WordPress plugins can be lifesavers for small businesses. A small business can turn to various plugins on WordPress to assist with managing customer service, web design, and social media.
But since there are so many different options in the WordPress Plugin Repository, it can be overwhelming to know which plugins are the best to use.
That’s where we can help.
We asked WordPress and small business experts for their advice on the best plugins to install on your website. They responded with an array of plugins to serve all your business needs.
Read on to learn more about the recommended plugins for:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Page building
- Improving speed and mobile performance
- Social media and email
Plugins for SEO: Yoast and Squirrly
If you want your business to rank higher in relevant searches, you have to optimize your content for SEO.
Yoast is a popular and useful plugin. The CEO of Robben Media, Brian Robben, says it is the single best plugin for his and his clients’ sites.
“It’s helped us rank first on Google for competitive keywords, drive millions of organic traffic visitors to our site, and convert millions in sales. The Yoast plugin makes it so easy to create a perfectly search engine optimized page or blog post, telling you exactly what tweaks to make before publishing. It’s truly incredible for any small business.”
CEO of Pest Strategies, Ed Spicer, says Squirrly is a great option for SEO beginners.
“It has all the features we need, including a live assistant tool that gives us tips as we write, sort of like Grammarly for SEO. Squirrly has definitely made our employees happy and more productive. The live assistant feature alone has helped us optimize our content and reduce our bounce rate by over 11%.”
Plugin for Page Building: Beaver Builder
A full-time web developer usually isn’t an option for small businesses. But some plugins make building a website an achievable feat.
Beaver Builder is Nolan Barger’s choice for website creation. As a “one-man marketing department” for furniture company Lancaster Live Edge, he calls Beaver Builder invaluable to his company.
“I’ve worked on 200-plus WordPress websites, and it’s hands-down the best page builder plugin I’ve used. [Beaver Builder is] the best for site speed, and the easiest to scale since it allows you to use conditional logic to apply templates to specific categories, products, and pages.”
Plugins for Improving Speed and Mobile Performance: WP-Optimize and AMP
Speed helps your customer retention and your search ranking. CEO of health care resource Dentaly, Max Harland suggests WP-Optimize for quicker-loading pages.
“Optimizing a WordPress site’s loading speed is the best way to improve user experience by reducing latency and load time. A caching plugin makes websites load faster by exporting a lighter version of your website from its database of saved HTML pages.”
His top tip is to use the image compression feature to decrease the size of data-heavy multimedia files.
Plugins can also enhance your mobile website. Phil Strazzulla, CEO and founder of SelectSoftware Reviews, says the AMP plugin has helped his mobile pages load faster than their desktop versions.
“What WordPress AMP does is take mobile pages and strips out everything unnecessary. When it comes to mobile internet, having your page load faster will not only make consumers happy, but it will actually also help your Google ranking.”
Plugins for Connecting With Customers: Grow by Mediavine and Sumo
Integrating social media on your website can be painful. Freelance writer Elna Cain uses Grow by Mediavine, which lets her customize social media buttons and their placement.
“It comes in handy for people still building a following,” Cain says. Grow lets users control whether or not to display engagement totals. You can also set it to show when you hit a certain amount.
“[If] you don’t yet have social proof, having a low share count may not look attractive to potential readers.”
If you want to grow your email list, founder of Her.CEO, Stacy Caprio, calls Sumo the most useful plugin for her business.
“My email list is the strongest part about the Her.CEO brand, and [it] has a strong community that is at the core of my website and company. I love the Sumo plugin because it makes setting up an initial auto-responder easy, and auto-imports my new contacts into my email provider.”
WordPress plugins offer solutions for your business’s everyday problems.
SEO plugins like Yoast and Squirrly can help customers easily find your website. You can build your email list with Sumo or add social media with Grow by Mediavine. Design your website with Beaver Builder, then make it run smoothly with AMP or WP-Optimize.
Listen to the advice from our experts and watch your website flourish.
Do you have a plugin suggestion for small businesses?
