordPress. And just to let you know too, that the subdomains, all the subdomains on wordpress.com and wordpress.org count as one site.

And so, that means there’s an awful lot – it’s not counting all of WordPress.com sites as each individual one, but it is as a whole, WordPress.com counts as one of those sites in the ten million, top ten million, websites. So, that’s really exciting to see we’re at 30 percent, and it is just growing very, very slowly, but I can remember when it was only 20 percent of the internet and 15 percent, and now, we’re all the way up to 30 percent. So, I just want to make sure, and highlight that, that that was something that we didn’t miss last week.

The other piece of news that I want to talk about is an event happening in July, July 12th through the 14th, and it is in Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and it is the thing called WPCampus. And it is the third in-person event, third in-person conference, and it’s basically gathering web professionals, educators, and people dedicated to making sure that WordPress is used in higher education. And so, if you’re interested in that, I’ve got a link in the show notes about it.

It’s a four-day event, and it is something that started a few years ago by Rachel Cherry. She’s a web engineer and passionate for all things WordPress and higher education. So, she loves going to WordCamps, but there was never one focused with all the topics that she wanted, and so, she created it. And so, this is one that’s going to be focused on specifically how WordPress can be used in education. If that’s something that’s interesting to you, I recommend checking out wordcampus.org and finding the details about the 2018 event.

All right. Let’s dive in and talk about some of these lesser known WordPress plugins. And all of them, but the first one here, have at least 20,000 active installs. So, they’re very popular, they’ve got a lot of traction, there’s a lot of people in the WordPress community using them. But I wanted to just show them and highlight them because I had never heard of them before, and the chances are if I’ve never heard of them and I’ve never recommended them, then there’s a good chance there’s a lot of other people that have never heard of them as well. So, let’s go ahead and just dive right in to them.

The first one that I found is a new plugin, so it only has a handful of installs, but this one is called Protect Pages and Posts, and this allows you to create both, and protect both, your pages and posts, so that you can have private content that’s within your site that can be only accessed within certain people. So, you can protect your WordPress pages or posts. Then, once the pages are protected, they cannot be accessed directly by the original URL’s and if somebody attempts to go to the original URL’s they’ll be redirected to the 404 page. And you can autogenerate private URL’s, and so, you can just generate a URL that’s completely private that goes to a specific person. And it’s a really neat plugin.

It’s something that is brand new to the stage, but if you have that ability to want to password protect some content on your website and you just want to make it hard and difficult for certain people to get it unless they have a link directly to the content, then this is a plugin that I recommend checking out for sure. So, that is called Protect Pages and Posts. And all of these will be linked up in the show notes for episode number 380.

All right, moving right along. The next plugin that I have is called Import users from CSV with meta. And not all of these have the most wonderful name that just rolls off the tongue. So, this one, Import users from CSV with meta, and this allows you to import users via a plugin.

So, this gives you the ability to, if you have like a website that you’re moving from one place to another or maybe you’re coming from a different content management system and you have all of these users, you’ve got their username, the email the password, the address, city, state, zip, you’ve got all the details about customers or people that you want to have an account on your WordPress website, this will allow you to import this file directly into your WordPress.

So, you can import thousands of users within seconds, you can send a new email to every user, I mean, very, very easily to say reset your password, you can use your own, you can update data for each user, you can change passwords for everyone on the website. And so, this is one that’s got 20,000 active installs, and it allows you to actually create a cron job as well to regularly import users periodically. So, you can do that, you can edit all the meta data for the users, you can do a lot of things. There’s a lot of things that you can do.

And this is very, very helpful. I can see this being a very useful plugin for someone running a membership site or something that maybe their trying to update all their data, maybe there’s pieces of data that they want, some sort of meta data that they want, to attach to each user’s account that they have, but they don’t want to go in and edit each user individually. This would be a great plugin to do that. Import users from CSV with meta. You can find that on the WordPress repository.

The next one that I want to share is called Advanced Custom Fields: Font Awesome Field. And so, this one takes place or you need the Advanced Custom Fields plugin and it allows you to set default icons for different custom fields inside your WordPress website. So, you can go and you can pick any of the Font Awesome Fields.

And so, Font Awesome is a web font that’s basically images. So, they have the calendar icon, they have the little chat bubbles, they have hundreds of hundreds of different arrows and different icons that you can use. And so, this is essentially saying that, oh, I created this new custom field within Advanced Custom Fields, and now I want to give it an icon to make it stand out and not use the default WordPress custom – or the default WordPress logo or little icon next to a custom field.

