As mentioned, that’s an extra $500+ value (it costs $6 p/m for each individual plugin on a plan) added to your hosting plan, not to mention you’re getting 7 of the best and most reliable WP plugins around.
Premium plugins you can use to supercharge your client sites, and better yet, add more value to your own web design and development packages.
Read on to find out which plugins you can now get 100% free with our hosting and why we decided to package them this way.
First and foremost, we want to set our members up for success and give them the best tools and plugins possible.
And in this case, 7 premium plugins that optimize performance, security, SEO, and more, seemed like a no-brainer to package with our hosting.
Our suite of plugins is also something unique to WPMU DEV and not something a lot of other hosts offer.
Finally, the nature of our all-in-one WP platform means that many of our tools and plugins intertwine with one another.
For example, our premium plugins are fully-integrated into our site management tool, The Hub, which is also home to our dedicated hosting tab/interface.
We built it like this so users could easily manage and optimize sites, while also having direct access to our suite of technical hosting tools and features.
So overall it made sense to enable features that are already designed to work together, rather than hide them from hosting users.
*Drum roll* here are the 7 pro plugins you can now get 100% free with our hosting:
Every site needs engaging forms. Forminator makes it easy with a drag-and-drop form builder, and allows you to create quizzes, surveys, polls – and accept payments.
Our hosting already comes with an easy and automated migration tool, but Shipper can take the wheel and move your WP sites in a few clicks if you’d prefer the plugin route.
WPBakery is one of the world’s most popular WordPress page builders. Learn how to speed up and improve your site’s performance with the WPBakery plugin installed.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how we took a site using WPBakery from this…
GTmetrix results for WPBakery site before optimization.
GTmetrix results for WPBakery site using free Smush and Hummingbird plugins.
And finally to this, after some additional tweaking*…
GTmetrix results after full optimization. * These results include using Smush Pro features.
I’ll also talk about a new integration feature for WPBakery available in our award-winning image optimization plugin, Smush, and testing it along with everything else.
In this post, I’ll take you briefly through each of the following stages of my testing process so you can replicate this on your own site:
Just follow the recipe below to speed up and improve your site’s performance with WPBakery.
It’s time to get cooking…
1. WPBakery Overview
While there are over a dozen page builders for WordPress, WPBakery (formerly Visual Composer) remains one of the world’s most popular WordPress page builder plugins.
In fact, according to BuiltWith.com, WPBakery is a “mega” technology. It is used on over 3.6 million websites around the world and it’s the 5th most used WordPress plugin.
As many of our members use the WPBakery page builder plugin on their sites, we decided to look at ways to help improve site speed and performance.
Basic Optimization Tips for WPBakery WordPress Sites
Before we get into optimizing a WPBakery site using free plugins, let’s go over some basic optimization points.
Page Builders and Additional Code
A common characteristic of almost all page builders is that they add codes to your web pages’ main HTML file and additional files (e.g. CSS and JS files).
While these codes all help you “build nicer pages” using flexible layouts, a range of styling options, and wonderful design elements, they also affect your website speed, as it makes your pages heavier and slower to load in users’ web browsers.
While the extra codes added by page builders may not be necessary to load specific pages on your site and are generally only a few hundred kilobytes, they are necessary for your website as a whole.
The accumulated effect of these additional codes can increase your web page load time anywhere from a few hundred milliseconds to a few seconds, as web browsers not only have to download these additional codes but also execute them in order to display your pages to visitors.
If you plan to use WPBakery, you will want to stick with it for a very long time, as deactivating the plugin on your site will leave behind a long mess of shortcodes that you will need to remove from your posts and pages.
Yiikes…who’s gonna clean this up?
As you will see shortly, we will try to optimize WPBakery to reduce the additional load time caused by these extra codes using our Hummingbird plugins to minify our site’s HTML, CSS, and JS files.
Minification is the process of removing white space, carriage returns, and unnecessary characters. This results in smaller files which help your site load faster.
Theme
One of the best ways to start optimizing sites is by optimizing your theme first.
Some themes provide loads of optimization settings and tweaking these can make a massive difference.
If you use a theme like Avada, for example, there is a whole section of options to help improve performance (Avada > Options > Performance).
Optimizing your theme can make a huge difference to your site’s performance.
Go through your theme’s documentation and optimize its performance settings if available. And they do make a massive difference.
