As bloggers, we spend a lot of time working on a range of different tasks. This includes things like checking stats, monitoring ad revenue, and interacting on social media.
That leaves us with a lot of sites to log into. But by adding a few WordPress plugins, you can pull some of this data back into the WordPress dashboard, which saves you time by giving a quick snapshot overview of everything.
Analytics 360
Analytics 360 brings Google Analytics and Mailchimp (Newsletter service) data together, and displays them on a subpage under the WordPress dashboard. This helps in accessing analytics tools like visualizing site traffic and managing mailing lists easier even without leaving WordPress.
A Google Analytics account is required, but you do not need to be a Mailchimp user.
My Gmail
My Gmail is another simple dashboard plugin which displays all the unread mails from your Gmail account without any need to load Gmail.
However, this plugin works only over HTTPS, so you will need to have purchased an SSL certificate.
Full Comments on Dashboard
The Recent Comments Box in WordPress facilitates managing and replying to comments easily, but it just shows the comment excerpt and the user has to load another page to view the full comment.
This limitation can be overcome with the Full Comments on Dashboard plugin. It extends the default widget to show the full comment, allowing you to reply properly.
Full Comments on Dashboard Download.
Google Adsense Summary
This is another important plugin which lets the user to check Adsense earnings for a stipulated time. After the successful installation of the plugin, the user should enter his username and password in the settings page and the earnings from his/her account are displayed anytime.
Google Adsense Summary Download.
Feedburner Stats
Feed Stats is a simple statistical tool for viewing and managing FeedBurner statistics. Under the Dashboard, you will find a “Feed Stats” link with graphs based on your recent FeedBurner data.
The plugin displays your FeedBurner statistics for things like subscribers on your blog, which the feed readers are being used, and which of the posts are most popular with subscribers.
Twitter Tools
The Twitter Tools plugin makes it easy for the WordPress user to manage his Twitter posts. This plugin helps to Tweet directly from the dashboard itself without opening another browser tab.
Using this plugin, the user can automatically Tweet about new posts, create a collection of his Tweets and publish on the users blogs, Tweet from any page on the blog, etc.
Plugin Central
Finally, Plugin Central is a plugin for managing all other plugins for WordPress. This lets you easily install plugins by naming them, or linking to a zip folder, as well as adding multiple plugins at once, and updating all of your existing plugins directly from the dashboard.
And that concludes our list. Not all of these plugins will be for you, but if you spend a lot of time on some of the services above, then give it a go and see if it saves you some time!
If you need more ideas, check out the dashboard tag on the WP.org Plugin Directory.
If you have any other suggestions for great dashboard plugins, let me know in the comments!
[plinker]
