By Dave Carr @Review.Casa
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Table of Contents
What is the Divi theme or Divi Builder?
The Divi theme from Elegant themes is the most popular WordPress theme on the market today!
Divi is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) front end design tool for WordPress.
The Divi theme is the best visual website builder for WordPress, it is the most intuitive of the visual page builders and incorporates full site editing and Woocommerce product pages too.
You can see my Divi builder review for the reasons I and so many other people think it’s the best theme
What is a WordPress plugin?
A WordPress plugin is an extension that adds extra functionality to your WordPress based website. With WordPress being the most popular open source content management system in the world it means that tens of thousands of developers have created nearly sixty thousand free plugins for it.
Some of these plugins are awesome and add essential features to you WordPress website.
A lot of developers have created premium WordPress plugins too. They work in the same way as free plugins but you have to pay a subscription to be able to access them.
What are Divi plugins or third-party divi plugins?
We all now know you can add extra functionality to your WordPress based website through WordPress plugins but did you know Divi has a range of Divi plugins or extensions that can enhance your Divi experience.
Divi sometimes doesn’t play nice with normal WordPress plugins (although this has improved over the last few years as Divi has become so popular) so developers started creating Divi specific plugins that add elements and Divi modules to be included in the Divi builder giving you more tools to build better websites.
If you think of Divi as a whole ecosystem just like WordPress. This ecosystem is an ever-evolving and growing part of the internet.
More and more designers and developers are joining the Divi community and building some outstanding plugins and child themes for Divi.
What’s the difference between premium divi child themes and a plugin for Divi
The simplest way for me to describe this is:
- Premium Divi child themes are for styling purposes to change the skin of your website.
- A Divi plugin adds new functionality to the Divi Theme. So plugins might add a new module to the Divi builder or add extra functionality to an old one.
Where to find divi plugins and the best plugins
There is a Marketplace for you to find plugins for Divi and child themes on the Elegant Themes website but I prefer to search around to find the best plugins for Divi before choosing because you might be able to find a lifetime deal on the owner of the plugins website. If you take Pee-aye creative as an example they sell yearly access on the Divi marketplace but on their site you can buy unlimited lifetime deals on all their plugins.
Sometimes you will find extra information which may stop you from making a purchase too if you look at multiple sources for example I was recently looking for a Divi mega menu plugin. I found a Divi plugin I liked the look of but on further research, I found that it had a massive impact on site speed
6 Divi must have plugins to enhance your Divi experience
Here are 6 of the best Divi plugins to enhance your Divi theme experience.
Divi Timer Pro – Add scarcity to your Divi based website
Divi Timer Pro is my top rated plugin in this list it’s a powerful Divi plugin that adds a new module to the Divi builder which adds the missing pieces to enable you to add scarcity to your Divi website. In my opinion, this is a must have plugin.
This new countdown timer Divi module adds many new elements to the Divi builder.
You can redirect pages when the timer runs out, you can set up evergreen timers, recurring timers and show and hide stuff when the timer runs out.
It allows you to run scarcity-based marketing campaigns on your Divi site easily.
Divi Social Sharing Buttons – A Divi plugin to increase social engagement
Divi Social Sharing Buttons has a ton of features and you can use it with the Divi builder to design the perfect social buttons for your Divi based site.
It’s a great little plugin for the design and adding of social buttons to your Divi site. And it costs $59 for a lifetime license to use on an unlimited amount of Divi websites.
Divi Responsive Helper – Switch on advanced Divi responsiveness controls
If you’ve been working with Divi for any length of time you will have run into one of those moments where the responsiveness becomes an issue.
Divi Responsive Helper adds so many optional features to Divi. It adds fine grain control over the responsiveness of the Divi theme.
So if you are looking for full control of the way your site works on different devices then this plugin for Divi is probably exactly what you are looking for.
Divi Contact Form Helper – Add advanced forms to Divi
If you have used the Divi contact form module then you will know people have been asking Elegant themes to sort it out for a long time.
The Divi Contact Form Helper is the missing link!
It has so many features you’ll cry with joy if you’ve been struggling with the Divi standard contact form module.
You get file uploads, dashboard statistics, date picker, time picker, reply from the back end and Zappier integration to name just 2 of this plugin for Divi features.
Divi Carousel Maker – An advanced divi carousel module
Personally being a CRO I’m not a big fan of carousels.
Out of the carousels that I’ve seen and tried this is probably the most versatile one I’ve found.
It adds a Divi carousel module to the Divi builder and lets you turn any module into a carousel on your Divi based site!
Divi Events Calendar
If you use The Events Calendar plugin then this addon lets you integrate The Events Calendar plugin with Divi.
Events are a great way to boost your engagement and The Events Calendar plugin lets people have control over signing up to your events and lets you automate the process.
What I consider is essential when choosing the best Divi plugins
When choosing plugin for Divi your main concerns should be:
- Speed – Anything that comes with a bus full of features that you don’t need will more than likely slow down your Divi site. Speed is a Google ranking factor so if your site gets slowed down too much, your rankings in the search engines will be affected. Speed will also affect the conversion rate of your Divi site.
- Not new (unless it’s from a well-known studio) – If it’s a new company releasing a new plugin for Divi then I tend to ignore them as developing a plugin for WordPress or Divi takes time to get right and work out any incompatibilities. Look for a Divi plugin that has had improvements over time.
- Support – Make sure that the makers of the plugin for Divi is responsive to queries before purchasing. It will be no good if something breaks and you can’t get a quick fix for your Divi based website.
Divi essential Tips
Use Divi presets
Divi presets are style settings that allow you to use styles across your whole website. When Divi was first created it was built as a landing page builder so each page was a separate entity within your Divi site. With the release of presets, you could then style your site globally.
Use the Divi performance settings
At one point Divi was a slow theme! The developers had crammed in a lot of useful tools so anyone could design a lovely looking website without hiring a developer but this led to speed issues. When Google announced that speed would be a ranking factor the team over at Elegant Themes set to work rewriting Divi for performance.
Elegant Themes rewrote the Divi theme and Divi builder plugin from scratch to give users the best Divi experience and make Divi fast.
The Elegant Themes team have done the impossible and made the Divi page builder and third-party Divi plugins super fast by rewriting Divi.
Optimize images on your Divi based site
By using the free plugin Resmush. you can optimise any image as it is uploaded to your WordPress or Divi based website. Just make sure the image dimensions are the size you need and then upload your image to the media library and Resmush.it will handle the rest.
This will have a dramatic effect on your Divi website’s load time.
