Best WordPress Plugins For A Business Website
The modern online business site is not just a series of a few pages that present the company. It is really important to build communities around business websites and the firm has to build online authorship in the niche. That is only possible when a proper plan exists and when the site is built in an appropriate way.
The great thing about using WordPress is that even the smaller businesses can use the CMS in order to create something that is much better than anticipated with a minor HTML or PHP knowledge. The addition of plugins makes the entire process a lot easier to manage and the quality of the business site a lot higher.
If you currently want to start a business website with the use of WordPress or you create a company presence, various plugins have to be considered in order to help with both administration and management while creating a presence that will be much more appreciated by visitors.
Every single one of the plugins mentioned below are going to help you to transform the site from a simple presence to the online corporate website you want to have. While it is obvious that you might not agree with some of the choices since there is a level of subjectivity that is involved but even so, this is a great place to start.
SEO WordPress Plugins
No matter what some people claim, SEO is vital for the success of any website out there. It does not matter if the site is a personal blog or a corporate website. Organic visitors are particularly valuable and every single site has to target a set of some main keywords at a per page basis. Besides this, there is a need to add synonyms, related phrases and words as alternate text so that better SEO exposure appears. Site structure is also a part of SEO so that also has to be taken into account.
Some of the best SEO WordPress plugins that business websites should consider using include the following:
WordPress SEO by Yoast
Out of all the SEO plugins that are available at the moment, this is the one that is the most downloaded and respected in the SEO industry. That is because the plugin is really smart and offers one of the best on page analysis feature available at the moment. You can so easily use it in order to add the necessary custom meta data together with the keyword tags.
Besides the great features mentioned, many others can be used in order to enhance the SEO presence of a business website. For instance, it is possible to add the no follow tag whenever desired and you can control various different custom post types that you would create.
WordPress SEO by Yoast does have the social media features that are needed in the modern optimization environment and the automation available with most of the customization is something that the SEO beginner is going to appreciate. This is one of the SEO plugins that are really easy to use. Such a fact is highly important for most website owners that want to use WordPress and want to have a good SEO presence.
Simple Sitemap
Based on the Google webmaster suggestions, every single website out there should have a sitemap and submit it to the Google Webmaster Tools section. The problem is that creating such a sitemap is difficult without programming knowledge. It is really important that you do not neglect this part of your site. Submitting a sitemap means that all your content is automatically monitored by Google. At the same time, when you make site changes, the search engine giant will know about it.
There are various plugins that are available and even WordPress SEO by Yoast can create a great sitemap but if you want a standalone plugin for this purpose, Simple Sitemap is the one you want to use. The plugin is going to do all that it has to in a very simple way. The XML sitemaps created are suitable and the plugin is incredibly easy-to-use. All that you have to do is to install it and then add the sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.
Business Oriented WordPress Plugins
It is important that you add some features to a business website. This is what the following WordPress plugins help you out with. Remember that a business website requires increased functionality, with a focus on making sales in one way or another. There are various differences that can be mentioned when comparing business sites with other types of sites but it is a certainty that the following plugins can help take the business site to the next level.
Contact Form 7
There is no way to deny the fact that this is the best possible website in its category. There are currently over 12 million downloads for a free addon that become essential for business websites running WordPress. Adding a contact form to a business site is a necessity. That will help the customers and even the regular readers to reach the company with queries or suggestions. It is also a necessity in order to receive feedback or connect with customers that are now at the potential level.
When using Contact Form 7, you can create a form that looks exactly as you want it to. The plugin is perfect for its purpose and drastically increases customer enquiries. Out of all the different plugins mentioned for business sites, this is the one that absolutely has to be downloaded and used.
WooCommerce
In the event that the business site has e-commerce parts, WooCommerce becomes essential. It will help you to build any type of site that sells products or services, including self-branded sites and affiliate based websites. You use it in order to sell something straight from the WordPress site with a simplicity that is hard to rival.
