Well, choosing the right plugins for your website greatly depends on several factors. First, it’s your website focus or purpose. I mean, if you want to build a large and functional online store, you’d most probably need to equip it with the variety of shopping tools, carts, payment gateways, etc. Second, it’s your website audience. If your website is intended for children, then overloading it with complex functionality is not recommended at all. Third, it’s the targeted market or location. For example, if your targeted users are from countries other than your own, you’d better provide necessary tools to easily contact you.
Choosing the right plugins for a business website is much more difficult as you’d have to bring lots of functionality to it. Apart from that, the right set of plugins will help you to advance your business and ultimately make more money. So, let’s have a look at the 10 most widely used plugins on business websites.
1. Google Analytics WD
Google Analytics WD is the official member of Google Analytics Technology Partners Program and provides detailed reports for your website audience and its performance. The WordPress Google Analytics plugin comes with an advanced custom reporting functionality and allows you to get reports for any metric and dimension.Its custom dimension tracking ability is a great way to track data for logged in users, authors, post tags and categories, published years and months. Also, it allows you to create and easily manage goals,compare reports of different periods with each other, export reports to various file formats, and supports front end stats view feature.
Google Analytics WD is responsive and is equipped with advanced data filtering functionality, which allows you to exclude unwanted data from the reports.
2. Form Maker
The WordPress form builder allows you to add simple and multipart responsive forms on your website for pretty much any purpose: questionnaires, surveys, application, registration, contact, etc. The plugin provides tons of form field options that you can use to obtain any kind of information from your visitors. The fields include text, passwords,datepicker, numbers,custom select and country select, checkboxes for multiple choice questions, captcha protection and many other. The plugin comes with 41 editable theme options for different form designs, and also lets you make additional changes to the forms with CSS. Form Maker has a very user-friendly submissions section and gives you simple analytical data about the choice based answers in the forms.
3. WordPress Google Maps
Google Maps WD is an advanced and intuitive tool for creating unlimited Google maps for your website. The WordPress Google Maps plugin is an ideal choice for business websites as you can mark your business location on the maps with custom markers, identify your business location within a specified radius and provide directions to any location with walking, driving, bicycling and transit modes. The maps support real time preview, which makes it easy to create and edit the maps. Also, the plugin comes with various maps themes and skins to give the maps an outstanding look and feel.
Google Maps WD supports all the essential Google maps styles and allows you to add polygon, polyline, circle and rectangle overlays on them.
4. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most complete search engine optimization tool for WordPress powered websites. It allows you to easily optimize your website and get in front of potential customers. So, what it basically does, is help you to write a keyword-rich content, meta descriptions for posts, insert image alt tags, write relevant post titles and headings, etc. Its snippet preview feature allows you to see how your posts and pages will look like in search results.
5. Sucuri
Sucuri is your best partner in all matters related to your website security. It’s a powerful security tool that performs security monitoring, malware detection, security hardening, and features a powerful website Firewall protection.The plugin comes with useful security notifications that instantly let you know if something goes wrong on your website.
6. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus simplifies your website backups and makes restoration really easy. It allows you to set manual or scheduled backups of your website database and files and store them S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, FTP, SFTP, email + others services. You can remotely control all your backups from a single dashboard, and split larger backups into multiple archives. The best thing about it is that the failed uploads are automatically resumed until the backup is properly done.
7. W3 Total Cache
Downloaded by millions of WordPress users, W3 Total Cache is the best caching and performance optimization tool available. It increases website performance, reduces the download time, and provides better user experience. It also improves your chances of ranking higher in search engines results especially for mobile-friendly websites. As a result, you website gets more views and your visitors spend more time on it.
8. OptinMonster
OptinMosnter is an advanced email list building plugin and lead generation tool that is best at converting your visitors into subscribers. It allows you to build high converting forms in a matter of a few minutes with its powerful form builder. You can create visually stunning form types such as lightbox popups, floating bars, slide-ins, and full screen welcome gates.With its signature MonsterEffect technology you can create eye-catchy forms with various animation effects. The forms are highly customizable, allowing you to add different text, headlines, colors, styles and design to them. With its advanced A/B testing functionality you can easily test your ideas and see which of them works best for your audience.
AddToAny
You can add highly customizable social sharing and following buttons to your website with AddToAny. It helps you to share your website content over 100 widely used social platforms and media sites. You can choose between vector and floating share buttons and use its outstanding universal AddToAny button for content sharing. The buttons come with fast share counts and can be placed anywhere on your website with a shortcode or as a widget. The plugin is also analytics integrated to let you track the shared links.
Zopim Live chat
With Zopim Live chat plugin you’ll be able to chat with your website visitors in real time and provide instant support to them. It adds a mobile optimized widget to your website and allows you to handle multiple conversations with your visitors through your website dashboard. The chat widget is easy to setup and customize, and blends perfectly with any website theme or design. Its advanced analytics dashboard lets you monitor your visitor flow and reach out to every single visitor that needs any help on your website.
Conclusion
The plugins presented above will be a great contribution to any business website and will bring lots of useful functionalities to it. They all are of the best quality and are proven to work out of the box with any WordPress theme. If you have any other plugins in mind that business websites will benefit from using, please let me know in the comments below.