Online presence is crucial for businesses. Accept it or not, most of your customers are online and if you want your business to grow a functional, easy to get around and customer-friendly website is a must-have.
WordPress is the first choice for small and big business owners, as it’s the most feature-packed content management platform, allowing you to equip it with the functionalities needed for your business and your customers. Among the seemingly endless number of the extensions available in WordPress directory there is a considerable portion of plugins developed primarily for business websites. They target different functionalities and can bring valuable features to your website.
I made a list of the best 15 WordPress plugins to share with you, which are sure to help you grow your business and better serve your customers. Sounds good ? Let’s get down to the list then.
Google Maps WD
If you want your customers to easily find your business location or the closest store near them, Google map is the answer. That’s why this WordPress Google maps plugin will be a valuable investment for your website and a great tool to go with. What it actually does is allowing you to add responsive Google maps to your website with various map styles, advanced markers, pins for store locators, directions, overlays with some advanced customization options. With its store locator functionality you’ll be able to mark multiple stores within a particular area and let your customers find the nearest stores around them. They can also get directions to your stores or any other points.
There is an unique custom marker builder option in the plugin, which allows you to create custom marker icons with preferred coloring. The plugin also comes with different marker listing options, and allows you to list the markers in the map as a legend. You can fully customize the maps using the live preview option, use the pre-built editable themes, or add new themes according to your needs.
WooCommerce
There is probably no need to introduce WooCommerce, the most popular ecommerce platform for WordPress. No matter what your business is about if it involves selling, Woocommerce gives you endless ways and possibilities to accomplish it. It combines all the features your business might need such as selling physical and digital goods, extensive shipping options, full control over your store, over 300 available extensions to meet the requirements of businesses of any type and size.
With WooCommerce you business is secured and is bound to grow.
Form Maker
Addressing your customers needs and requests on time is a proven strategy to build better connections with them. The easiest way your customers can connect with you is a contact form, which is widely used across thousands of websites. WordPress Form Maker plugin will let you generate not only contact forms but also application, survey, questionnaire, registration and any other type of forms with various info fields.
This WordPress form builder enables you to create simple forms with several basic info fields and multi part forms for obtaining any needed information from your customers. Generated forms are responsive, fully customizable, and come with 37 editable themes to help you to create forms spending less time and efforts.
OptinMonster
OptinMonster plugin can be your best partner if you want to grow your email list and ultimately convert your visitors into customers. It helps you to add highly converting pop-ups, slide-ins, sidebar forms, floating header and footer bars and other types of forms to your website and turn your visitors into subscribers and customers.
The plugin comes with various form templates and lets you create and customize forms literally in minutes. While you can add forms in various locations, OptinMonster’s powerful exit-intent technology allows you to show pop-ups to your visitors based on different triggers. There are also mobile specific forms available in the plugin.
UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus plugin will help you take care of the backup of your website’s database and make sure your files are safe out there.The good news is that you can have manual, as well as scheduled backups, and store your files in different locations such as Dropbox, Google drive, Google cloud storage, Rackspace, email, etc.
You can have different backup schedules for files and database, and also select which of the files to backup and which components to restore later on.Failed file uploads are automatically resumed until the backup is fully done.
WP Super Cache
You can significantly speed up your website with the help of WP Super Cache plugin.It is a static chaching plugin, which generates static HTML files without processing heavy PHP scripts. It basically betters your website performance and reduces the load of the server. As website speed is considered as an important aspect for search rankings, make sure to give a careful thought to it.
Yoast SEO
Search engine optimization is required on all kinds of websites nowadays, but for business and corporate websites it’s a must-have strategy from the get-go. . If you need any kind of help with optimization of your website Yoast SEO plugin is the first and best choice you should make. It takes care of the full search engine optimization of your website.
It helps you to write better keyword-rich content,reminds you to enable pretty permalinks, insert image alt tags, checks if your titles are long enough , if your post’s meta description contains relevant number of characters, etc. You can have a snippet preview of your posts and see what they will look like in search results.
YARPP
YARPP is a great tool to introduce your website visitors related content, that is posts, custom post types and pages most relevant to the things they’re looking at. It choses the content based on its relevancy to the current entry, taking into account post titles, tags, categories and the content. You can display the results in thumbnails or list views with featured images, and choose from the available templates. YARPP is a proven way to increase engagement on your website and a great option to make some recommendations to your visitors.
AddToAny
Help your website visitors and customers share your posts and pages to various social platforms with a click of a button. As one of the most popular social sharing plugins AddToAny is the right tool to go with. It allows you to add social sharing and following buttons on your website, which can be placed in different locations. The buttons are mobile and retina ready and can be customized in so many ways. The plugin also provides some analytical data about the amount of shares, which can be tracked by the share counts of posts and pages.
WP Review
One way to help your customers make the right choice from the products or services you offer is to display product reviews by the people who have previously bought or used it. WP Review plugin will help you add content review functionality to your business website without affecting its loading speed.It uses star, percentage and point rating options and gives you full control to design the review box as you want. For additional styling options you can use custom CSS.
The plugin supports shortcodes to insert the review box anywhere on your website.
Relevanssi
For a better search functionality on your website you should check out Relevanssi plugin.It allows you to provide advanced searching options to your customers and better present the results as well. The search results are displayed based on the relevance to the search query and are highlighted. The plugin supports fuzzy matching and search for phrases with quotes. It searches for results all over your website including comments section, tags, categories, custom fields.
Slider WD
Slider WD will enable you to add responsive and highly configurable sliders to your website and highlight the key features of your business. Create beautiful slides with over 25 transition effects and design customizations and showcase images, video files, and posts. Still not enough ? Embed media files from Instagram, Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo and spice the slides up with hotspot layers, carousel, parallax and filsmtrip effects.
You can protect your slides from illegal use by adding watermarks to them and enabling image right click protection. The slides also support social sharing layer to help you to easily get the word out about your business. The number of the slides you can create is unlimited.
Header and Footer
Do you want to have fully customized and functional header and footer sections on your business website ? With Header and Footer plugin you can easily manage the code on the head and bottom sections of any single page on your website.You can add various scripts for Google Analytics, Google Webmaster tools, Adsense, custom tracking codes and bring those services to the header and footer parts. The services can be added before, after or in the middle of the posts and pages and the codes can contain PHP script parts as well. So basically, you don’t need to install various plugins to get all those functionalities. With Header and Footer you get them all and also get an organized way to manage them.
Sucuri Security
Sucuri Security plugin is the best way to monitor all the security related issues on your website. It offers powerful security file integrity monitoring, security notifications, remote security malware scanning engine, security blacklist monitoring, effective security hardening configurations, post-hack security actions, and other advanced features to minimize the risks of attacks, operational problems and other malfunctions. In short, Sucuri is a security toolset that works out of the box to keep your website safe out there.
Max Mega Menu
Menus are essential for better website navigation and better search engine rankings as well. With WordPress Mega Menu plugin you’ll be able to create widgetized menus by dragging and dropping menu items. There is a built-in theme editor available in the plugin that gives you over 100 customization options to design and style menus according to your business needs. You can create multiple menus with separate configurations for each of them. The menus are responsive, retina-ready and are compatible with all the major browsers.
Nowadays a functional website is an ultimate way to help you to grow your business and better serve your customers. If you’ve chosen WordPress as the managing platform for your website your chances of standing out get really high. You can equip it with the right tools and functionalities needed for satisfying visitors and customers.
The plugins presented above provide general functionalities that would be equally useful for websites of different purposes and niches. They are all of high quality, compatible with the latest WordPress version and are sure to enhance your website is so many ways.
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