Essential WordPress Plugins For Businesses
WordPress is a popular platform for building websites. The best WordPress plugins can help you promote your business, automate valuable tasks, and improve the security of your site.
This article will look at the essential WordPress plugins for businesses: how they work and when you should use them.
Ready to get started? Let's dive in!
What Is WordPress?
WordPress is an open-source blogging platform that has evolved into a powerful content management system (CMS). You can use the platform to create your website or build and run it on your server.
There are two main versions of the platform: WordPress.com and Self-Hosted WordPress (or WP). The free version hosted by WordPress.com is limited in terms of business uses, but for many small businesses, it's more than enough to get started. You'll also find hundreds of thousands of websites using the platform.
WordPress makes it easy to add new functionality with plugins. While there are thousands of available plugins, we're going to focus on those that will help you take your business online.
Best WordPress Plugins For Businesses
There are hundreds of WordPress plugins available for use, but not all meet our needs as businesses.
Free Plugin Options
The following plugin is either free or has a free version available:
- Business Catalyst
The Business Catalyst plugin adds eCommerce features such as online payment tools, shipping, and inventory tracking. It also works well for marketing your business through email messages and social media.
- Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin helps search engines find your website. It automatically creates a map of pages and posts on your site and generates the HTML code you need to add to your site's home page. You can customize this map by adding or removing specific items or use an advanced mode to control how often it updates.
- WP Super Cache
This plugin boosts page load speed by caching (or storing) your site pages and posts temporarily. It can be tweaked for performance, and you'll find it works well with other plugins. WP Super Cache has detailed documentation to help get things working again if you run into any issues.
- Social Warfare
This is a powerful plugin for sharing content on social networks. It adds advanced features such as the ability to manage multiple accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest or track your social engagement with custom charts and reports.
Premium Plugin Options
For those who prefer to keep their website self-hosted (using WP), there are a few premium options worth considering:
- UpDraft Plus
This plugin backs up your website in case something goes wrong. You can manage remote backups at UpDraftCentral, and restore your site with one click if needed.
- Easy Digital Downloads
This plugin adds one-click digital downloads to your website, including both free and paid options. You can set custom prices that include tax and shipping costs or use a “pay what you want” pricing scheme to incentivize visitors to pay more. You'll also find additional features like coupons, product variations, and custom product pages.
- Owl
This is an excellent plugin for analytics. It helps you track visitors, conversions, page visits, where they came from, and how long they stayed on your site. You can set up custom reports to see what's working best for you and use this data to fine-tune your website as needed.
Final Words
As you can see, there are plenty of WordPress plugins available for business use. This will vary depending on your needs and the type of website that you're looking to create. These plugins provide a great way to get started with online marketing or update an existing site from eCommerce to analytics.
