WordPress has taken the blogosphere to a completely new level. We’ve come a long way from the point we had to build our websites from scratch. With WordPress we get an amazingly flexible content management platform which we can enhance and customize to the extent we need.
WordPress directory is updated with new plugins on a daily basis and gives us tons of plugin options to choose from.In this post I want to drive your attention to the some of the latest plugins added to the directory, which I found really great and efficient.They offer good quality, awesome functionality and are easy to use. Here are 8 of them.
Google Analytics WD
Google Analytics WD is a new, yet one of the most feature-packed, user-friendly and efficient plugins I’ve tested so far. It allows you to access all of your Google Analytics reports from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard, and also lets you create and get custom reports on the metrics and dimensions that GA doesn’t automatically track. The WordPress Google Analytics plugin gives you comprehensive reports on your website audience and overall performance, as well as Ecommerce sales stats and reports on your AdSense and AdWords accounts. Apart from it, you can set and manage goals for tracking targeted activities, and track data for custom dimensions. Google Analytics comes with advanced data filtering functionality, front-end reports, alerts and Pushover notifications, and other great features to help you get the most out of your site statistics.
WordPress Google Maps
Google Map WD is another new addition to the WordPress directory, which is distinguished with its intuitive backend,powerful functionality and wide customization options. WIth its help you can create unlimited responsive Google maps with custom everything, and add them to your site using shortcodes. It comes with all the essential Google map styles and controls, layers and overlays, store locator, user geolocation, and several unique map themes and skins, which you can’t find in any other plugin. The plugin also offers “get directions” functionality which your blog visitors can use to get walking, driving, bicycling and transit routes to the locations they want. The WordPress Google Maps has a built-in icon maker, which lets you create custom icons with preferred colors, images, animations, text, etc.
Facebook Feed
With Facebook Feed WD plugin you can bring multiple page/public group/profile feeds to your website with some additional styling options and control over the displayed content. You can display photos, events, albums, and other content from the feeds and choose the feed update interval, content length, number of the posts displayed, user roles and the view options. The best thing about it is that if you don’t want to display the whole content of the feed in your post, you can select only specific content types, such as photos, videos, albums and events. There are different view options for each content type which are fully customizable. The Facebook Feed plugin features a powerful lightbox , where you can display media content using filmstrip, show comments and social share buttons, number of likes, descriptions, etc.
Social Warfare
Social Warfare adds beautiful, super fast and highly customizable share buttons to your blog and helps you drive more traffic to it. The plugin supports top social networks and comes with a number of placement options, allowing you to place the buttons above or below the content,
both above and below the post content, and anywhere else manually. It also supports floating buttons types, which keep following your readers as they scroll up and down your blog.It’s analytics integrated and allows you to display your most shared posts with a widget on the sidebars of your blog.
GoDaddy Email Marketing
Although new to the directory, GoDaddy Email Marketing plugin has gained over 80.000 active downloads. The reason behind such a popularity is that it makes super easy to build an email list and get more subscribers. It enables you to add highly customizable sign up forms to your blog and display them using a widget. The plugin features powerful tracking functionality, which shows how many of your emails get clicked on, opened or shared.
Head and Footer Scripts Inserter
Another awesome plugin that enables you to insert custom HTML, JavaScript, and CSS scripts in the head or/and footer sections of your website.You don’t have to touch any files of your theme. The plugin adds the scripts to the header/footer section of your site automatically, as you add the scripts to the relevant field in the plugin’s page.The scripts keep working even after your theme has been updated. Also, the plugin makes it easy to verify third party tools and allows you to use Google Webmaster tools, Alexa, Pinterest and Google+ services on your blog.
Coming Soon
This plugin is a great choice for the blogs and websites that are not yet fully launched or are under construction. The plugin is super simple to setup and customize, which helps you create responsive coming soon pages in just a couple of minutes. It allows you to change the page’s background image, add css3 animations to the page, display contact info and buttons to your social profiles, and display a countdown to the launch of your blog. All the customization is done with the live preview, so that you can instantly see the changes and adjustments you make to the page.
WP Speed of Light
WP Speed of Light is an advanced plugin which optimizes your site’s speed through caching, gzip compression, database optimization, and other technical tools. It takes care of your blog’s loading time, cleans up your database system, tests of your pages, and plugins or themes that require more attention. The plugin also includes a speed loading test and compare, to make sure your website loads fast and provides better user experience for your visitors.
This short list includes some of the newly released WordPress plugins which are distinguished with quality and advanced features. Although new, they already have a number of considerable downloads, reviews and active installs. They are good alternatives for popular plugins and are definitely worth giving a try.
Author
Gayane Mar is the founder of WPCapitan.com, a WordPress enthusiast and blogger. She is a contributing author to a plenty of well-known WordPress related blogs and enjoys sharing her experience to help people with WordPress.