Hosting
Your hosting setup has a huge impact on your site’s speed and performance.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out that can reduce your page loading times significantly by choosing a fast web host.
Something you may not be aware of, however, is that Google recently updated PageSpeed Insights to improve scores based on the faster HTTP/2 protocol.
HTTP/2 servers provide a performance boost to sites and improve Google PageSpeed Insights scores.
So, make sure that your server supports the HTTP/2 protocol if you want faster site performance and better speed test scores.
CDN
A Content Distribution Network or CDN can further reduce your page load time by serving your site’s files from multiple data centers that are closer to your users.
As we are testing with our free plugins first and CDN is a feature of the “Pro” versions, we’ll keep CDN disabled during the initial test phase. We’ll turn it back on later when we look at ways to further optimize our test site.
Caching
Additional ways to further reduce your page load time include caching.
It’s important to note, however, that caching distorts page loading test results because it serves users a stored version of the site’s page, so any tests using caching turned on are not actually measuring the delivery of a page from an initial request to the original server where the site is stored.
For this reason, we’ll start our testing with Page caching disabled. We’ll then enable page caching later on just to see what kind of a difference in overall performance it can make to our test site with WPBakery installed.
Image Optimization
Compressing images helps your pages load faster and your site perform better by reducing image size without loss of image resolution.
We’ll be testing our site using our free image compression and optimization plugin, Smush.
Remove Unnecessary Elements
Some additional things that can affect the speed and performance of a WordPress site using WPBakery include removing any unnecessary elements like widgets, fonts, plugins, themes, etc.
For example, social media widgets often load an excessive amount of JavaScript and CSS files, which can slow down your server.
Widget optimization includes not only deleting unnecessary widgets that you don’t need but also removing them from places where they don’t need to appear (e.g. include widgets on your blog posts but remove them from pages like your home page, contact us, about us page, etc.)
Additionally, make sure that you are using the most up-to-date version of WPBakery and that your site, theme, and plugins are also all up-to-date. Outdated themes and plugins can conflict and slow down WPBakery performance.
Now that we have looked at various factors that can affect site optimization, let’s look at the specific methodology used to test our WordPress WP Bakery site.
2. Methodology
As this post is all about speeding things up, I’ll skip the parts where we show you how to set up hosting for your site, how to fully configure our Smush and Hummingbird plugins, and how to use page speed testing tools like GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights to save time and get to our testing results faster.
If you need help with the above, see our in-depth tutorials below:
Please go through the sections on this post before optimizing your WPBakery sites: We recently published a tutorial on how to optimize Elementor sites. It contains a detailed walkthrough of all the steps we recommend using to configure and optimize our Smush and Hummingbird plugins.
The only plugins we’ll install on our test site are Smush and Hummingbird (Note: The WPMU DEV Dashboard plugin is installed automatically on sites hosted with WPMU DEV).
Page caching and hosting and Pro plugin optimization features like Static server caching (Fast CGI) and CDN were disabled during our initial test phase.
The same WordPress theme (Shopkeeper) and theme configurations and options were used throughout all tests. Note: This theme doesn’t have its own optimization settings, so this will be done using the plugins.
WPBakery Builder plugin version = 6.5.0 (note: the plugin came bundled with the theme and that was the highest version of the plugin I could update to.)
The same GTmetrix default server location and browser were used throughout the test (test server location = Vancouver, Canada. Browser = Chrome (Desktop) 86.0.4240.193, Lighthouse 6.3.0).
Essentially, everything remained the same through the test. I simply turned on more options incrementally before re-testing, as detailed in the results section below.
Additional Notes and Disclaimer:
The site is hosted on WPMU DEV hosting, so installing Smush and Hummingbird using WPMU DEV’s Dashboard (a members-only feature) automatically upgrades all plugins to Pro. I performed my initial tests with Pro features disabled to simulate using our free plugin versions.
Hummingbird optimizes sites using different caching types (e.g. Page caching, Browser caching, RSS caching, and Gravatar caching) and compression features (e.g. GZip compression). As mentioned earlier, we started with Page caching disabled. We also disabled Gravatar caching and RSS caching. Browser caching and gzip compression are turned on by default on most hosts. There’s no easy way to turn these off without modifying web server configurations, so these were left on for the duration of the test
As our developers like to continually remind us, many variables can affect the performance and results of testing sites. This includes using different themes, plugins, hosting environments, configurations, the alignment of the planets, etc. We’ll discuss this a little more at the end of this post.
