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Today is June 21, 2026.
It’s Father’s Day. It’s Go Skateboarding Day. And as of right now, the C7 Plugin Store is officially open for business.
I’ll be honest with you. This launch date wasn’t originally on a calendar. It crystallized over the last few weeks as the stars started lining up in a way that felt less like coincidence and more like a signal. My dad, passed away about six weeks ago. He was the guy who taught me that if you were going to build something, you built it right. No shortcuts. No halfway. Do it properly or don’t bother. He never wrote a line of code in his life, but he is woven into every line of code I’ve ever shipped. Today felt like the right day to put something real into the world in his memory.
And then it turned out to also be Go Skateboarding Day, which (if you know anything about me and what skating has meant to my life for the last 30-plus years) means today is legitimately one of the better days on the calendar. So. Father’s Day. Go Skateboarding Day. Store launch. We’re doing this.
What we actually built
The short version: twenty-one plugins, one theme, one unified platform, zero excuses.
The longer version follows. Get a coffee.
C7 LaunchPad: the theme that runs the whole show
LaunchPad is the center of gravity for everything we’re launching today. It’s a WordPress theme, yes, but calling it “just a theme” is like calling a Swiss Army knife “just a knife.” It’s a page builder, a suite control panel, and a design system all in one.
Twenty-two pre-built layout sections ship out of the box: hero sections, galleries, accordions, pricing tables, timelines, testimonials, a before/after slider, and more. You pick the pieces, drop them in, and your page is built. No coding required.
Here’s the thing about LaunchPad that I’m proudest of: your content stays portable. Most page builders store your content in their own proprietary format, which means if you ever want to leave, your site comes with them. LaunchPad stores everything in plain WordPress fields. Your content is yours. Full stop.
It also ships with a verified accessibility audit baked in. Grade A, 95 score, zero errors. Name me another theme that ships that. I’ll wait.
The suite dashboard is called Mission Control, and it’s the thing I’d hand over as the pitch to any agency or developer evaluating this stack. Every C7 plugin plugs into it. One settings home. One place to manage licenses. One-click setup across the entire suite. That coherence, that “one back end for everything” feeling, is something no single competitor can match because they’re all single products.
The hero plugins worth knowing right now
With twenty-one plugins launching today, I’m not going to exhaustively describe all of them here. But a few deserve a proper spotlight.
C7 AI Chat Bot
A chatbot that lives on your server, learns your actual site content, and answers visitors in any language. No per-conversation fees. No sending your customer data to a third-party platform. You train it on your own content, it answers on your behalf, and when it can’t handle something it hands off to a real human. It even talks out loud if you want it to.
Tools like Intercom charge you every time the bot resolves a conversation. This doesn’t. Your conversations, your customers, your data.
C7 Analytics
Website analytics that live on your own server, not Google’s. You get the full picture: which pages people visit, where they came from, what they clicked, how far they scrolled, and where they dropped off. The heatmaps and session recordings live on your server too, which is something the big analytics tools literally cannot offer.
There’s also a one-click “why isn’t my tracking working?” button, which sounds minor and has saved me from more late-night debugging sessions than I care to admit.
C7 Forms
Every form builder promises power. This one also passes its accessibility and performance audits with top marks, and the full anti-spam toolkit (multiple layers of bot protection) is free. Most competitors charge extra for that. Conversational mode lets you ask one question at a time instead of dumping a wall of fields on someone, and save-and-continue means you can actually see who got halfway through and bailed.
C7 Site Hider
If you’ve ever needed to hide a site while it’s under construction, you’ve probably grabbed one of the popular “coming soon” plugins and been mildly disappointed. Most of them are glorified splash pages. Site Hider actually locks the whole site down properly, handles search engine crawlers correctly so you don’t tank your rankings, and comes with ten different landing page styles, magic access links you can send to clients, and role-based controls for who sees what. It’s the thing this category always should have been.
The rest of the suite: the quick tour
C7 Blog: 22 different ways to display your blog, including full-page storytelling layouts with scroll effects. It actually changes how your whole blog looks, not just one widget on a page.
C7 Events: A full events calendar with 20 display layouts, recurring events, ticketing, attendee check-in, and map views, all without bolting on $120 worth of add-ons.
C7 Locations: Manage multiple locations and show them on a map. Uses free mapping by default, so you’re not racking up Maps bills the moment someone opens your store locator. But it does tie into Google Maps and Map Box nicely
C7 Portfolio: A portfolio plugin built for design firms. Not a photo gallery with a coat of paint on it. Real case-study layouts, client testimonials per project, and 20 ways to display your work.
C7 Products: A product catalogue with 20 layouts, product variations, and an optional add-to-cart, all without needing WooCommerce.
C7 Search: Instant search results as you type, with nine different display styles including a Spotlight-style pop-up. Default WordPress search is genuinely terrible. This isn’t.
C7 Popup: Show the right message at the right moment. Exit intent, scroll triggers, geo-targeting, A/B testing, all without usage limits.
C7 Customers: A simple CRM that builds itself. Every time someone fills out a form, places an order, or signs up on your site, a customer record is created automatically. Includes a free client-facing portal where customers can view their own info.
C7 Checkout: A full online store without the WooCommerce complexity. Canadian tax handling built in for all 13 provinces. Supports Stripe, PayPal, Moneris, and Elavon. Subscriptions, returns, digital downloads, wishlists: one product, not five.
C7 Page Tree: See your entire site’s page structure laid out like an org chart, then drag pages around to reorganize them. Sounds simple, saves you a stupid amount of time.
C7 Site Health: Monitors your site around the clock for downtime, broken links, security issues, and more. Scans for accessibility problems. Watches your contact forms to make sure they’re actually sending. Tells you about problems before your clients do.
C7 Image Editor: Crop images to exactly the right size for every spot on your site, with a live preview showing you what each crop will look like before you save. WordPress crops everything from the dead center by default, which is why every team photo ends up cutting off someone’s head. This fixes that.
C7 Mailer: Makes sure the emails your site sends actually arrive. Connects to your Gmail, Microsoft 365, or any mail service, keeps a full log of everything sent, and has a backup sender ready to go if the first one fails. WordPress email is broken out of the box. This is the fix.
C7 Help: A built-in help center inside your WordPress dashboard. It knows which C7 plugins you have installed and only shows you relevant guidance. No hunting through docs sites trying to find the one article that applies to you.
C7 Message Board: A proper community forum for your site. Q&A boards, threaded discussions, membership-gated sections. The stuff that normally requires stitching together multiple expensive plugins.
C7 Backup: Scheduled backups of your whole site, stored somewhere off your server, with a restore process that actually works. A real free tier that doesn’t expire. No subscription standing between you and your own backup files.
Today the store is open. Dad, this one’s for you. To everyone else, stay tuned as there is much more in store… and yes that is a pun 🙂
Now go ride your skateboard!
Simon
