 Hey, what's going on everyone? We're coming to the end of the year and I felt a very good way that we could wrap up 2023 is by highlighting some of the best WordPress plugins of the year. Inside this video, I'm gonna share with you the top 10 plugins that were my favorites. These are my favorites, all right? What I really wanna hear from all of you are your favorites as well. So use the comments below. Let us know what plugins were the most impactful for you this year. This is our chance, all of us. Our chance to give credit and recognition to some incredible developers that are building phenomenal tools that are really helping us out inside the WordPress space. And I have to tell you, choosing just 10 for my list was super, super difficult because there was so many good plugins this year. There was a lot that I've been using. So also at the end of the video, I do have an honorable mentions list with other ones that have been impactful for me this year. Let's go ahead and check them out. Number 10, Bricks Extras. Bricks Extras is an add-on for bricks that adds extra elements and features and functions to bricks. I remember coming across Oxi Extras a few years ago and when I saw Oxi Extras and how well-coded it was and how clean and light and fast, I really consider switching to oxygen just to use it. So when the same team that created Oxi Extras came out with Bricks Extras, I didn't even think twice. Now throughout the year, Bricks Extras has been adding new elements but the one thing that I love most that they've added have been more conditions. One of the beastly features inside bricks are the conditions. Bricks Extras has just expanded on it, especially with like WooCommerce and other things as well. It just really unleashed more of what we could do with the conditions. This is one of those tools that if you are using Bricks, I would suggest to anybody to put this inside your toolbox. This is one of the ones that are inside my Bricks toolbox and it's going to stay there. Number nine, WP Co-Box. This is a Co-Manager plugin built for the pros and serious developers. We do a lot of custom work here over at Lightbox, do a lot of custom coding just about on all of our websites and this right here has been a tool that's made our productivity and our whole workflow much smoother. A few things that I love about WP Co-Box are the way the code snippets and files are structured. It makes it a lot easier for us to organize everything and to get a good overview of our files and what we have and what we're building. Also, the preview mode that allows us to see changes in real time is super, super useful. I really dig that. And the code editor itself, for example, being able to highlight a string like this and being able to see all the other strings that match that, it gives us sort of a search and find feature to the code editor and this has come in handy on so many different occasions when our files start to get long and it just makes a whole process of editing code a lot faster. Number eight, WS form. This has been a new one for me but the love that WS form is getting from the professional development community inside WordPress speaks volumes. It's extremely well-coded and it is done by a very active developer which I love to see. And what won me over was a level of integrations that WP forms covers. Me, I'm a really big fan when it comes to integrations and automations and when I'm able to connect things together so everything works a lot more fluid, I really, really dig. I'm sure I'll have a lot more to share coming up inside the next year as I begin to lean hard into using WS forms. Number seven, Perf Matters. This is my new go-to performance tool and this is a beast. Again, another well-developed plugin. Not only does Perf Matters have heaps of performance features but it also helps with the overall health and security of the website. The speed enhancements have been amazing and I love how I've been able to remove the CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift, especially when it comes to fonts and top-level images loading using Perf Matters. I am now using Perf Matters along with Lightspeed on all of our projects and all of our websites. I used to use WP Rocket, I switched over, now I'm getting much better results so this has been a great upgrade for our performance. Number six, Studio Cart. Studio Cart, they need more light shine on them because this is an absolutely incredible plugin by a really solid development team. It's very similar to Thrive Cart and Shirt Cart and it's great for selling downloadables or courses or memberships and even small web shops and the thing I like about it is it is lightweight. Like I use this for my own personal site for the Lightbox Academy and I don't suffer from any of those heavy draining type of performance issues that I would get from WooCommerce. What really makes Studio Cart stand out for me though is the integrations and automations. It's insane the automations I've been able to set up with this. They even have their own Zap and I'm not talking about a web hook, I'm talking about their own Zap with a whole bunch of just really well thought out triggers. The integrations and automations makes this my go-to tool plus the development team, they are solid and their founder Nicole, she's always been helpful and super awesome, they have really great support and they had a great year adding a lot of useful new features, things like collections, more automations and then they also have a great roadmap ahead of them. They're gonna be releasing something for affiliates and memberships which I'm really looking forward to. So I wanna see