Are you getting the most from your business’s WordPress site?
Thousands of small businesses rely on the WordPress platform for their site design and content organization. But beyond the standard layouts and themes, WordPress plugins give your site added customization.
And with the raft of small business WordPress plugins available — updating and accumulating daily — there’s nary a solution one hasn’t provided already.
Mario Peshev, a Web developer for 10-years, WordPress contributor, and author of more than 20 WordPress plugins, told Small Business Trends in a recent interview, “You can practically do anything you can think of with WordPress plugins.”
The best part about many of the small business WordPress plugins plugins that most benefit businesses is the price. A lot are free.
And WordPress plugins are pretty easy to install and they are easy to update.
Now, there are literally thousands of plugins available through WordPress.org. Not all plugins are great. And not all work, but they’re still listed.
From this seemingly endless list of plugins, there are a baker’s dozen of small business WordPress plugins that Peshev recommends for businesses with a WordPress site. He shared that list of small business WordPress plugins during our interview.
Small Business WordPress Plugins
JetPack
Jetpack is Peshev’s first recommendation, primarily for its multi-functionality.
It is actually a combination of plugins that boasts features designed to boost your ability to customize your site, make it mobile-friendly, increase traffic and automatically create and publish richer content.
Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 provides you with everything you need to create your own form and offers an in-depth Q&A, tutorials and other information regarding how to display a form on your page, as well as customize it.
Contact Form 7 works even better if you add one of these three plugins to it, says Peshev:
- Flamingo allows you to save messages submitted by your visitors.
- Really Simple CAPTCHA helps prevent “bots” from interfering with your forms.
- Bogo is a multilingual plugin. It allows your global website audience to participate in their native language.
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms allows you to create a complicated workflow and is designed to quickly and easily integrate with a variety of third-party services such as PayPal. This one carries a price but it starts as low as $39 for one website.
Buddy Press
With BuddyPress, you can create and operate your own online community — your very own social media network.
“You can create your own Facebook,” Peshev says.
Site members can register, create profiles — even have private conversations with each other. It’s described as a “social network in a box.”
MailChimp
The MailChimp plugin helps you ramp up your list of email subscribers to whom you send your newsletters. This plugin allows you to add things like MailChimp sign-up forms to your WordPress site.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
WordPress SEO by Yoast lets you optimize your website for better SEO, meaning you install it and it automatically optimizes your website for higher Google ranking — a must if you want to increase your website’s visibility.
It does this by alerting you to whether a title is too long (or too short) and recommends that you add more (or less) keywords to ensure your content gets the best ranking it can.
bbPress
bbPress allows you to create your own forum or bulletin board on your website.
This is just another tool that allows you to engage with visitors to your website.
Akismet
Quite simply, Akismet polices comments from site visitors for spam.
And anyone who’s managed a busy WordPress site will attest there could be thousands of spam comments posted to your site. It’s Akisment’s job to keep those from being posted for everyone to see.
iThemes Security
iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) is the number one WordPress Security Plugin, according to WordPress. It provides more than 30 ways to defend your site against hacker attacks that exploit things like plugin vulnerabilities and weak passwords.
With some 30,000 new websites hacked each day, according to WordPress, this is a plugin you’ll definitely want to consider, Peshev says.
Marketing Optimizer for WordPress
Marketing Optimizer for WordPress is designed to do precisely what it says. It offers you a landing page template, as well as A/B testing. This is the process by which you present two versions of the same Web page to different sets of visitors, then determine which version of the page yields the more valuable results. These results could be in terms of revenue, leads, signups, downloads, purchases or registrations and comments.
Plug In Photo via Shutterstock
This article, “13 WordPress Plugins Small Business Owners Should Focus On” was first published on Small Business Trends
from Blogger http://evangelinagius.blogspot.com/2015/04/13-wordpress-plugins-small-business.html
Evangelina Gius 