WPBakery (formerly Visual Composer) is one of the most well-known and feature-packed visual page builders available for WordPress. While the team at WPBakery is always improving on their product, the number of variations of web projects out there make it impossible to rely on a single plugin for all of your needs.
Luckily, though, WPBakery is easily extendable, with a wide array of templates, add-ons, and ancillary plugins available. Let’s take a look at why you might need to extend WPBakery, and some of the best add-ons currently available on Envato Elements.
Extending Your WPBakery Builds
Whether you’re putting together your own website or building one for a client, WPBakery is a great tool to get your site off to a good start, and quickly. For most sites, using the visual builder will get you 90% of the way to a finished product.
No matter the site, though, there’s almost always a piece that goes a bit beyond what vanilla WPBakery offers. Whether it’s a very specific look for your page’s slider, a unique way of handling pop-up messages, or an intensely complex form, there’s an add-on that can handle it.
For subscribers to Envato Elements, you’ll get access to more than a dozen of these add-ons, plus thousands of other items (including stock photos, images, and themes).
What Is Envato Elements?
Envato Elements is a monthly subscription that unlocks access to all of the plugins and add-ons that we talk about below, plus more than 900,000 other resources. These include a number of graphic templates, WordPress themes, WordPress plugins, stock images, courses, and more.
If you’re interested, check out more about Envato Elements.
Manage Your Templates With Templatica
A soon-to-be favorite for anyone with a complex website, Templatica is a WPBakery add-on that makes managing templates a breeze. When it comes to templates in WPBakery, there are a ton of premium ones that come built in to your license. If you create a lot of templates on your own, though, it can sometimes be difficult to keep them all in order and to implement the fine control many have come to expect from individual page editing with the tool.
The biggest feature in Templatica is its addition of the “template” block for use in your visual editor. Instead of needing to create a full-page template to be used on your page type, this block lets you easily create smaller blocks to be used among multiple pages. This smaller block can then be updated in one place, and those changes pushed to all of the pages where the block is featured.
This is incredibly useful for elements such as a call to action, which is likely to be placed in a large number of places and on several different page templates. By using this block, you can place the call to action wherever you want it to appear, and easily update them all at once.
Expand Your Slider Options With Fast Slider
If you’ve used WPBakery for a while, you know that while you can build a slider with the vanilla plugin, it can be difficult and arduous to put together something truly stunning. That’s where Fast Slider comes in.
The goal of Fast Slider is to help you create a beautiful slider on your page as quickly as possible, which the plugin excels at. With more than 20 templates available, more than 100 effects, and easily changeable skins, it is perfect for those that just need a good slider without getting lost in the details.
Build Beautiful Splash Pages With VC Page Intro
Popups and splash pages get a bad rap, but there’s a reason you see them on so many websites: they work. You can easily add this capability to your WPBakery builds by using the Visual Composer Page Intro add-on.
This plugin adds a ton of powerful features, including 12 templates for building your own page intros. Beyond that, there are also three different types of intros that can be built, named “normal”, “session”, and “cookie”, that allow you to alter your intros depending on a predefined, dynamic flow.
If your page intro includes video, it also includes an option to auto-redirect a user when the video is finished playing (but be sure to use this ability responsibly!). Finally, Visual Composer Page Intro includes support for popular translation plugins, making it great for international sites as well.
Placing logos on your website has become a mainstay for many industries. Whether it’s companies that you’ve worked with or products that you carry, displaying their logos is an important component of building trust. The Responsive Logos Showcase plugin makes it easy to drop a great-looking carousel or listing of logos on your site.
With easy adjustment of built-in skins, a number of great effects, and a highly responsive design, this add-on makes it easy to add logos quickly. Included with the plugin are a series of PSD files that can make it easy to add the plugin to mockups and designs.
If you’re looking to add an audio or video library to your website, Multimedia Carousel will come in handy. This add-on lets you mix and match multimedia in an easy-to-use WP Bakery add-on. While it only comes with two skins out of the box, it can be easily customized by those with a little CSS experience. Besides the “classic” media carousel look, this plugin also offers a “perspective” styling option, creating additional depth in your galleries.
Video is an important part of many websites these days, and for a lot of site owners, using a video hosting site such as YouTube or Vimeo works great. If you want to customize the look of your video player, replace their branding with your own, or circumvent dealing with the potential of other people’s ads, you’ll need something else.
The HTML5 Video Player add-on for WPBakery makes this easy to do with videos you host on your own site. With a number of themes available and the ability to add playlists to the player, you can quickly add the capabilities of players from other sites to your own.
Extending Visual Composer and WPBakery
With these add-ons available (and many more!), WPBakery can be modified to fit almost any needs your website might have. The best part about the plugins in this list is that they’re all available for one monthly price through Envato Elements, so check it out!
What are your favorite add-ons for WPBakery? Let us know in the comments below!