15 Best WordPress Plugins from 2014
“One thing about open source is that even the failures contribute to the next thing that comes up. Unlike a company that could spend a million dollars in two years and fail and there’s nothing really to show for it, if you spend a million dollars on open source, you probably have something amazing that other people can build on.” – Matt Mullenweg
WordPress is an absolutely fantastic interface to build your website on. It provides mind boggling freedoms in terms of what you can do with your website, thanks to all its community generated plugins, allowing you to virtually do whatever you want with it.
With nearly 31 thousand plugins to choose from, sifting through the lot of them to find the right ones for you can be a real hassle. Also, at that number of plugins, quality assurance is nigh impossible.
To make your life a little bit easier, we have decided to put together a list of some of the best WordPress plugins that came out this year. Put your seat-belt on, and enjoy the ride.
1. Secondary Title
Plugin names are not really the place where you want to be abstract or creative, so this plugin’s name should give you a pretty good clue as to what it does. It allows you to add alternative titles to your posts, basically allowing you to write longer titles, without them being aesthetically unappealing.
You will still need to be concise, but it’s a nifty little trick you can use to add commentary to your titles.
2. Bump This
The internet is not a passive billboard. Your website’s success fully relies on positive feedback from users, and this is one way of encouraging feedback, as well as interaction. Bump This is a plugin that lets you add a button to all your posts, that users can click on if they liked what they’ve read and/or seen.
After a given number of clicks, the post is bumped to the top of the page, making it easy to create “hot posts”, and making sure that new users get to see the best you have on offer. Any thing posted after the “hot post” is bumped up still gets top position, so you don’t alienate frequent users.
3. Style Buddy
Finding the right theme is especially hard if you don’t want to modify the entirety of your website. Style Buddy adds metaboxes to every WordPress custom post type, letting you add custom JavaScript and CSS only to the items you want them added on.
4. Video Capture
Websites need gimmicks to stand out. Good content is a must, of course, but the beauty of the web is in the fact that it is easy (or at least easier) to find good content. But to really make people talk about your website, you need to give them something to remember.
Video Capture is a really cool plugins that lets you place a “Record” button anywhere on your website. This button activates the user’s web camera or mobile camera, and that’s where your imagination should kick in. You could use it, as the makers of the plugins suggest, to allow users to leave testimonials, reviews, or comments on you posts, rather than the more common written comment.
5. Better Email Validation
Like we said, plugin names tend to be pretty direct. Better Email Validation’s function is to provide you with better email validation, so that you can make sure that your users are, if not human, at least well designed spam bots.
6. LeadIn
“Business isn’t business unless it’s personal”, the plugin’s description reads. Knowing your users is paramount when marketing to them, and LeadIn let’s you know just that. Once a users fills out a form on your website, a cookie will track the user, and send you information like what pages they visit, what social networks their on etc., so that you will better understand your target audience.
7. Project Manager TPC
Running an organized operation is key to the operation’s success. Project Manager TPC offers some really great tools to manage a project. This essentially allows you to build a Bandcamp-like website, with by-task privacy settings, email notifications, and task-sorting widgets.
8. Gmail Comment Approval
Ever thought to yourself “Man, it sure would be great if I could just approve all these comments from my Gmail inbox.” Well, daydream no more. Here’s a plugin just for that.
9. Admin Bar Button
Tackling aesthetics more than anything, this plugin doesn’t so much solve a problem, as it just improves your user experience as an admin. Rather than having the Admin Bar always stretched out on top, you’ll just have a little button in the corner, that stretches into the Admin Bar once you hover over it.
10. Flaunt Your Clients – Free
The more important clients you get, the more coveted you are as a professional. One way of letting people know what high-profile clients you have is stating it in your “About Me” section, another way you can do it is by creating a Client Hub that contains reviews, Love Stories and related posts from your clients.
11. Article Directory Redux
Putting it simply, you can create a category-based directory for all your posts, and bypass the admin interface when wanting to post.
12. Google Web Fonts Customizer (GWFC)
Fonts are really important to the overall look of a website. It’s a real shame whenever you find that perfect theme, only to find out that the fonts just aren’t right. GWFC integrates the WordPress Customizer with Google Web Fonts, so that you can pick the right typography for your website.
13. Disable User
If you are managing a community on a WordPress platform, than you know that sometimes tensions arise, and it is because of these tensions that users get their accounts deleted. Now, loosing users is not in your interest, so temporary bans might just be the perfect solution to discourage unwanted behavior, without loosing the people that are doing the behaving.
14. Meet My Team
If your website is not, strictly speaking, your thing, but rather a team effort, than giving everyone proper credits is the nice, honest and polite thing to do. Meet My Team is a cute little plugin that allows you to properly introduce your team, without having to create extra pages for it, by creating a grid with a modal.
15. tinyfier-wp
The faster a website runs, the better the user experience. It’s always worth trying to make your website run quicker and smoother, and tinyfier-wp this year’s selected helper. It boasts using intelligent asset analysis, so as not to break the initial load order.
That concludes our list of the best WordPress plugins for 2014. We hope you enjoyed our list, and that you’ve found the items on it useful. Be sure to leave us your thoughts, in the comment section below.
Learning approach.
I like this very much.