Building a custom e-commerce website can cost thousands of dollars. WooCommerce makes that investment a bad idea as the plugin has everything that you might need. This ranges from giving you the possibility to accept a CC payment to offering the smooth and simple checkout process that is vital for increasing conversion rates. WooCommerce is also great at handling content generation, the addition of product reviews and even presenting reviews or articles in a highly attractive way.
What is really interesting with the use of WooCommerce is that it synergizes really well with premium e-commerce themes that are available at the moment. In fact, there are thousands that you can choose from in order to create a site that looks exactly as you want it to.
WooCommerce allows the site owner to offer discount coupons, payments through PayPal, cash on delivery as an option and free shipping deals. You can even integrate Google Analytics with ease if you want to. On the whole, this is the one plugin that you want to always have installed if you want to sell anything through WordPress.
Google Analytics
In order to increase sales and offer a great website for visitors, you need to keep track of who visits and what actions happen on the site. It can be really difficult to track post links and various pages with the purpose of improving conversion rates. You can add the Google Analytics code to the various pages of your site, together with custom variables connected with links but that can be incredibly time consuming.
The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin solves many of the analytics problems you would have. You can easily select the custom variables once installed and track all the outbound links. This does include downloads that you might offer. There is no need to add any manual code as everything will be automatically managed by the little plugin you add.
WP Super Cache
Website loading speed stands out as one of the most important factors that have to be optimized in a modern website. WP Super Cache is a vital plugin that most websites need to have at the moment. It will boost site loading speed as it creates various HTML static pages for the dynamic content that you have. This is necessary since dynamic content automatically needs MySQL database connection, rendering elements and PHP execution. By eliminating this part of the process, pages are turned into static content. Based on statistics, the pages can end up loading around 10 times faster than without using WP Super Cache.
The plugin comes with various options that you can take advantage of. The settings that are available can be modified from the administrator panel in the WP Super Cache settings page. You can use an integrated CDN option if you want to. This allows adding the CDN URL you have in order to automatically load java files, CSS files or images. Website speed is boosted and you have much more time to convince people to make a purchase. At the same time, faster loading speed helps in getting a higher search engine ranking for your keywords so this synergizes perfectly with the preferred SEO plugin.
Call To Action Buttons
Using call to action buttons will help to boost conversion rates. However, many of these buttons are not actually SEO friendly as they are normally powered with Ajax, JavaScript or with the use of images.
The WordPress plugin mentioned helps as it allows you to create W3C validated buttons. Complete control appears in terms of desired text style, design, text color and the addition of do follow or no follow SEO tags. Preserving content ranking is made easier and the various gradient based variations are normally appreciated by users.
Social Media WordPress Plugins
Social media is necessary for any modern website so you want to be sure that your WordPress business site has all that it needs to allow the visitors to quickly share your content or discuss it. You want to be sure that you always focus on having a proper online social media presence. The 2 plugins below can help you with that.
Social Media Auto Publish
Since social media can easily improve brand presence, you want to be able to publish all your new content on the social media pages that you own. The problem is that this can be really time consuming. A small company does not actually have the necessary budget to hire professional social media managers. The plugin helps you to take care of this problem.
The plugin is basically the preferred one for business site owners that use WordPress at the moment. You can use it to feed followers with the new updates in an easy and instant way. All that has to be done is to connect Facebook and Twitter to the plugin. After that, posts are shared to the social pages in an automatic way.
Simple Share Buttons Adder
Last but not least, this pretty small plugin includes the features you want in terms of improving social media presence by helping you to quickly integrate the share buttons. The control panel of the plugin is simple, allowing you to choose out of different layouts and modify settings like button colors, icon set, locations and share texts. Even 100% unique social media sharing buttons can be generated if this is what you want.
I am big fan of yoast and its a must plugin for me another one that I live without is Goistats analytics for wordpress .. great info on dashboard and ease of use as well to implement .. its truly enterprise class.
Great list of plugins. I would also include a page builder as a must. Every business needs to have nice call to action buttons, but also needs to produce landing pages for campaigns, and possibly change the design of the homepage and other pages once in a while. A page builder is a great tool to do just that without coding. Essential to any business.