WordPress themes and plugins developed by Bulgarians — shared by Atanas Yonkov, a WordPress expert with many years of hands-on experience. He is the founder of digital agency Nasio Teams, which focuses on creating free and premium WordPress themes and providing consultancy services. We are once again delighted to have him contribute an expert perspective to our blog, this time with a focus on the Bulgarian contribution to the WordPress ecosystem.
We are glad that the WordPress community in Bulgaria is close-knit and constantly contributing to the WordPress platform. We hope this article proves useful and gives you a glimpse into some excellent work by Bulgarians. We pass the baton to Yonkov with gratitude and pleasure.
I have been working with WordPress since 2016, when two friends and I started a blog. I then began building sites professionally and turned towards WordPress theme development. Over the years, many platforms have appeared claiming they would dethrone WordPress as the most popular CMS for site creation. Yet WordPress remains the leading choice for building sites — for both small and large businesses worldwide. Examples include the White House website, The New York Times, NASA and even Beyoncé, all powered by WordPress. The reasons for its popularity are many: open source code that enables fast and easy knowledge-sharing, the freedom to choose where and under what conditions to host your site, and unlimited possibilities to choose from thousands of free and premium themes and plugins created by developers worldwide.
In this article we look at Bulgaria's own contribution to the theme and plugin ecosystem — additional software you can install on WordPress to quickly and easily create a beautiful and functional site without writing code.
Plugins by Bulgarian Developers
Plugins are an inseparable part of the WordPress ecosystem as they add extra functionality to your site. They make it easy to add things like optimisation, security, visual elements or an entire online store. Among the worldwide community of plugin authors are developers from Bulgaria. Here are some excellent plugins created by Bulgarians that offer quality and practical solutions.
All-in-One WP Migration and Backup
With an impressive 5 million active installations, All-in-One WP Migration and Backup is one of the most popular WordPress plugins in the world and the most popular WordPress plugin with active Bulgarian participation. Two of the founders are Bulgarian — developers Borislav Angelov and Yani Iliev. With this plugin you can quickly and easily move, copy or back up your site without any technical knowledge. It allows you to save a complete copy of your site — including pages, images and settings — and restore it later if something goes wrong. The plugin is often used when migrating a site to a new hosting provider, creating a backup or setting up a staging copy.
Bulgarisation for WooCommerce
Bulgarisation for WooCommerce is a plugin by Varna-based developer Tihomir Parushev. The plugin is an indispensable tool for online store owners in Bulgaria, as it significantly simplifies the integration of WooCommerce with Bulgarian legal requirements. Through it you can generate documents required by the National Revenue Agency (NRA) such as the audit file per Regulation N-18, invoices, credit notes for returned orders and more. Delivery methods via Speedy, Econt, Box Now and CVC are also included.
Minimal Share Buttons
Minimal Share Buttons is a plugin by popular WordPress developer and enthusiast Milen Petrinski — Gonzo. This plugin provides a convenient and proven way to increase user engagement on your site by giving visitors the ability to share posts quickly and easily. The plugin is extremely lightweight and does not burden the site, loading a minimal amount of code. It uses no external scripts, making it safe and GDPR-compliant. The buttons blend naturally into the site's design and can be added at various points in article content or templates.
Nasio Blocks
Nasio Blocks is a lightweight plugin by Atanas Yonkov that adds additional Gutenberg blocks missing from the WordPress block editor — including an article slider, content slider, expanding accordions, tabs, icons, charts, timers and more. The plugin also includes ready-to-use block patterns that you can copy directly to your site with a single click.
Simple Tour Guide
Simple Tour Guide provides an excellent way to introduce site visitors to your product or service by visually guiding them through the different elements of your site via a series of pop-up windows. The plugin provides an interactive user guide (tour guide) through which you can significantly improve user experience and increase conversions.