If you want, you can create a full backup of your site, but it’s not necessary, as Smush and Hummingbird will not break your website.
Now, for the test results.
3. WPBakery Site Setup
As stated, All tests were performed on a brand new WordPress installation on WPMU DEV’s managed WordPress hosting.
My brand new WPBakery site…hot and fresh out of the WordPress oven!
I then uploaded the Shopkeeper eCommerce theme.
Shopkeeper is a popular WPBakery eCommerce Theme for WordPress.
Although WPBakery is a standalone premium plugin, many themes come bundled with the plugin (including Shopkeeper).
WPBakery comes bundled with this theme.
I then imported the theme’s demo content, as I wanted loads of pages and large images.
Let’s import everything into the site and push this baby to the max!
With the WPBakery plugin installed and activated and my demo store’s content imported, my test site was now ready for testing.
Toss in lots of pages with loads of images…now we’re cooking!
Before touching anything, I ran some page speed tests on my site using Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix.
Here are my initial Google PageSpeed mobile test results…
My initial PSI mobile results.
My initial Google PageSpeed desktop test results…
My initial PSI desktop results.
And my initial test results on GTmetrix.
What GTmetrix thinks of my non-optimized site.
With these initial benchmarks recorded, the next step was to install our free Smush and Hummingbird plugins.
We’ll do it one at a time and see how these affect my site’s scores.
4. WP Bakery and Smush
I started by activating Smush, WPMU DEV’s image optimization and compression plugin.
Hey Smush, thanks for offering to do the heavy lifting, but let’s keep it simple for now.
After installing Smush, I ran a check to see if any images needed compressing.
Smush automatically compressed over 2,300 images and detected additional attachments that needed re-smushing.
I’ll just bulk smush these few additional attachments.
After Bulk smushing all images, the test site was ready for another round of page speed testing.
Over 2330 images smushed. Nice work, Smush!
By simply turning on Smush and leaving everything else on the site untouched, I got a slightly better score on Google PageSpeed Insights’ mobile test results.
According to Google’s mobile PSI score, I’ve reached my 30s.
And an increase in my Google PageSpeed Insights’ desktop score (plus the score has gone from red to yellow…yay!).
And thanks to Google’s desktop PSI score, I’m now into my early 50s…
My GTmetrix grade has also gone up from “D” to “C”.
That looks more like a C+to me!
Okay, that wasn’t bad for just turning on Smush.
Before adding Hummingbird to the mix, let’s enable a new Smush feature created especially for WPBakery plugin users.
5. WPBakery and Smush WPBakery Integration
In WPBakery, certain themes let you add custom image sizes.
Some themes that use WPBakery let you add custom-sized images.
Smush auto optimizes images in the WordPress media library. Since WPBakery’s custom-sized images are not your typical registered WordPress thumbnails, we have developed an integration to hook into the image resize functionality in WPBakery.
To enable this feature in Smush and allow the plugin to smush images resized in WPBakery’s editor, head over to the Integrations screen and simply toggle the switch on.
Got special image requirements? Smush offers WPBakery integration for custom-sized images.
Note: After enabling the WPBakery integration in Smush, you may see additional images that need bulk smushing.
Turning on the WPBakery integration brought up 85 images that needed resmushing.
I bulk smushed WPBakery’s custom-sized images, then ran the speed tests again.
The PageSpeed Insights mobile score improved by one point.
There is a point to be made for enabling Smush’s WPBakery integration feature.
As did my PageSpeed Insights desktop test results.
Here’s another point worth making…remember to turn on the Smush WPBakery integration feature!
My GTmetrix results also showed a slight improvement.
I see a C and that’s no B.S. (B Score).
My scores are slightly better after turning on Smush and the WPBakery integration feature, but we’re not done yet.
Leaving the features of Smush Pro disabled for now, let’s activate Hummingbird on the site.
6. WPBakery, Smush, and Hummingbird
Hummingbird installs from your WordPress dashboard just like every other free WordPress plugin.
In my case, however, as I have the WPMU DEV dashboard installed on my site, I’ll just activate the plugin there.
WPBakery with activated Hummingbird and a side of Smush. DevMan, give my compliments to the chef!
