- Development
5 WordPress Plugins for Small Businesses
Written by Alex Curtis
If you are looking to improve your website without needing to write any code, using the right WordPress plugins can help with this.
However, it’s important to be careful when choosing plugins as using the wrong ones can slow down a site – or, worse, make it less secure.
There are so many options when it comes to finding plugins, and you should choose based on your needs rather than installing for the sake of it. However, let’s take a look at some of the top plugins that guarantee added value.
Yoast SEO
Without a doubt, Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO tools in the WordPress arena. It helps to improve search engine optimisations as well as provide stats on your content readability. There are a number of ways to drive traffic to your site, however, search engines are confidently among the strongest
Features:
- Boost indexing and obtain richer results
- Analyse readability of your content
- Optimize your posts with keywords and meta descriptions
- Built in redirection tool (redirects old URLs to your new website)
- Helps in creating XML sitemaps
Updraft Plus
Taking regular backups of your site is crucial to ensure you protect your investment. Before making any major changes to your website – for example, code infrastructure or theme changes, it is highly recommended to make a backup to ensure there is something to revert to (should anything go wrong!)
Features:
- Ability to schedule automated backups (manual optional)
- Supports various cloud backup locations (Amazon, Google Drive and more)
- Highly secure and fitted with encryption
- Ability to restore your website at any time
Optimole
If your website appears to load more slowly than usual, one reason could be due to the size of your images. Optimole addresses this by optimising the size of all the images you upload. This is especially handy if you have hundreds of blog posts. A (not so fun) fact – If your web page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, about 50% of your visitors will abandon the site.
Features:
- Ability to compress all your images
- Supports a range of image formats (jpg, png, retina and more)
- Image resizing tool
- Bulk compress tool (handy to compress all your old images)
Gravity Forms
If you’re looking to add surveys or signup forms to your website, don’t settle for out-of-the-box WordPress functionality. Gravity forms is a simple yet powerful visual form builder that can be integrated with a number of add-ons (e.g. a CRM) to capture user information. Whether it is a contact form or user signup, you can fully customise any field within the WP dashboard while maintaining a responsive design.
Features:
- Easy to use visual builder
- 30+ ready to use form fields
- Ability to add conditional logic
- Premium integrations
- Fights Spam (reCaptcha)
Wordfence
Security is often overlooked when working on small business websites, and an SSL does not guarantee protection. We highly recommended Wordfence. It is a free and feature-packed plugin that helps keep your site safe from malware and unauthorised access. Boasting real-time threat monitoring and country blocking (premium), Wordfence will support most WordPress security needs of most small businesses.
Features:
- Real-time firewall to block malicious traffic
- Real-time IP blocking from unauthorised access attempts
- Integrated malware scanner
- Website vulnerability reporting
- Two-factor authentication (2FA)
- Ability to add custom security rules & alerts
Whether you are just starting a website or have an existing one, these plugins are likely to add value to your internal workflow. Though you can install plugins without a business plan. Keep in mind, many of these tools do offer a premium version at a price which can help scale your website to the next stage. It’s also important to always consult with your developers before installing plugins, to check compatibility.