The 10 Best Free and Premium Plugins for WordPress in 2012

Best Plugins for WordPress in 2012

WordPress is an amazing content management system which is only getting more powerful as more people are using it as their content management system.  

As mentioned in the annual WordPress “State of the Word“, WordPress data says that 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, and 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.  This means that developers are being pushed to make amazing plugins to please the millions of WordPress users around the world.  While plugins are great for helping you achieve nearly anything on your website, some plugins are simply MUST HAVES on nearly any WordPress blog.  Here are some of my favorite.

 

SEO WordPress Plugins for 2012

WordPress SEO by Yoast

An absolute must have for any WordPress blog. Ever since blogging in WordPress, I’ve used to use the All in One SEO Pack. This has been considered to be the best plugin for SEO purposes that can be installed. However, recently I’ve switched to the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin, which is more advanced.

Here are the main advantages of this plugin (from the Yoast site):

• Post titles and meta descriptions
• Robots Meta configuration
• Canonical
• Breadcrumbs
• Permalink clean up
• XML Sitemaps
• RSS enhancements
• Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
• Clean up head section

FREE PLUGIN – VISIT LINK

Scribe SEO

Scribe SEO is a powerful SEO plugin for WordPress. It has been developed by Brain Clarke (www.copyblogger.com). Most WordPress SEO plugins are highly technical and tedious to operate. Scribe on the other hand has been specifically developed keeping non-programmers in mind.

Scribe SEO follows a simple three point formula to improve optimization and make your site more attractive to search engines. It automatically suggests relevant keywords, modifies your content to make it more SEO-friendly and lastly, it helps you generate a lot of back-links which draw traffic to your site.

PREMIUM PLUGIN – VISIT LINK | Scribe Makes SEO Simple

Google Analytics Dashboard

The Google Analytics Dashboard plugin for WordPress gives you access to your Google Analytics data directly inside your WordPress blog. You can also allow other users to see the entire dashboard while they are logged in or include just parts of the data in posts, as a widget or as part of your theme. Goal tracking is also available.

FREE PLUGIN – VISIT LINK

Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics may be able to do more for your WordPress blog than you think.  Did you know that Google Analytics and track which categories are the most popular for you?  It will also track any out-going events making it easy to analyze your affiliate marketing data.  This WordPress plugin will make it easy for you to customize your Google Analytics stats based on your own personal WordPress blog.  This really is an exciting plugin…also made by Yoast.

FREE PLUGIN – VISIT LINK

301 Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

FREE PLUGIN – VISIT LINK

 

Conversion and Lead Generation Plugins for 2012

Formidable and Formidable Pro

Formidable Pro is installed as a plugin to the WordPress content management system. Once activated, it adds several options to the WordPress dashboard. Forms are added easily with a few clicks by the designer. Theses can be used instantly as standalone pages or bound into existing pages with surprisingly little effort – and no programming. These facts make it perhaps the best WordPress plugin available today.

FORMIDABLE PRO allow you to save your entries into the WordPress database, but now it gives you an incredible platform in your WordPress admin to view the results from the entries.  Even better, it allows you to save the content to a CSV file directly from your WordPress admin.  Digging deeper, we found that not only would it save it to the database, and featured an easy way to save entries, but it also provided beautiful reports and charts based on the information entered.

View our recent post on the Formidable Plugin here.

PREMIUM PLUGIN – VISIT LINK

Max Landing by Max Foundry

Quickly create great-looking landing pages proven to increase website traffic, conversion rates, and sales. The 12 landing page templates in this plugin will save you hours, days, even weeks of time. No HTML required, just select options and fill in the blanks.

Max Foundry’s WordPress landing page templates were designed to get the most bang for your buck in terms of conversion rates. Each landing page template is highly customizable – fonts, sizes, colors, styles – it’s all there, and easy to use. There are 9 different backgrounds for the call-to-action button, the 6 most web-friendly fonts, over 30 font sizes, and an unlimited number of colors to choose from, just to name a few customizable options.

PREMIUM PLUGIN – VISIT LINK

Lightbox Evolution

Lightbox Evolution is a tool for displaying images, html content, maps, and videos in a “lightbox” style that floats overtop of web page. This is our favorite lightbox plugin that we have found for WordPress.  It comes with 6 different themes, as well as settings that allow you to automatically add the lightbox effect to all images and videos.  If you choose you can also set Lightbox Evolution to group all images from the same page or post into the same lightbox.

PREMIUM PLUGIN – VISIT LINK | FREE DEMO

White Label CMS

This is a great plugin that allows you to really customize your WordPress admin panel. There are clients who might be a bit confused by having the WordPress branding and news everywhere , and this excellent plugin lets you transform WordPress into a client-branded CMS. It’s very simple to use and set up and will make your clients very happy.

FREE PLUGIN – VISIT LINK

TinyMCE Advanced

Looking for ways to beautify your WordPress pages and posts but not knowledgeable with HTML or JavaScript codes?  Then definitely there’s a plugin that can help you.  TinyMCE Advanced is a perfect plugin that could let you edit designs through a WYSIWYG editor to complement your blog’s whole layout.

FREE PLUGIN – VISIT LINK