As you can see, the WPMU DEV dashboard plugin detected that I am a member and automatically installed Hummingbird Pro.
To simulate the free plugin version, however, I’ve ignored time-saving Pro features like automated scanning and left uptime monitoring disabled.
We’ll also leave Hummingbird Pro’s CDN hosted minification disabled, as we are not enabling the CDN at this stage.
Notes:
Hummingbird Pro provides enhanced minify compression (with 2x the regular optimization of Hummingbird Free). I couldn’t disable this feature without changing my entire testing configuration, so we’ll just run with it.
Hummingbird Pro works seamlessly with Smush Pro’s image optimization. This, however, won’t affect our results right now as we are leaving all Smush Pro features disabled until later in the test.
With these explanations out of the way, let’s return to the test.
Initial Hummingbird Performance Test
After installing and activating Hummingbird, I ran the plugin’s Performance Test to get detailed insights on ways to improve the site’s performance.
You can run a performance test from the plugin’s dashboard or go to Hummingbird > Performance Test and click on either the Run Test or New Test buttons.
Click the button in Hummingbird’s Dashboard to run a Performance Test.
Here are the results of my initial test.
My Performance Test results immediately after installing Hummingbird.
Tip: Make sure to check Hummingbird’s documentation. It has an excellent section on Asset Optimization tips. I recommend reading that section first if you plan to use Hummingbird’s advanced optimization features.
After the Asset Optimization test, Hummingbird returned a list of recommended fixes.
Better tell my secretary to hold my calls and cancel all bookings for the week so I can get through this list of recommended fixes!
Initially, I went through and started to manually implement each of Hummingbird’s recommended fixes.
I’m fixing to get through this list.
The recommended way to optimize assets manually is to fix one item at a time and constantly check your site to make sure that everything is working correctly.
So, that’s what I did. After every few fixes, I ran another set of Performance Tests in Hummingbird plus new Google PageSpeed and GTmetrix tests.
I kept going and noticed my scores gradually improving.
For example, here is my Hummingbird Performance Test result after some additional tweaking…
Speaking of tweaking… my score’s freakin’ peaking!
Here is my mobile score for Google PageSpeed Insights after some more Hummingbird magic…
Girl, we couldn’t get much higher…or could we?
My desktop score…
C’mon baby, light my fire.
And my GTmetrix score…
Try to set my site on….fi-aaaarr!
Note: Occasionally, one of the recommended fixes would break up the site.
Uh oh…I wonder if anyone is going to notice that my home page looks different.
Fortunately, Hummingbird’s recommended fixes cannot cause permanent damage to your site, especially if you follow these tips:
If you are optimizing a lot of assets, give Hummingbird time to process everything. Tweaking assets can take up to 5 minutes for results to kick in.
If you are implementing optimization fixes one at a time as recommended and something causes an issue, go back and undo the last tweak you made. Your site should return to normal.
If you somehow truly stuff up, don’t panic. Start by resetting module settings, then try disabling the problematic module. If these measures don’t fix the issue, simply disable the plugin to restore your site to its pre-optimized state and contact our support team. They will help you troubleshoot any issues (make sure to also read the plugin’s documentation section on troubleshooting issues with Hummingbird.)
The best tip Hummingbird’s developers gave me as I manually worked through the list of optimization fixes was to stop optimizing files manually and switch to the automated options. Specifically, I was instructed to switch to ‘Auto-Speedy’ mode, so that’s what I did.
Hummingbird’s developers recommend using Auto-Speedy to optimize your site’s assets.
Unless you are going for a custom setup with deferring and inlining of assets, choose one of Hummingbird’s automated options: Speedy or Basic. You can read how each of these options works by clicking on the “How Does it Work?” link.
My Optimized WPBakery Site Is Now Ready To Serve, BUT…
So far, I’ve only optimized the WPBakery site using the free optimization features of Smush and Hummingbird.
If you’re happy to leave things at that and simply install the free plugins on your WPBakery site, you can see that these will improve your site’s speed and performance.
For example, here are the results with my test site:
With Google PageSpeed Insights, my site’s scores went from…
27 -> 41 (mobile) = 52% improvement.
46 -> 79 (desktop) = 72% improvement.
With GTmetrix, my site’s scores went from…
D -> B grade.
58 -> 82 (performance) = 41% improvement.
89 -> 96 (structure) = 8% improvement.
These are tasty improvements!
