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About Thrive plugins

We are now giving AffiloJetpack members who host with us two new premium plugins to use on their sites: Thrive Leads and Thrive Architect.

These plugins are developed by Thrive Themes. You can get a quick overview of the products by checking out their sales pitches at https://thrivethemes.com/architect/ and https://thrivethemes.com/leads/more/

Here’s our take on how you can use these plugins.

Plugin #1: Thrive Architect (also called Thrive Landing Pages)

Thrive Architect is a completely visual page designer that you can use to create amazing squeeze pages and other pages across your site.

The editor comes with a huge range of features you can add to your squeeze pages — including countdown timers, testimonials, review stars, video widgets — and you can add them all by just dragging and dropping them into the page like this: 

 

 

It comes with a huge range of layouts and templates for different kinds of pages, including squeeze pages, video landing pages, podcast signup pages, download pages, and more. You can use these layouts as they are, or customize them. You can also create pages completely from scratch, although we’d recommend starting with a template first. It makes things easier.

Here are some of the templates currently available inside Thrive Architect: 

 

There’s a small learning curve involved in figuring out how to use the editor, but there are help videos on the Thrive site that will help, and we’ll provide some relevant help videos in the AJP Support area too.

(By our estimation, the plugin is much simpler to learn than learning WordPress itself, and certainly a lot more fun!)

 

This plugin is great for…

Squeeze pages: It’s perfect for creating your squeeze pages. It comes with a huge range of built-in templates that can be easily customized to create stunning (responsive!) squeeze pages.

Unlike the squeeze pages in AffiloTheme, you can set a Thrive squeeze page as the homepage for your website — great if you’re building a squeeze site, rather than a site with a lot of content.

Thanks and download pages: Thrive Architect is also great for creating these pages, because it makes it really easy to add and edit images, buttons, etc.

Homepages: If you’re creating a content site you can also create a homepage for your site in Thrive. This allows you to use a different layout for your homepage, rather than the standard WordPress choices.

 

The plugin is not great for…

Creating every single article on your website: We don’t recommend that you use Thrive to create all the article pages/posts on your website (if you’re adding lots of articles).

This is because each Thrive page is independent, and if you want to make a change across your entire site (eg, change a form or an image) on every page on your site, you would need to edit every single page you’ve created with Thrive. That would be incredibly tedious!

Instead you should use your WordPress Theme for the style and design of the bulk of your site, and use Thrive for a few select pages across your site.

 

Plugin #2: Thrive leads

This is an amazing plugin for adding signup forms across your site. You can use it to replace the AffiloTheme signup forms that normally appear in your sidebar (sidebar forms) and at the ends of your articles (feature forms).

It comes with some great templates that you can customize. The editor is just like the one you use in the Thrive Content Builder, which means it’s entirely visual with lots of drag and drop goodies you can use to build your forms. Colors, fonts, images etc are entirely customizable.

You can use Thrive Leads in the same way as the AffiloTheme signup forms (eg, a form in your sidebar, and a form at the ends of your articles) but it also has a lot more features: You can create exit-pops that appear when your visitor tries to leave your page, or normal popovers that appear when the visitor has been viewing your page for a while, or scrolls to a certain point.

Here's an exit pop:

 

 

One of the really big benefits is that you can create a variety of “groups” of forms, and set them to appear on different pages on your site. For instance if you had a category of articles on dog health, you could create a sidebar form, footer form and exit pop that only appear on these pages, and offer an ebook on dog health.

And then on your articles about dog obedience, you could have a sidebar form, footer form and exit pop that offer your “dog obedience problems” ebook instead. This is really easy to do with Thrive Leads.

The last big exciting feature is the ability to split-test your forms. You can create two variations of the same form, and test them against each other to see which one attracts the most signups.

 

Use Thrive Leads for…

  • Creating your sidebar/footer signup forms
     
  • Creating signup popovers
     
  • Creating “watch this video!” popovers (you don’t have to have a signup form in these popovers… you can use them to do whatever you like!)
     
  • Creating exit pops on your article pages and your squeeze pages (Mark strongly recommends a “watch this video” exit pop on squeeze pages to catch the people who don’t feel like signing up.)
     
  • Adding a call to action at the bottom of your articles that scrolls into view when someone reaches the bottom. This could be a “sign up”, or it could be “read this next!” or “watch this video” — it’s up to you.)

 

Don’t use Thrive Leads for…

  • Creating your squeeze page, or adding the signup form into your squeeze page. That’s what Thrive Content Builder is for.

 

Frequently asked questions

Will Thrive work on my site?

The Thrive plugins are well-made, and claim that they will play nicely with any plugin that is equally well-made according to WordPress guidelines.

(But, they say, there are plenty of poorly-made plugins out there, and there’s always the risk that these plugins will cause problems.)

Usually if anything goes wrong with the plugin, it will simply be that the Thrive editor doesn’t load properly. That’ll just be annoying for you — it’s unlikely to affect your visitors or your site’s performance.

 

How do I update the plugins?

We will add the Thrive plugins to your site pre-activated and ready to go.

Because the plugin technically belongs to us, you won’t see the normal options for updating or deactivating the plugin on your site. That’s something that we have to do for you.

There will most likely be a slight delay between the time the new version comes out, and the time we can update it on your site. Hopefully this won’t be more than a couple of weeks. (We need to test that it’s not going to break things!)

 

How do I remove the plugins?

This is something that our technical team will need to do. You won’t have the option of disabling the plugin from within WordPress. Contact Affilorama Support and we’ll arrange that for you.

 

Do I have to use the plugins?

No. We’re just providing them as an option, because a lot of our members were looking for greater flexibility in creating their squeeze pages and signup forms.

If you don’t want to use the plugin, you can just leave it sitting there untouched. It won’t affect your site in any way. You’ll just notice a new button that says “edit with Thrive Content Builder” when you edit your pages or posts. You can just ignore this and edit your content as normal.

The AffiloTheme squeeze pages and signup forms will continue to work as normal, and are perfectly fine for building your AffiloJetpack website.  

 

Will it slow my site down?

Pages created with Thrive Architect tend to perform very well on page speed tests, but (like most things) it will depend on how you use it.

If you cram your page full of large images, videos, twenty different fonts, etc… then it might slow things down a little. Thrive can make this more likely because it’s simply so easy to add all these extra features.

So long as you don’t go completely overboard, you should be fine!

We haven’t noticed Thrive Leads having any impact on site performance either. If you notice significant issues with your site, and you think it comes from either of the Thrive plugins, please contact support.