6 Must-Have WP Plugins For WordPress Business Sites

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One of the biggest advantages of using WordPress is the mind-boggling choice of plugins and tools available for you to use, depending on what you’d need those plugins and tools for. WordPress is so popular that many tools – in addition to dedicated WordPress plugins and tools – integrate with WordPress directly.

Some tools involve adding JavaScript codes and other methods could be third-party plugins built specifically for WordPress.

Either way, the choice of plugins, themes, and tools is bewildering if you think about it.

Now, there are some WordPress plugins and tools that are fancy. Others are “nice to have”. Some others are a “must-have”.

What really makes to your final list depends on your business, your needs, and the specific functionality you’d expect from your WordPress site.

According to Tom Ewer who wrote for ManageWP , there were over 29,000+ plugins with a grand total of 286,000,000+ times, and that was in the year 2014. You can expect a ridiculous number today, as of 2017.

Those are just dedicated plugins for WordPress. Add to this a sheer number of apps and tools that you can integrate and you’d be forced to just “keep thinking”.

Out of all those plugins, how would you even begin to select what you’d need? We’ll make it easier for you. Here are six must have WordPress Plugins and tools you’d need for your business sites.

 

Google Analytics WD

Without Analytics, you’d forever be groping in the dark when it comes to knowing about the volume of traffic that comes to your website and where your visitors come from. You’d never know if Facebook gets you more traffic or Twitter. Is your paid advertising working the way you expected it to?

You’d have a hard time figuring out how to make decisions that you’d need to without the number crunching.

Google Analytics is free, powerful, and comes packed with everything you need to help you understand your traffic, user behavior, effectiveness of your content, and more. It helps you setup meaningful KPIs and measure your growth.

WordPress makes it easy for you to integrate your site with Google Analytics with our Google Analytics WD plugin . Stay on top of your metrics; track goals and custom dimensions; and send yourself automated and customized reports.

If you’d like user permissions, roles, ecommerce reports, tracking exclusions (based on roles and users) and pushover notifications, you get them all with a single plugin.

 

Mailchimp WD

Email marketing is often overlooked, under rated, and almost neglected. Most businesses don’t even tap into the sheer power of email marketing.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing delivers an astounding 4300% ROI on every dollar spent: that’s $43 for every $1 in marketing spend.

Having said that, Mailchimp happens to one of the most popular email marketing tools available for businesses to use.

While Mailchimp is indeed popular, it’s still a pain to integrate WordPress with Mailchimp – at least, it’s not straight forward. Critical functions like creating/managing custom fields, integration with Paypal, list management, subscriber management, etc., are all hard to do with WordPress.

With Mailchimp WD , you don’t have to sweat.

 

JetPack 

We love, admire, and respect the Jetpack plugin for WordPress — it’s not just a plugin, it’s an entire suite of necessary tools for your business.

Jetpack has almost everything you’d need to run a WordPress website that just works. Imagine downloading one plugin to get a lot of bang for your buck (which could also be zero)?

Jetpack provides you with:

Traffic and SEO: site stats, analytics, automated social media sharing, displaying related posts, SEO tools, and also an advertising platform.
Brute force attack protection, uptime/downtime monitoring, highly secure logins, two-factor authentication for your WordPress site, site backups, site restoration, and also migration.
Tools for Content creation such as a high-speed CDN, ability to compress images, sidebar widgets, video hosting, and more.

Jetpack is a must-have plugin for your website. It’s free and it’s awesome.

 

Yoast SEO

Forget about all those plugins for SEO that you’d think you need. You don’t need all of them. You’d need to optimize your website for SEO and for that, you’d just need one single plugin to help you with that.

It’s called Yoast SEO Plugin and we are sure that you’ve heard about it (and it’s alright if you haven’t).

Keep your WordPress core light and easy. Download and Install Yoast SEO plugin for your WordPress website and you are done.

After the 2 minutes it takes to download, activate, and configure your plugin, all you have to do next is to focus on publishing quality content on your blog for the rest of your life.

Remember that SEO today is more about quality content than any overnight gimmicks.

 

Optimizely 

A website design is never done and over with. Design itself is nothing without the results it promises to deliver.

Whether you design your website yourself or you have someone else help you with it, design is never a “do it and forget it” affair.

A major part of your work “after” your website goes live has to do with testing different elements of your website design. The best tool to do that is Optimizely and you have a dedicated Optimizely plugin for WordPress .

Do A/B testing for your home page, product pages, service pages, and even about page. You could test every single page, design element, headline, and piece of copy if you could.

 

Sucuri 

If you build it, the hacking attempts will come. Since WordPress is popular, the open source CMS also happens to be a sitting duck as a target for hackers globally.

Unless you are on a managed WP hosting package that takes care of Malware scanning and removal, anti-hacking WordPress security stack, and other such frills, you are left on your own to manage security for your WordPress site.

Literally, your business could turn into ashes with the right security for your website. Sucuri then is a globally recognized authority when it comes to WordPress website security.

Using the Sucuri plugin, deploy security management with security activity audit logging, file integrity monitoring, remote malware scanning, blacklist monitoring, security hardening, post-hack security action, and get instant security notifications when they occur.

If you had to just pick one plugin out of this list, download Sucuri for WordPress now.

The list of plugins can never be complete or exhaustive because there are so many of them and usage of plugins is really a matter of unique requirements for each business.

Whatever you do, don’t overload WordPress with too many plugins. Also, always keep your plugins updated.

What are your favorite plugins or business tools? What plugins can’t you live without?

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