If you are hungry for some WPBakery site optimization using free plugins (and with Smush and Hummingbird there IS such a thing as a Free lunch!) then these results are quite healthy.
However, I like my site optimization really well done with no half-baked measures.
So, let’s turn up the thermostat and see if we take things even further.
7. WPBakery Site, Smush Pro, and Hummingbird
Because everything was already set up, I was curious to see just how far I could optimize my WP Bakery site with the additional features of Smush Pro and Hummingbird Pro.
After all, all’s fair in love, war, and optimizing sites for speed, am I right?
Left Auto-Speedy mode to handle all of the site’s asset optimization.
Enabled Page caching.
Switched on the recommended features in Hummingbird’s Advanced Tools screen.
Follow General tab’s instructions to reduce page load times and soldier on!
My Final Test Results
Here are screenshots from my final test results using Smush Pro, Hummingbird Pro, and WPMU DEV’s hosting…with everything turned up to “11”:
Hummingbird Performance Test
Desktop…
Tweaking fantastic!
Mobile…
Not bad…could use a pinch more!
Google PageSpeed Insights
Desktop…
I love my greens!
Mobile…
Sixty-nine and feeling fine!
GTmetrix
Sweet…
8. WPBakery Optimization Take Away
Whew…we’ve worked up quite a sweat here working away with WPBakery on my testing kitchen, but I think the proof is in the pudding.
With Google PageSpeed Insights, my site’s scores went from…
27 -> 69 (mobile) = 156% improvement.
46 -> 93 (desktop) = 102% improvement.
With GTmetrix, my site’s scores went from…
D -> A grade.
58 -> 92 (performance) = 59% improvement.
89 -> 99 (structure) = 11% improvement.
With Hummingbird’s Performance Test, my site’s scores went from…
45 -> 80 (Desktop) = 78% improvement.
The chart below shows the difference in improvement in my WPBakery WordPress site using the Free vs Pro versions of Smush and Hummingbird.
WPBakery site optimized with the whole enchilada!
Anyone with eyes bigger than their stomach will be quick to notice that the above recipe works for optimizing any site, using any theme. It’s not specific to WP Bakery only.
The only extra ingredient added here was the Smush WP Bakery integration.
Whether your site uses WPBakery, Elementor, or any other page builder, add Smush and Hummingbird to your site optimization mix and you should see some nice speed and performance improvements. Just remember that results can and will vary depending on your hosting set up, plugins, themes, site configuration, etc.
If you want to go extra lean and feel the heat, then turn on Smush and Hummingbird’s Pro features and consider using our managed WordPress hosting for additional speed and performance features like CDN and server caching, plus dedicated 24×7 support served fast, fresh, and hot.
We’ve always provided free versions of our most popular pro plugins on WordPress.org, but recently we’ve been stepping that up. So even if you’re not a member, you should check them out and let us know what you think :)
I’ve said it before, but it’s worth reiterating: the more you help the community and the better the quality and functionality of your freely available GPL plugins, the more the community, WordPress as a whole, and, well, everyone, wins.
I’ve linked above the dedicated page we put up covering our core offerings (alternately, you can go to the plugins section of our WordPress.org page), so I figured it was about time that we gave you a quick guide as to what they do, how they differ from the pro versions (very little!) and talk about a couple of upcoming free offerings. Hey, don’t turn that page, this ain’t no simple listicle.
And one last thing, just so I don’t have to put ‘free’ in every heading, all of the below are exactly that ― freeeeeeee. Enjoy!
Smush and Hummingbird.
Our Titans of WordPress Performance Optimization.
Smush free on WordPress.org is trusted on +1 million active installs.
She’s particularly special as adopting her was when we discovered that something done *just right* could be a huge hit. It turns out that when you take care of 99.9% of all users, 0.1% are more than happy to come over and try out a membership. Smush is particularly notable for having the 3rd most 5-star ratings of any plugin on WordPress.org!
The free version of Smush is perfect for hobbyists and individual site owners.
If you’d like Super Smush lossy compression, fast CDN image delivery, WebP conversion, automatic resizing, the ability to optimize images up to 32MB, bulk smush optimization for all your images in just one-click, auto-convert PNG to JPEG, the ability to Smush and make a copy of your full-sized images (to restore them at any point), you can always take the next step with WP Smush Pro.
Hummingbird brings your pagespeed closer to the perfect 100.
