A Guide to Newly Released WordPress Plugins

We’ve stepped into a new year and it’s a good time to take on new opportunities, try out new things and be ready for some great things to happen. WordPress has started to test out its new directory, which is great both in design and usability. It’s more organized, easy to navigate around and its search box works just good as never before.

There are currently over 48,300 plugin in the directory at the moment (48,311 to be precise), and I guess by the time I finish writing this post, there will be a couple of more. Everyday dozens of new plugins are added to the directory and, believe me, there are some great ones that are worth giving a shoutout. Being a WordPress nut I love to try and test out new plugins and usually end up making plugin roundups. Find below my recent roundup, which includes best newly released WordPress plugins.

MailChimp WD

The MailChimp WordPress plugin  provides an easy way to connect your site with Mailchimp, and gives you full control to manage your email lists and subscription forms. With its help you can create beautiful subscription forms with customized header area and custom fields,which include Paypal integration, custom select options, file upload field, pagebreak, survey tools and many more.You can place them anywhere on your site using scroll box, top bar, pop-up and embedded form form display options. The plugin allows you to show or hide specific fields on a form based on the selections your visitors make. The plugin is responsive and comes with limitless customization options, advanced emailing settings and organized submissions section.

AD Manager WD

The WordPress AD Manager plugin is a comprehensive tool to help you create, publish and manage various ads on your website. The plugin supports almost any type of code, such as HTML markup, Javascript or specific advertisement script (Google AdSense).It allows you to organize ads in groups and gives you three modes to publish them.You can inject the ads on any post, page or category, and place them before or after the content, or any specific paragraph you want. Also, you can automatize the process and set schedules for the plugin to publish the ads automatically on the date and time you specify. AD Manager WD is statistics integrated to give you information regarding clicks and impressions of your ads.

SecuPress

With SecuPress you can analyze and improve the security of your website.Once the plugin is installed you can scan your website security with its 4 point security check feature. It will give you a security report and autofix the found vulnerability issues. If there are any issues found that the plugin is not allowed to fix itself, you can fix them manually. It comes with a login control feature, which you can use to limit the number of login attempts, avoid double logins, and blacklist unauthorised users. The plugin also features an advanced firewall functionality which protects your website from bad crawler bots, malicious URLs, brute force attacks, and so on.

Widget Options

Widget Options is a complete widget management solution for websites built on WordPress. It gives you full control over the widgets on your site and allows you to assign different content to widgets on your sidebars and footer area. The plugin comes with extensive customization options which allow you to show/hide widgets on specific pages (posts, custom taxonomies, tags) and on mobile devices, set custom widget alignments, create predefined widget classes, and many more. Along with it, the plugin offers live customization, when you’re able to see all the made changes in real time.

To Top

To Top plugin enables you to add a highly customizable button to your website, which smoothly scrolls up to the top of the page  when somebody clicks on it. It makes it easy to navigate on long pages and provides a quick way to get back to the top of the page. The button icon, style and design are fully customizable, letting you to set icon image, background color, button shape, size and location. Also, you can hide the button on small devices.

WF Cookie Consent

WF Cookie consent is a responsive and easy to use plugin, which allows you to show how your website complies with EU Cookie law.It displays a clear message to your users and notifies them that the site uses cookies. The plugin comes with a myriad of settings to control the style and the content of your messages, and supports multi-language installations with different plugins.

AMP for WP

This plugin automatically ads accelerated mobile pages functionality to your website and makes it load faster for mobile users. The plugin comes with advanced functionality and supports Google tag manager, custom post types, star ratings,AdSense etc. It now has a custom AMP editor, which allows you adjust or change the content for any page or post just for AMP. You can switch on/off AMP support for specific pages or posts, show related content below the post, and many more things within the plugin admin area.

Amazon Associates Link Builder

Amazon Associates Link Builder is the official Amazon Associates Program plugin for WordPress.It enables you to search for products in the Amazon catalog right from your WordPress dashboard, and gives you real time price and availability information about them. You can easily insert product links into your posts, generate text links, create custom post units, and display them with widgets that the plugin comes with

This roundup contains great alternatives to already popular plugins which are very often high in price and difficult to figure out. Check these goodies out and feel free to leave a comment below after.