We, and just about 60 million people all over the world, are all in love with WordPress!
I mean, who wouldn’t? WordPress has given small businesses the power to take it to the next level without going way beyond your business budget. What’s also great about WordPress is that it lets us customise and enhance our websites using plugins.
WordPress plugins – why are they awesome?
The WordPress core software is already built with the basic features and functionality you would need in building a website, like customising the look and feel of your site, editing website pages and blog posts, and uploading images and videos. But there are missing functionalities, of course, and this is what plugins are for.
Plugins are bits of software that are installed into a WordPress website to allow users to add new features and expand the functionality of their sites.
Out of about 40,000 plugins to choose from, how can you tell the good from the ugly? Small business owners often come to us to ask which plugins we’d recommend. For us, it’s all about what can make your website look super sexy and sleek, and of course, security, ease of use, and those that will give your business the boost it needs.
So here are 14 of our most recommended WordPress plugins for small businesses.
- Yoast SEO
Every digital marketing guru out there has sworn about the importance of SEO in business and they are so right! We want to rank high in Google search results, but Google gets really picky when it comes to ranking pages in its most coveted page one. So the key is to make sure our websites are SEO friendly. Yoast SEO will analyse your posts and pages and guide you through which areas you need to improve on.
2. WooCommerce
I don’t think any ecommerce website could survive without WooCommerce. It’s the go-to plugin for websites that function as online stores. It has a complete list of features that provide customers with easy and stress-free ecommerce experience.
3. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP plugin lets you track your website using the tracking code and view key visitor data, as well as view in-depth page and post reports.
4. MailChimp for WP
This plugin lets you easily grow your mailing list by creating great-looking signup forms and easily integrate them with other forms within your site.
5. Beaver Builder
How do you create website layouts without coding? There’s the Beaver Builder plugin for that. It’s an extremely user-friendly drag-and-drop page builder tool that lets anyone design an amazing page layout. The free version includes basic modules and the premium version offers more advanced ones, including ready made themes, saved modules, custom modules and page layouts.
6. Sucuri
Security is surely a big deal for any online business owner. The Sucuri Security plugin has a free version, which is built with basic functions intended to reinforce your site’s existing security posture. The premium version includes a powerful website firewall that protects your site from malware threats, DDoS, XSS attacks, and other types of cyber threats.
7. CSS Hero
Customising the look of your website may require a great deal of coding. But we don’t have time for that, do we? CSS Hero allows website owners to make changes in your website’s theme (font styles, colours preference, effects, margins) without having to write a single code.
8. Cerber Security & Antispam
This plugin is your best defense against spam and unwelcome login attempts. It restricts access and tracks intruder activity, and its powerful antispam engine protects your registration, contact and comment forms.
9. SeedProd Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode
This plugin is a great way to keep your website under wraps while you’re busy tweaking it. Aside from the usual “coming soon” page that displays while your site is under construction, the plugin can also be integrated with email and social media tools so you can promote and build hype for your site’s launch.
10. WP Rocket
This is a powerful caching tool that helps improve loading time of your web pages, thus improving search engine optimisation. This tool is extremely user-friendly and easy to install.
11. Drift
If you think your website is not converting visitors into customers, then a live chat system might help. Drift is an easy way to add a live chat function to your site. This plugin allows you to talk to your customers while they’re on your site to get more chances of closing a sale. Encourage them to browse your products, help them get out when they’re stuck somewhere, or convince them to give you feedback.
12. Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is an awesome form building tool that lets site owners easily capture leads or increase email signups. It allows you to easily create a form and integrate other third party services like PayPal, MailChimp, Stripe, and many others.
13. Imagify
Uploading images that are too big can affect the loading speed and quality of your website. Imagify is a highly-recommended image compressor for websites that use a large amount of images. This tool reduces the size of your images without losing their quality.
14. Wordfence
Wordfence is a popular free security tool exclusively for WordPress websites. It includes a website firewall, a security scanning system that alerts website owners in the event of a security issue, provides recovery tools, and shows a threat defense feed that includes the latest malware signatures, malicious IP addresses and firewall rules.
Do you have anything to add to our list? Give your favourite WordPress plugin a shoutout in the comments!