Now I know you’re not supposed to have favorite children, but sadly here I have to make an exception. I absolutely love Hummingbird. This isn’t just because she’s amazingly useful, but because her growing pains were pretty severe. Turns out compressing files, minification and trying to cover every single base in making your site extremely fast is, erm, quite hard. Who’d have thought it lol?
Hummingbird Pro is all about automation and optimization for users with a lot of sites.
Right now the experience of setting up and using Hummingbird is really, well, exceptional. I reckon it’s the best UX work we’ve done and the outcomes aren’t bad either. And it’s free! (I know I said I wouldn’t say that again, but hey, it’s pretty cool). And this is born out by the fact that she’s the fastest-growing of our newer offerings. Honestly, give her a try if you haven’t already.
SmartCrawl.
Our Premium Alternative to Yoast SEO.
This was something we thought about long and hard and figured we’d give it a crack.
Basically our thinking is that Yoast & All In One SEO have pared back their functionality in the way that Facebook has pulled back your page views (unless you pay for premium, or get a boost) and we think that sucks.
SmartCrawl is the queen of content optimization.
SmartCrawl is designed from the bottom up to provide you with most, if not all, of the premium features that you’re used to paying for. Plus a good helping of that gorgeous and easy-to-use UX that I mentioned above. That’s why we think it’s the best free WordPress SEO plugin out there (dammit I said that word again). So why not take her for a spin.
SmartCrawl SEO adds streamlined content optimization to any site.
OK, I’ve given up not saying free now, sorry. But do bear with me because you’re not going to want to miss this one – especially if you either don’t have a security plugin :scream: or are paying for one that doesn’t stack up to this chap.
Secure and monitor your sites with the keen watchful eye of Defender.
If you are managing a bunch of sites, use the Hub to monitor security in one place.
Hustle… The Ultimate Opt-In / Pop-Up Marketing Plugin Is A Charming Fella
Now for the coolest cat on the WordPress plugin block. He’s got the looks, the style, and the features that make OptIn Monster, Sumo and every other premium and paid plugin look like a gawky teen.
Hustle makes marketing and conversion optimization easy with pop-ups, slide-ins, opt-ins and social sharing tools.
Essentially if you are looking to capture email addresses, offer free downloads to get leads or promote your services in any way he’s going to do it for you. From pop-ups to slide-ins to slide-ups and in-copy content Hustle allows you to not only set a vast array of different (beautiful) stylings but also targets visitors based on all sorts of different conditions. You’ll actually be amazed you don’t have to pay for him.
Hustle includes all the styling, templates, animations, and display conditions in both the Pro and Free versions.
Forminator.
Finally! The Form, Quiz, Survey, Poll Builder WordPress Has Been Waiting For.
Say hello to Forminator the form, poll, quiz and survey builder!!!
Forms are the Holy Grail for WordPress sites and now there is an option that won’t cost you your life savings. Forminator’s drag and drop builder is by far the easiest tool for setting up forms in WordPress (I’m not biased…promise). Quickly add a simple contact form or complex registration forms.
We didn’t stop there. Forminator includes polls with real-time chart and graph results, no wrong answer quizzes (think Buzzfeed) and knowledge tests.
But perhaps the real surprise is the included developer API. Because Forminator is now open to millions of users on WordPress.org any developer can build and sell integrations or custom apps.
Forminator excels at creating forms, quizzes, surveys, and polls.
I could go on and on about the included Gutenberg block, GDPR-friendly settings, and included spam protection, but that’s another post for another day… and trust me… I will.
Branda.
Our Marketing Powerhouse Plugin.
White label your dashboard, customize system emails, maintenance mode and coming soon landing pages – Branda is everything you need to rebrand WordPress.
Branda has everything to rebrand WordPress for free without touching any code.
Customize every aspect of WordPress to fit your brand with Branda, the only premium and 100% free white label plugin for WordPress.
Transform your dashboard, customize system (default) emails, quickly toggle maintenance mode and coming soon landing pages, change every aspect of your login screen, remove or replace logos, create color schemes, and much, much more.
Customize Your WordPress Multisite Admin Areas With Branda
Even the best WordPress theme builders leave WordPress branding all over your site.
On your personal blog it is not a huge problem, but for a small business, design and development agency, or any professional site, a finished look with a complete brand package is important. That’s where Branda comes in! Turn WordPress into your own white-label solution.