So, it works really well. It is one that’s got 40,000 active installs, and it basically, that’s all it does is it adds a custom icon and just makes your WordPress site just a little bit nicer on the back end and just gives that a little bit more of a custom feel. So, if you’re using Advanced Custom Fields, I’d definitely check out Advanced Custom Fields: Font Awesome Field.

Moving right along to the next one. This one is called a WPFront Notification Bar. WPFront Notification Bar. And this will display a notification right across the top of your website that will allow you to promote something on your website or show some sort of news. It allows you to put a button there at the top. So, think about just you’re coming to your website, now, all of the sudden, you have a black bar across the top. It might say this is – download the free plugin or buy this today or 25 percent off coupon or whatever.

So, you can put shortcodes in there, you can open a URL or execute JavaScript when people click on the button, you can position at the top or the bottom, it can be a fixed position, so it can be sticky, so, when you scroll, it always stays at the top of the page, you can set any height that you want, you can say that I want it to appear after five seconds on the website, you can say that I want to have a button so that people can close the button, and it’s got tons and tons of features. You can pick the color, you can do a lot of things with it. It’s a really nice plugin. It’s a great way to get something out in front of people immediately when they come to your website.

And this is another one, it’s got 20,000 active installs, and so, it’s a plugin that’s being used by a lot of people. And it’s got a – it’s a four-and-a-half-star rating, so there’s a lot of people using it. It’s one that if you need something on your website to be highlighted and get out in front of all the people coming to your website, then I definitely want you to check out WPFront Notification Bar.

All right. I’ve got a few more here as I scroll through all the open tabs in Safari right now. This one is called Customizer Import and Export. This one’s probably the most popular one we’ll talk about today, and I’ve never heard of it, but it is one that’s got 70,000 active installs. And this will allow you to export and import your customizer settings from directly within the customizer interface.

So, if you’ve ever set up a WordPress site and now you want to – you duplicate this from your test site to your live site, you’ve gotta go in and you’ve gotta reduplicate the all the effort that you’ve just put in, you have to go in and set the theme, and then set the colors, and set the CSS, and anything – any other plugin that adds a customization features, you gotta go in and do this.

Well, this gives you the ability to say, I want to export all the settings here and then you install this plugin on your second site, and then you import all the settings right back here. It is by The Beaver Builder Team, so the team that brought you The Beaver Builder plugin and theme, they’re the ones that created this Customizer Export and Import. And it just it works. It’s basically you click one button on one site and then you import that same thing on the other site. And it’s super, super easy to use. It is something that I’m gonna remember to at least suggest a lot of times.

Working with customers in the WooCommerce world, they’re saying, well, how do I move a site from one place to another? And if they haven’t done it, if they haven’t completed cloned the website, this would be a great tool for doing that.

You also have the ability, in the screenshot it shows, within the customizes you can export and you can import, and if you’re importing things, there’s a button that you can check that says, download and import image files. So, this is really great because if you’re importing content that you’ve added and there’s images in that area, then if it sees an image it will download it and add it to your own media library for that site itself. So, that is the plugin, Customizer Export and Import, and this one’s a good one. Definitely check that one out.

I want to talk about Strong Testimonials next. It is a flexible testimonial plugin that works right out of the box for beginners with advanced features, and there’s pros – the pros can use this as well, obviously, because there’s some advanced things that you can do with customizations, and they’re boasting on there, their WordPress repository page, that it’s backed by strong support. It’s got 40,000 active installs, and it’s got a five-star rating with 151 five-star reviews.

And so, this is the only plugin that provides basic style for background color and font color. Everything else is inherited by the theme, and then, they have some templates that are light versions and dark versions. You can do customized things like fonts, and margins, and borders, all those DDB with CSS, but you have the – they do provide you the tools that you can do that.

There’s no complicated shortcodes. There’s a front end form that you can fill out, there’s custom fields that you can add, you can add star ratings, you can add a slider with several navigations options, so you can show all your testimonials in a slider list, and you can sort by oldest or newest or random or menu order, you can have excerpts of the testimonial that goes to a read more link, you can pull in feature images and Gravatar images for people, you can embed YouTube videos or Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, and you can do all of this within the plugin itself.

Plus, you can have the ability to have a testimonial submission form, so you can give your customers, the people that you’re providing service to, you can give them – you can send them a link and say, hey, can you fill out this testimonial form, and then, they can go in and they can add all their details. And it automatically fills it that information for you, so you can just quickly turn that into a testimony that’s displayed on your website.

So, that is the plugin, Strong Testimonials, and if you do need some sort of testimonials on your website, I highly recommend checking this out. And I guess I should say too, that everyone should be using testimonials on your website, and so, definitely check this one out if you don’t have one already.

