HubSpot is a great platform with which to develop websites easily and quickly, namely thanks to its streamlined Template Builder. You can get quite far before you have to get your hands dirty with any real coding. However sometimes you just need to up the ante, you need that extra bit of functionality, or that sexy new feature that will get your website over the line and noticed. Going forward, i’ll refer to these ‘features’ as plugins.
One of those plugins that stops you in your tracks, and demands that you to fist pump the air; not once, not twice, but thrice.
At this time, HubSpot doesn’t have a plugin marketplace like Wordpress does, so getting that killer feature ‘one-click-installed’ isn’t yet possible; but as certified HubSpot COS Designers, we can manually install these easily. Without further ado, here are our 5 most loved, most cherished plugins that we’ve incorporated in our COS sites.
MMenu is one of those plugins that stops you in your tracks, and forces you to fist pump the air; not once, not twice, but thrice. It’s a fluid, dynamic app-like menu that is designed with a mobile first mind-set that completely liberates us as designers and developers, and you as customers in terms of what you can do with a menu, how many menu items, and menu tiers you can have, and so much more. We love including this on every responsive website we make. Learn More.
Sliders on websites have been around for years now, and are most likely going to stick around for years to come - with the advent of responsive web design, it's been more important than ever to make sure that every aspect of your website works perfectly on mobile - especially an aspect that screams for attention like feature sliders.
This is where Owl Carousel comes in - It responds to touch and grab inputs on mobile, is CSS3 hardware accelerated, fully responsive, and packed with a ton of options; all of this inside a feather light package, meaning that it won’t slow down your website’s performance with superfluous features and bloated code.
We love using it for feature sliders, testimonial sliders, or for anything really; what's more, it works beautifully with HubSpot’s Custom Module feature, meaning that it can be turned into a dynamic tool anyone can use easily. Learn More.
Hubspot doesn’t like to sit still when it comes to developing great new pieces of open source code, and Pace is no exception. Pace is an automatic page loading bar, which gives you 14 types of loading animations to choose from, not to mention the ability to customise the colour of the loading bar to suit your website. It’s a subtle feature, but we like adding it to give visitors that extra little bit of feedback about what’s happening on the site that they’re viewing. Learn More.
This is another staple plugin that we use on every site we make. Sometimes web pages can get large - very large, and sometimes it can be a burden to scroll all the way back up manually - that's where this plugin shines. It generates a button that only appears after you’ve started scrolling, and fades into the background until you need it - but when you do finally click on it, Back-To-Top smooth-scrolls all the way (surprisingly) back up to the top; no muss, no fuss, no RSI. Learn More.
Last but certainly not least, the Custom Google Map. We’ve never been satisfied with simply embedding a standard Google Map into our websites, nor the websites of our clients - this plugin gives us the freedom to customise the look, feel and behaviour of a Google Map - giving us control over the colour of the map, the appearance of the marker, and even letting us have multiple markers, instead of multiple maps on one page. The end result? A beautiful, simple, and functional map; one that doesn’t have any of the standard Google Map controls cluttering the layout. Learn More.
These are just the tip of the iceberg; there is an entire ecosystem of great functionality out there on the Internet, just waiting to be put to work on your website.
Combined with HubSpot’s Template Builder, and Custom Modules, not to mention HubL, the sky's the limit for us as COS Designers and Developers; more than that however, you the customer stand to benefit most from these amazing tools. Want to learn more? For a read on responsive web design that's easy on the eyes, check out this great article.