how they evolve in 2024 but definitely Studio Cart, they need their light shine on them, this is one of those ones I think is flying under people's radars. That is a really, really good solution. It's an incredible plug-in and I'm really happy to shine some light on it. Number five, Fluent CRM. This is probably the best LTD I ever bought. At the same time, I'm still kicking myself that I only bought it for one license. If I knew how good it was gonna be and how I could be using this more for our clients that which I do now, well, I would have bought the full, you know, the full biggest LTD that I had possibly good up because now this is something that is inside my stack when I am helping my clients out with their email marketing. And the thing I love about Fluent CRM the most is it just works. The automations, the list and tags management, the integrations with web hooks, everything just seems to always work and I find it quite easy to manage and work with. Number four, Migrate Guru. Or I should say my lifesaver because that is what Migrate Guru has been for me this year. See our previous migration tool that I've used for years it started to let me down, it started to fail with the migrations and it was happening more often. So I switched over to Migrate Guru and the thing is it worked every single time. It just worked. And here's really why this ended up in my top 10 list. This is because this year we had a really big project. It was for a news publication and it was huge. It was huge. The database was 48 gigabytes. When we tried to migrate it to push it over, nothing worked. At the end of the day, it was Migrate Guru that came through. They managed to migrate a 48 gigabyte site, database over. It took around 24 hours of letting the migration run but it did, it went through, it worked. And that one right there saved my, that is why it is high up on my top 10 list. Number three, ACF the free version. And just to clarify, it's the free version on my list, not the pro version. This year ACF added the much hoped for custom post types and custom taxonomy. And they did all this on the free version. Before you needed to add a CPT plug in along with ACF and the minimalist in me, that wants to minimize the number of plugins, didn't really jive with this. So I gravitated towards Jet Engine for all of our dynamic sites. And I still really like Jet Engine. It's still in our toolbox. But here's the thing, 90 to 95% of the time when I need a custom post type or custom field, I don't need all of those advanced features and something like Jet Engine and MetaBox or even ACF Pro. Now we could use the free version of ACF to create dynamic and listing sites. And it's more lightweight than the more robust options. And the UI has been cleaned up big time. It makes it much easier to use than when I first started with ACF. Also, I gotta give a big shout out to WP Engine for not blasting the entire dashboard with a bunch of annoying notices about upgrading to the pro version like some other plugin and companies do. So all the other companies out there blasting our back ends with all these ugly, intrusive, annoying notices, please take note of what they are doing. Number two, advanced themeer for bricks. Have bricks was Goku or Vegeta. Advanced themeer turns bricks into a level five super Saiyan. All right, it's crazy how beastly this is. Now, originally I picked up advanced themeer just because it was Maxime from the Bricks community who's always been just super cool, helpful, and also very knowledgeable. So I knew he was really good. I just picked it up because he was a cool cat. I did not realize how good this tool was going to be. Last week I was running a workshop on getting started with bricks inside the Lightbox Pro Academy. And we were using the vanilla bricks. Now, after using bricks with advanced themeer, it was a shock to see how much advanced themeer changed the whole experience of developing sites inside bricks. First, I managed all my variables inside AT. This makes my setup so much faster and easier. Then in the builder, there are heaps of add-ons that improves the workflow. The ones that I found most useful up to now are the class managers, export styles to a class, seeing when styles are applied to different screen sizes, being able to select variables, being able to see what has been styled inside of a class. And look, I could go on for a whole hour talking about how these features, some of them might seem small, have a really big impact on the way that I am working with bricks and my whole workflow, the whole experience, all of it. It really takes my productivity to another level. And for anybody who ever asks, what plugin do I need? Like, what is the one plugin that I should get for a bricks builder? I would always recommend AT Advanced Themer because I found that for me, this has brought out the most beastly features. You know, there has been one complaint though. I want to address that, all right? There's been one complaint about Advanced Themers, a common one. And that is, Maxime, the developer, he releases features too quickly. And what a good problem that is to have a developer who is so active and just putting out super, super useful adult features, too fast for people to keep up with. Like, that is a very good quality problem. And as an extra bonus, ACF Pro comes along with it. So you don't need to buy ACF Pro. It comes already installed with Advanced Themer. Now, if you should use your own ACF Pro license or Advanced Themers ACF Pro, that's another discussion. But for now, it's been a super awesome bonus to have. And now it's time for number one. And number one is going to