Branda lets you make all the brand customizations your theme doesn’t include. A must-have, best-in-class WordPress admin plugin.
Last but not least… a true FreeBee.
This last plugin is fully functional, feature rich, and there is absolutely zero difference between the Free and Pro versions.
Beehive
Originally released as premium-only in 2009, Beehive has consistently ranked in the top 10 WPMU DEV premium plugins for total downloads and active installs. To celebrate her decade plus analytics, we made one of the best Google Analytics WordPress Plugins on the market free for everyone.
Give website analytics free to all your clients with Beehive!
Set up with Beehive is as easy as connecting your Google profile and verifying your site. No more hunting through code files or manually adding tracking links. Beehive makes it easy to get valuable statistics for bloggers, small business websites, eCommerce sites, enterprise networks and more.
Beehive takes your user’s privacy seriously. Toggle IP Anonymization to anonymize your visitor IPs, stop demographic reports, protect user IDs and more.
Activate analytics for every site across an entire Multisite network with one tracking code. Pick and choose what sites have access. Beehive grabs all the information and makes user tracking, statistics reporting, and site management simple.
Beehive puts your Google Analytics overview, stats, and graphs right in your WordPress dashboard. Save time and get a better picture of the most important content on your sites.
Beehive is a one of a kind WordPress analytics dashboard plugin that makes it easier to grow the traffic on your site.
If you’re running a business website or eCommerce store Beehive provides information you need to convert more leads into sales and increase your bottom line.
“Why Would I Ever Want A Membership?”
I can see the pitchforks and torches in the distance, and I can hear the questions ― “Why pay if everything is free?”.
I’m confident that the real value of your membership is found in automation, and the time saving, money making machine that is the Hub.
The Hub offers at-a-glance summaries & actionable tasks for your most important metrics.
If you’re managing more than one site, consider that our well stocked pantry of super servers, white label reporting, safe upgrades, uptime monitoring, and 24/7 support for all things WordPress, is hard to beat.
Our free offerings are totally fine for hobbyists and single site owners, but freelancers, development agencies, and basically anyone earning income with WordPress get incredible value. Don’t take my word for it – try all the pro features for the next 30 days – on me. :)
We’re Not Done… Coming Soon…
Major Updates to The Hub & Hub Client
Last year we asked our members (and visitors) what they’d like us to make for them to the same standard as our other offerings and, well, we listened.
The Hub and The Hub Client have exciting rollouts coming this year. If you’re not familiar, The Hub is our streamlined site management tool. From its smart and crisp UI, you can quickly handle a myriad of top level tasks, such as: managing updates; optimizing performance; monitoring uptime; staying on top of SEO; scanning analytics; tightening security; scheduling and implementing backups; generating white label reports; collaborating with clients and colleagues. All this and more… using any host!
Here is a peek at the top Hub & Hub Client features heading your way soon:
The Hub:
New Hub Plugin Manager
Bulk install, activate, delete, update, configure and add WP plugins from one place.
Dark siders rejoice. Soon you’ll be able to switch The Hub to dark mode!
Access community resources and helpful content straight from your Hub interface.
New color adjustments to meet the AA accessibility color standard.
The Hub Client:
Automated site creation and client billing.
Offer different hosting and feature plans, set the initial charge and subscription levels, and let your clients purchase a plan. Welcome to your new WordPress SaaS business.
Domains
Offer your clients the opportunity to search for and purchase a domain, which will be automatically mapped to their new hosting and templates set up… yep, be your own GoDaddy!
Full UI customization, for a Hub completely your own.
And naturally, we’re not stopping there. If you think the plugins I’ve featured here are lacking in any specific way, have any particular requests for them, or just wanna let us know what’s on your mind, hit us up in the comments section below.
Plus, if you’ve got a burning desire for any other really good WordPress.org plugin that you think WPMU DEV could roll out for you in the future, let us know that too.
So there you go. It may have taken a while to figure out, but striving to better the quality and functionality of your freely available GPL plugins is by far the best way to go about your WordPress business, and the best way to operate as an open-source company.
We sincerely hope you enjoy our free plugins, whether or not you ever fancy giving our free trial at WPMU DEV a run.
Over to you :)
Editor’s Note: This post has been updated for accuracy and relevancy. [Originally Published: September 2018 / Revised: July 2021]