I’ve got three more here on my list. This one is called WordPress Infinite Scroll – Ajax Load More. So, it’s another mouthful of a plugin when it comes to its name. It’s got 30,000 active installs. And this Ajax Load More is the plugin for WordPress that will allow you to infinitely scroll for lazy loading posts or pages, comments, with Ajax powered queries.

And so, what does all this mean? It’s like a bunch of mumbo jumbo, but basically what this means is this will allow you to – it’s got a shortcode builder in and it’s gonna take a little bit of set up to do, but it basically means that once your website loads, it’s gonna only load the top part of your website, it’s not gonna load all of it, and then, as you scroll down on a post or a page, it’s going to load the rest the information. So, it’s going to make your website load a lot faster, and then, it will query and get the information it needs when it is presented to the person viewing the website.

And so, it’ll do the same thing on your list of posts, like you can turn in your posts page, instead of just showing ten, like as you get to the bottom of ten, kinda like Amazon does, and as you get to the bottom, it just automatically like shows you ten more. And that’s what the infinite scroll is and how that works. And there’s lots of functionality within this.

It looks like it is – this one might be a little bit more of a developer-centered, a develop-focused plugin, just in the fact that there’s a lot of parameters to set up to make it work, but this is one that I highly recommend checking out if you want to speed up your website, and if you have really long articles or different pages that might have a lot of images or things that will take a little while to load, make sure that you’re loading those once the customer, once the viewer to your website, is actually scrolling down through your website.

So, that is Infinite Scroll – or WordPress Infinite Scroll – Ajax Load More. Again, a huge, huge mouthful.

Okay, the second to last one that I’m gonna share with you is one that hasn’t been updated in a couple years, but it’s a pretty basic plugin, so I think that’s okay. It’s got still 30,000 active installs, and that is Weather Underground. And that is a plugin where allow you to add in – it’s got some templates that are built in – but it will allow you to add a great looking weather forecast to your WordPress site.

This is something that would be very, very popular or work very, very well, if you are running a travel website or some sort of service that is renting kayaks on the beach or different things, like it’d be really great to show very quickly and very easily what the temperature is there right now, what the five-day forecast is, and whatnot.

So, this is the – it’s called Weather Underground. And it allows you to customize and set things up exactly how you want it to appear in the sidebar or throughout your site. And so, if you’re looking for that type of functionality, if you need some sort of functionality to show the weather, I definitely recommend checking out Weather Underground.

And my last plugin that I want to share with you today, again has 20,000 active installs, it has 90 five-star reviews, it’s overall rated at four-and-a-half stars. And it is one that’s called Ajax Search Lite, and it is a live search plugin. It is a responsive live search engine that will boost your user experience by providing the user-friendly ajax-powered form. It’s a live ajax search.

So, basically, you’re filtering the results within categories or post types, it basically auto-completing and keyword suggestions as you’re typing on your website. So, very much like how Google works, and you go to Google.com and you start typing, and you say like, how to tie a shoe, like it’s gonna automatically autocomplete what your phrase is before you actually get there.

So, this is a plugin that you can use on your WordPress site, and it will allow you to search within pages or posts or custom post types, you can search titles or descriptions, excerpts or custom fields, you can make sure that just categorize or post types, if you want to search for a particulars of those. There’s eight different built-in templates. There’s just a lot of functionality and a lot of features in this as well. It caches images for faster response time, so you can add images to those searches. So, it could pull in your featured image for each post or page. And it just – it’s really cool.

It’s a plugin that has, again, a lot of features. It does have a pro version as well, and this is only one of the ones that has a pro version, but it is something that I definitely think you should check out. I’m gonna check it out to see what it would look like on yourwebsiteengineer.com, how does it work, does it make things easier to find, does it make the search field faster? And it is one that I’d never heard of before, and I’m going to check it out. So, that is called Ajax Search Lite, and you can find that on the WordPress repository.

Now, there are tons of plugins out there, like I said, and I’m pulling up the number here. So, there’s over 54,000 plugins, free plugins, on the WordPress repository. Which ones are most important to you? Which ones have I missed? Like I know that there’s tons out there and I try to highlight one every single week, but I want to just ask if you have one that you really like and you use on every single website, leave a comment for episode number 380, and I’ll be sure to mention that one on the next plugin roundup show that I do or bring it as a plugin of the week each week.

And just it’s so hard to find all of them, and so, these are ones that just kinda I stumbled upon over the past few months, and that’s what I wanted to share with you today, some of these lesser known plugins, but ones that have some really cool functionality that would be great for your WordPress site.


So, that’s what I wanted to share with you today. Take care, and we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye-Bye.