Envato releases official WordPress plugin

Envato’s latest entry into the world of WordPress was announced today, with the release of version 1.0 of the Envato Elements WordPress plugin.

The plugin, which has been in beta since August, already boasts over 50,000 active installs, many from first-time Envato users.

While the company has been a long-standing contributor to the WordPress community through its market-leading ThemeForest and CodeCanyon marketplaces, this is the first time Envato has built its own plugin in-house.

The plugin provides users with more than 2,000 free templates drawn from the company’s global creative web design community and covering a full range of niche interest areas, from restaurants and small businesses to creative portfolios.

The plugin also provides access to 670,000+ high-quality stock photos for Envato Elements subscribers, allowing them to easily browse, import and license photos directly into their websites without having to leave the WordPress dashboard.

With a one-click import system and support for both Elementor and Beaver Builder, Product Manager Aaron Rutley said the plugin team wanted to make the process of building a beautiful website with WordPress, as simple as possible.

“Page builders for WordPress are getting better and better, but websites need creative design and images to really shine. That’s where Envato, and our community of creatives, can really add value.”

“Until now, Envato was a collection of websites you went to, to buy and download creative assets. Now, you add the plugin to your WordPress install, and you can keep your site visually updated without ever leaving your dashboard,” said Rutley.

“From a technical point of view, we’re very proud of initial integration we’ve been able to engineer with the WordPress Core Media library and the Envato Elements Photo Library. It’s definitely a challenge to integrate the two, but we’ve had positive feedback on our efforts so far and we’ll continue to refine and improve our offering from here.”

The initial beta launch taught the team a lot about what the web design community expects out of such a product, said Rutley.

“The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive so far, with a 4.9 out of 5 rating on the WordPress plugin directory. We’ve seen a lot of demand for Elementor and other page builders over the last 12 months or more, and we have been keen to continue to explore this space.”

“We know our author community is awesome at content – we’ve got more than 2,000 templates already part of the plugin – so our focus has been on finding new ways to help website creators in their quest to get their projects from an idea to ‘done’ as quickly as possible.”