Genesis is one of the most popular and renowned frameworks widely used for WordPress websites. If you operate a website on Genesis, then you essentially require quality genesis plugins to improve the performance of your website and make it better.  Here in this article, we will share information about top 7 helpful Genesis plugins for helpful for developing WordPress theme. These plugins adds new look to your websites, increases its functionalities and makes you work easier.  

1. Genesis Grid

Availability: WordPress Plugin Directory Cost: Free Active Installs: 6,000+

This useful plugin turns your simple post to a grid based layout and make it appear attractive and up-to-date. With the help of this plugin, featured post can be set as full-width post on the top of the listing and  teasers as the post broken into columns.  The number of features and Teasers, both, can be set to the homepage and internal pages and the numbers of columns that teasers are broken into.

The image sizes used for features and Teasers can also be identified.  It is recommended that setting features should be set for large and Teasers for Medium. Go to Seetings-Read and set the dimensions of those images as required. If you have uploaded images previously, make use of the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin to rebuild thumbnails at these dimensions.  If images is not shown even after this step, make sure you make use of “included featured images”.  Check it as Genesis > Theme Settings > Content Archives.

Eventually, you can easily identify where the grind loop is being used by looking into Home, Search Results,  Author Archives,  Category Archives, Taxonomy Archives and Tag Archives.

2. Genesis Design Palette Pro

Availability: WordPress Plugin Directory Cost: Free Active Installs: 700+

Genesis Design Palette Pro offers all alternatives that are required to customize your Genesis powered website without using a single line of code.  This plugin manages the visual composer for  Genesis website and it will be possible for you to  display the website the way you want. Once you start using this plugin, everything comes under your control.

3. Genesis Simple Menus

Availability: WordPress Plugin Directory Cost: Free Active Installs: 9,000+

Genesis Simple Menus offers an easy alternative to handle the secondary navigation menu of your  Genesis-powered website. Using this plugin, you can set  customized navigation menus for specific posts, pages or taxonomy pages. These settings will breach default settings and help your website function smoothly.

4. Genesis Layout Extras

Availability: WordPress Plugin Directory Cost: Free Active Installs: 10,000+

As Genesis lacks in additional page payout, using this plugin will help you get extra layouts. It is well-equipped with customizable layouts for home page, tag, category,  date archive, author,  attachments,  pages, posts,  404,  search results, etc. It also contains  layouts of custom post  generated by other Genesis plugins.

5. Genesis Optimized Social Share

Availability: WordPress Plugin Directory Cost: Free Active Installs: 1,000+

Genesis Optimized Social Share loads main social media channels without affecting your page Loading Time & PageSpeed Score. Visitors don't need to wait for long time to land on the websites. Advanced social counters don’t break  because they are arranged Asynchronously.

6. Genesis Simple Edits

Availability: WordPress Plugin Directory Cost: Free Active Installs: 200,000+

This popular Genesis plugin enables you to make edits in the three most common areas of your website – the byline, post meta and the footer section. Editing these sections is possible without disturbing any PHP codes, hooks,filters. You can easily put shortcodes, HTML code, normal Text into these sections.  

7. Genesis eNews Extended

Availability: WordPress Plugin Directory Cost: Free Active Installs: 90,000+

A few years ago, Genesis eNews widget eradicated what came as default in the theme. They did so with an intention to decrease the amount of code in focus. It was a great functionality to attract more and more subscribers to websites. Now, an updated version of eNews widget plugin is available and is much better than its previous versions.

The use of Genesis eNews Extended plugin, you get the plugin with some additional features. It supports the majority of mailing list service providers such  as FeedBlitz, FeedBurner,  Aweber and  MailChimp.