be Bricks Builder. Okay, okay, I know, Bricks is technically a theme. But it's also a page builder, so I'm letting it slide here. Plus, it's just so darn good. I cannot see myself giving anything else a number one. Thing is, this has been the year for Bricks. I first picked up Bricks in 2021 and didn't really give it a try until 2022. And I thought it was cool. It was crazy how clean the code output was. But it was still new. And core features like the Loop Builder, the Menu Builder, the Mega Menu, the Papa Builder Grid and other features that were really important, they were steadily being rolled out in 2022. And I didn't feel while it was at that stage, it was ready yet for us to use for client projects and for production work. But this year, that has changed. It's been an optimization year as Bricks has now solidified into a high level solution ready for client projects. All those new features that came out and Bricks just made it all work really well together. And to be honest, trying to describe how good Bricks is, I just get left speechless because there's just so much in it. That is phenomenal. What has been built here is truly, truly incredible. Now, this is definitely a tool for the pros inside WordPress. And there's a reason why so many pro developers, web designers, web creators are starting to gravitate towards Bricks. Now, really quickly, I'm gonna run through my honorable mentions list because all of these I'm about to list, these are all tools that I've started using this year as well, tools that I really, they all could have actually been in the top 10 because they're all like super, super good, ones that I've gravitated towards and also fallen in love with. The first one is Core Framework and ACSS. Frameworks they unleash the power from Bricks and both of these are great options. I'll be sharing these a lot more coming into the next year as I'm starting to lean a lot more into frameworks on Bricks. While we're at Bricks, there's also Bricks Forged. This is another tool that adds more power to Bricks. It's developed very well and it's another one of my Bricks tools that's inside of my toolbox. Next is Login Lockdown Pro. This year I replaced WordFence with Cloudflare optimized with rules, also using a 7G firewall. And I found Login Lockdown Pro to be a good add-on to add a bit more security at the site level. Also, it keeps my sites light and fast. I don't have any performance issues while using it. Up next is WPVivid. Now, this has been a great solution for the last couple of years. This year though, they released Database Merging which has been a really good solid new solution for say like WooCommerce sites and super active sites. This is a really, really good tool. Up next is Code Snippets Pro. It's a solid solution for anyone who wants to keep managing Code Snippets, simple and minimal. Not like WPKobox, that is much more robust, aimed towards a pro level developer. Code Snippets Pro keeps things more just really easy to use and that is a great solution for many, many out there. And this year they rolled out the Cloud feature which is a great new feature for Code Snippets. Up next is Quickly and I'm predicting this is gonna go on my top 10 list next year. This year I didn't get a chance to really work with it like what I wanted to, I just didn't have the time. I did pick up the LTD and this is something that I'm really looking forward to working with. I've only dipped into it briefly but I do see myself using this much more in this next coming year. Up next is SEO Press Pro which I consider to be the best SEO plugin hands down. I'm putting it out there. I think SEO Press Pro is the best, especially for us pro SEO specialists. This year has been full of super useful enhancements and new features like the broken link scanner making it much easier to build schema structure data and most importantly, they stay on top of the changes in Google. They are super active and this is so vital when it comes to using a really good SEO plugin especially when you are offering SEO services for clients. And last but not least, Elementor. Okay, I know this has been a year for bricks and as you could tell by my excitement for bricks you could tell I've been falling in love with it but still at the same time I don't wanna cast shade on Elementor because Elementor has done a lot of good things this year. They've done a lot of just really great improvements under the hood. Performance has really improved inside Elementor but then also they've been releasing features that we've been asking for. The ones that we really want. And they've released them now in a more slower granular way but it is steady and it's working right now. At least we got containers, right? You know what? I think just because we got containers live inside Elementor no, we shouldn't do that. 2023 has been a much more better year for El than 2022 and I gotta give it Elementor a shout out. Gotta give them the flowers for that because they did do really well this year. And there you have it. Some incredible tools right here. Now it's your turn. I wanna hear from you. What do you find really useful? What plugins have impacted your workflow? Which plugins did you replace and upgrade to this year? Let us know in the comments. This way we all could go through. We could all look, we could learn from each other and we are also given credit where credit is due to these amazing creators of these tools. That's it for this video. If you did find it useful, do all that good YouTube stuff. Like and subscribe, help support this channel. It is much appreciated. And I'll be back again soon with another one. Thank you for watching.