Bulgish Permalinks
Bulgish Permalinks is written by developer Boyan Raychev. This plugin automatically converts Bulgarian letters in URLs and file names to Latin characters, according to the official transliteration rules. Converting non-ASCII characters in URLs is good practice as it makes them more readable and is considered beneficial for SEO. Note that the plugin has not been updated for some time, but continues to work without issues on the latest version of WordPress.
Simple WebP Converter
Simple WebP Converter by Krasimir Ignatov is a lightweight WordPress plugin that automatically optimises your site's images by converting them to the modern WebP format. This reduces file sizes and speeds up page loading without any visible loss of quality. The plugin works fully automatically when images are uploaded and requires no technical skills.
Themes by Bulgarian Developers
Themes in WordPress determine the appearance and layout of the site — design, colours, fonts and page structure. Thanks to thousands of free and premium themes created by developers and agencies worldwide, WordPress users can build professional sites quickly and easily without spending time designing from scratch or writing code.
WPXpress
WPXpress is a free multipurpose theme by Tsvetomir Tsvetanov, who holds the record for the most approved themes in the WordPress repository with over 50 published themes. WPXpress is a modern and intuitive theme combining speed, functionality and impressive design. It is suitable for all types of sites — blogs, business cards, corporate pages and WooCommerce online stores — offering a variety of templates and easy customisation. The theme is mobile-optimised and SEO-friendly.
AllX
With AllX you can build almost any type of site — from business pages and blogs to online stores and media platforms. It is optimised for fast loading and efficient resource use. With impressive animations, AllX gives you full freedom to build a site that reflects your ideas and goals.
Unax
Unax is a starter free theme by Atanas Antonov. The theme is extremely lightweight and designed to be easily modified in order to recreate different designs from low to high complexity. No unnecessary CSS and JS to get in your way — only core WordPress functions to build upon as you see fit. An excellent tool for any WordPress developer.
Brikk
Brikk is a theme by experienced developer Ivaylo Zahariev. Serious effort, talent, time and thought have gone into providing the best possible user experience without requiring additional code. The theme is suitable for businesses that need a publishing system for various types of listings and reservations — restaurants, accommodation, events, job listings, rentals and other services. It gives you the technical capability to create platforms on the scale of Airbnb or OLX without requiring any technical knowledge.
Heilz
Heilz is a powerful WordPress theme for digital products, listings and marketplace platforms, fully compatible with WooCommerce. It enables the creation of online platforms for sharing and selling files such as photos, videos, music, software, themes, eBooks and more, with various monetisation models. Thanks to its flexible modular system and drag-and-drop interface, Heilz is suitable for both beginners and advanced users who want a fast and reliable online platform optimised for SEO.
Pliska
Pliska is a modern and flexible WordPress theme by Atanas Yonkov. The theme is suitable for blogs, article directory sites, business cards, corporate websites and online stores. It offers ready-made demo content in the form of block layouts (patterns) for a quick and easy start. The theme loads very fast, is accessible and SEO-optimised, and works flawlessly on all devices. It supports light/dark mode, different templates and full compatibility with Gutenberg, WooCommerce and all popular builders.
Prespa
Prespa is a lightweight and fast WordPress theme suitable for blogs, business sites, digital agencies, online stores and various corporate projects. Built with a focus on speed, it uses only core WordPress functions, clean HTML5 and CSS3-based templates and no unnecessary libraries. With the ready-made block patterns included with the theme you can create a functional and beautiful site without additional plugins or page builders — though if you prefer to use them, there is no problem. The theme is fully compatible with most popular builders and guarantees seamless WooCommerce integration. Like Pliska, it supports dark and light modes that visitors can choose when browsing the site.
Conclusion
Thank you to the readers who stayed with me to the end. I hope the information provided about WordPress themes and plugins developed by Bulgarians has been useful. I am glad that the WordPress community in Bulgaria is contributing more and more to the development of the WordPress platform. I also thank Jump.BG for inviting me to share my expert perspective on this topic.
