10 Essential WordPress Plugins for Online Businesses
WordPress plugins are handy little things – they allow you to completely customise the functionality of your site, providing a multitude of website adaptations and enhancements to help make building and running a website easier and more successful.
From integrating social media channels, filtering comments and booking appointments, to compressing images, checking for broken links and building contact forms – you name it – there’s probably a plugin out there that can do it (or can help you do it).
But with a daunting 54,327 WordPress plugins available, it can be difficult to know which ones you really need.
Here we have devised a list of 10 essential WordPress plugins for online businesses:
Sharing your location on a map view makes it super easy for your website visitors to see where you are, without having to open up another tab to Google it.
This plugin allows you to customise Google maps for your website using the simple builder feature. You can add unlimited markers and locations to your map, choose the size of your map and even customise the theme of your map.
As well as making it easier for you customers or potential customers, they look professional, too.
Having a live chat system on your website is a great way for customers and potential customers to get in touch with you and receive responses in real time. A live chat system enables you to speak to more than one person at a time, speeds up your support system and also allows you to respond to enquiries in quickly – all while automatically saving a transcript for your convenience (and security).
LiveChat is the most popular WordPress chat plugin which includes features such as; unlimited simultaneous live chats, automatic live chat popup for site visitors and customisable offline message forms. And… its free.
Yoast SEO is the number 1 SEO WordPress plugin and one of the most popular WordPress plugins there is. Yoast SEO helps you optimise your website and make it as SEO-friendly as possible, using a traffic light system to score your content.
By installing Yoast SEO, you can avoid duplicate content on your site, optimise your content with keywords, discover internal linking opportunities as you write and check the readability of your content – knowing that your site is optimised for the most recent Google algorithm.
After the introduction of GDPR hitting everyone’s subscriber lists hard, it’s more important now than ever to focus on building and nurturing our email marketing lists.
You can use OptinMonster to help grow your subscriber list by using their collection of prebuilt form templates to create your own subscriber popup forms, exit intent forms, subscriber forms and so much more.
WooCommerce is the official e-commerce plugin for WordPress and is designed to integrate seamlessly with WordPress and make managing an online store simple and easy.
With WooCommerce you can list products on your online, manage shipping options and take payments from major credit/debit cards, PayPal and BACS.
This simple plugin allows you to easily insert code such as Google Analytics code, HTML and custom CSS into header and footers without editing your theme files. Adding Google Analytics tracking codes into your headers and footers allows you to accurately track traffic data on your site.
Using a caching plugin on your website is one of the easiest and most efficient ways of speeding up your website. A caching plugin like WP Super Cache improves the performance of your server by generating static HTML pages of your site and saving them on your server. When a visitor tries to access your site, the caching plugin will deliver the smaller HTML pages (faster loading) over the larger WordPress PHP scripts (slower loading).
Contact forms are a must for any business website. They are a simple and easy way for potential customers to connect with you, ask questions and send messages and also a great way to help you get feedback from customers.
WPForms enables you to easily create any type of form you require for your website including subscription forms, contact forms, and feedback forms. It also features a library of predesigned form templates to make building the perfect form into your website, even quicker.
MonsterInsights is the number 1 Google Analytics plugin there is.
This clever little plugin allows you to see useful information about your website visitors such as where they came from, how they found your site, what they are clicking on once they enter your site and where they go next.
You can use these insights to improve your website and create new strategies for driving sales and growing your business.
This plugin allows you to see your Google Analytics traffic within your WordPress Dashboard.
Information changes all the time, and so will your site. At some point, you will more than likely find yourself removing pages for one reason or another. If you just remove a page and a customer tries to access it, they will receive an error message which isn’t great for their user experience or your SEO. So, to avoid this issue you will need to set up a permanent redirection to an alternative URL (a 301 redirect).
With Redirection you can easily set up and manage redirects for redundant URL’s within your WordPress site. It also offers additional features such as tracking 404 errors that occur on your site so you can work on fixing them.
Bonus
Although not a plugin, rather a browser extension; Grammarly integrates with WordPress, and works by checking for spelling, grammar and readability issues within your content – before you publish it. Essential for all, even the spelling and grammar experts amongst us!
Do you need help setting up a new website? Want to give your current website a facelift? Contact us today to see how we can help.
Square Media is Northamptonshire’s premiere Web Design & Marketing Agency experienced in developing effective content and marketing strategies for forward-thinking companies in the local area. Our team of specialists consistently deliver outstanding results working in a variety of areas such as Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media Marketing Consultancy, Pay Per Click (PPC) and AdWords Management amongst a wide range of other services.
