Having a professional, streamlined and optimized website is crucial for every business. It not only improves the user experience of your visitors but also helps increase traffic to the site. If you are using WordPress, then there are lots of effective and easy to use plugins on the market that can significantly boost your website traffic. Here are five recommended plugins that every business should consider.
Spider Facebook
This is an excellent plugin for every website that wants to extend its reach in social media. If you want to be successful, you have to optimize your pages for social networks.
One of the main features of Spider Facebook is the ability to create a sharing widget so that any visitor can share your content with all of their friends and followers with just a click. It makes the process much easier, because users do not have to copy your link, go to the Facebook homepage, paste that link and then post it on their wall. You help them do everything much faster, so you can expect a lot more shares. The plugin also supports Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ share buttons.
Besides this important feature, Spider Facebook allows you to add Facebook login and register buttons to your website and a like box so that people can easily follow you on Facebook. This last feature is especially important because if people like your content, they might want to follow you on social media. Through social media, you then have ongoing chances to remind them about your business periodically.
MailChimp WD
Did you know that more than half of you traffic will never come back after the first visit? Scary! In order to reduce this number, you have to get creative. That’s why you need to exploit all the tools available on the market to keep your visitors coming back. One of the most effective ways to maintain contact with your audience is through email marketing.
The MailChimp WD plugin allows you to easily integrate the email marketing platform MailChimp with your WordPress website. This plugin lets you create multiple opt-in and opt-out forms, in the top bar, in popups, and in a scroll box. Every form submitted data through the plugin is automatically sent to the MailChimp platform, so you do not have to copy everything manually. All you have to do is create a useful newsletter and send it to your new subscribers.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular among WordPress users. Everyone wants to rank highly on Google and get additional traffic from natural search results, but only a small percentage of people know exactly how SEO (search engine optimization) works and how everything should be done correctly.
The Yoast SEO plugin helps people that do not have this knowledge. One feature allows you to add meta tags, breadcrumbs navigation, and even generate XML sitemaps – all good food for Google that makes it easier for your content to be discovered. You can link your website to Google Webmaster Tools so that all required information is transferred automatically between platforms.
Most of the optimization with this plugin is done when you create posts. You enter the keyword(s) you want to rank for, and the plugin will automatically guide you through all the steps you need to take to prepare your content for Google.
Yoast SEO also optimizes your website for social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
WordPress Popular Posts
Once visitors start coming to your website, you want to show them the best you have to offer,so they know your website is one worth bookmarking and returning to. You want people to spend as much time on your website as possible and share more than one piece of your content.
One of the best ways to achieve this is by showing your most popular content to the user. If many readers like your article already then there is a good chance that new visitors will like it as well.
So, the WordPress Popular Posts plugin allows you to add a widget on the website and display your most successful posts based on page views or comments. Also, you can set a time range if you do not want to show articles older than 24 hours, 7 days, a month, or later. You can flexibly customize the layout of the list or just add a thumbnail to every title. You can even customize the plugin to show only a list of posts from a particular category if you do not want to rank all of your content.
Instant Articles for WP
Instant Articles is still fresh but very powerful feature on Facebook that allows you to load your content up to 10 times faster than on any other normal website. Every person using Facebook on their smartphones can read full articles without actually leaving the social network. Some of the largest media sites like Mashable, Techcrunch or Buzzfeed are already using this feature on their website to good effect.
What this plugin does is to allow you to add your posts directly to Facebook Instant Articles from your WordPress website. Instant articles receive much higher reach, and due to fast loading capabilities, there is a greater chance that your content will be shared more often. Also, you get an opportunity to access monetization options through Facebook Audience Networks.
These are five WordPress plugins that could significantly improve your traffic numbers. Every one of them is easy to install and simple to use. There are, of course, many more plugins with different functions out there that could also improve your traffic. These are some of the most widely used and well known ones.
What do you think? What are your favorite plugins for boosting traffic to your WordPress website?
