FooPlugins has undergone an epic redesign! After lots of hard work, careful planning and vats of coffee, we have finally relaunched our new site. And we think it looks awesome!

But what prompted such a big change? It’s been in the making for some time now. The previous FooPlugins website hadn’t had a good overhaul for quite some tome. We had made a few changes here and there, but nothing significant. And let’s face it, it was looking a bit tired.

With so many new WordPress offerings now available, and with the advent of Gutenberg, now was a great time to give some new life to our site design. But this wasn’t the only motivating factor.

We also needed to work on creating a good user experience. This included improving our site speed, providing you with the info you need (and cutting loose any dead weight), as well as making it easy for you to find what you’re looking for.

Based on what we were looking for, we had a few important decision to make about the products we would use going forward.

We Chose Kinsta for Hosting

We decided to move our WordPress hosting to Kinsta, and we couldn’t be happier. Before we moved, our page load times were erratic and we had been experiencing an increasing amount of downtime. When your site is your sales platform, this just doesn’t work.

Since moving to Kinsta, we have seen a steady decline in page load times. We have made the site more lightweight by cutting down on image sizes, and serving them from the Kinsta CDN. And of course, we’ll need to wait to see more long-term results. But so far, so good!

The other big decider was the price. Kinsta came in considerably cheaper than our previous hosting provider, while still offering many of the same benefits. The support has been quick and efficient. And we just love the dashboard!

All told, Kinsta was an easy choice.

The GeneratePress Theme

Another easy choice was GeneratePress. We wanted a clean look that worked with our products and GeneratePress made it simple for us to showcase FooGallery and FooBox.

To start with, we wanted to use our hero images to create page headers that stood out. Using the GeneratePress elements we could do just this. We were also able to apply these headers to specific pages, meaning we could differentiate visually between FooBox and FooGallery.

We were also able to create a general header and apply this to all the other pages. The page or blog title could be integrated into the header, along with elements like the post date for the blogs.

We also needed a theme that allowed us to use Gutenberg blocks. We needed tables for a FooGallery and FooBox feature comparisons (Advanced Gutenberg blocks came in handy here). We also needed pricing tables, testimonials and product blocks, for which we used our own blocks.

GeneratePress easily accommodated and worked with these requirements. We could adjust the theme colors to suit our brand and style the site to create something we could be proud of.

Freemius Integration

We moved our licensing to Freemius not too long ago. As a dedicated online payment platform, this just made sense. They could focus on the licensing, while we could focus on building amazing plugins.

Freemius was a good choice for our clients as well. They have an integrated account, so you can access your purchases, licenses and such, right from the account page on FooPlugins. So it’s a win-win.

We did, however, have a number of FooBox Legacy customers who were still on the old system. For a number of reasons, we wanted to move these Legacy clients over to Freemius. Part of our site redesign is consequently focused on this: Legacy clients can now migrate, update and more.

Our aim is to make it easy for clients (you guys) to buy, renew or upgrade your licenses. Freemius, quite simply, helps us get this right.

Clean Up

There was also a major cleanup within our WordPress backend. Not only did we remove the plugins we no longer needed, we also started a fresh new install of WordPress and only migrated what was absolutely necessary. This allowed us to remove tons of data from the site. No e-commerce data, no user logins, no license metadata! It truly was liberating to start fresh without all the bloat that had accumulated since 2013.

Final Thoughts

We’ve put a lot of work into creating a site that looks amazing, but at the same time, gives you what you need. There may well be some issues – we may have decided not to include info you need, or there may be bugs that need fixing. If you find anything then please drop us a line.

We do hope that you love the new site as much as we do. But if you have any thoughts or comments, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Disclaimer: in the interest of full disclosure, we have made use of affiliate links in this post. But rest assured that we have used these products in the FooPlugins redesign. Furthermore we trust and recommend these products.