ITB BLOG

The 6 best WordPress plugins for your business’ blog

No matter whether you’re running a small business or operating a big company, you can benefit from using WordPress by setting up a clean website that attracts potential clients and customers. Although WordPress already comes with plenty of state-of-the-art standard features to get you started, plugins provide your website with even more durability.

With that said, here are the six best WordPress plugins for business websites.

 

Shareaholic

The purpose of having a WordPress site in the business world, in most instances, is to promote your product or service by generating content that attracts readers and keeps them coming back for more. That said, readers who find your content interesting and entertaining enough to share must have a way to do so if you want to drive inbound traffic, inbound links, and create a buzz around your business.

Assuming that someone will spend five seconds of their life copying and pasting your URL to share your content is as big of a mistake as figuring that your business will blossom just because you have a WordPress site. Shareaholic fixes this problem by allowing your readers to share your content on a multitude of social media platforms with a simple click of the mouse. Not only that, but the buttons look attractive, so it won’t make your website look messy.

 

WordPress SEO by Yoast

If you want your website to stand out among the crowd of billions, you’ll need to take full advantage of SEO strategies. With the help of WordPress SEO by Yoast, you’ll have total control of page titles and meta descriptions on a per page/per post basis. Not only that, but you’ll be able to set up rules for search engine robots like follow, nofollow, index, and noindex, among others. Rest assured, Google won’t penalize you with this plugin.

 

404 Redirected

Unfortunately, many business owners who own and operate websites don’t keep tabs on their broken links as much as they should. Think about it. Say that you’re reading an interesting article about investing on a business site. You click on a link assuming that it’ll direct you to something informative about your investments, but you get a 404 page instead. Mistakes like this can cause you to potentially lose new customers.

Not only does this look completely unprofessional, but it shows your readers that your website is shoddy. If your website is shoddy, then that likely leads them to believe your product or service is too.

Don’t fret, though, as the 404 Redirected plugin allows you to 301 redirect those bad links to working pages on your website. Not only will this redirect traffic to the right content, but it’ll pass PageRank to the correct pages.

 

Akismet

Spam deters people from visiting your website much like broken links do. And guess what—you’re going to unfortunately deal with a lot of spam in your website’s comment section on WordPress. Fortunately, though, there’s a solution. Not only is setting up Akismet easy, but it’ll fight spam with the strength of a thousand ban hammers.

 

BackupBuddy

Every business that has a website needs to have a way to back the content on it up regularly. Don’t take the Internet for granted, as there have been horror stories about people losing all their information without ever getting it back. With BackupBuddy, you can avoid becoming a victim and take matters into your own hands.

This plugin allows you to create partial or full backups of your WordPress website, including its core, its database, and all the plugins associated with it. If you run into an unfortunate situation when you need to restore your website’s information, this plugin will do so in a matter of minutes without your business losing a step.

 

WordPress Stats

Contact pages are a crucial page on any business website. It’s obviously where most potential customers go to get in contact with the business. So as well as having a user friendly and clean looking contact page like Fisher Investments does, you need a WordPress plug-in to be able to monitor where your visitors are going, how long they’re staying on each page for, to be able to determine the effectiveness of your website.

With WordPress stats, you can receive detailed statistics including page views, where your traffic is coming from, and what people are clicking when they’re on your website, like if they’re going to the contact page and for how long, to see how effective that page is. With that kind of in-depth data, you’ll be able to examine what you can do better and implement the necessary changes to make your website successful.

Do you know of any other plugins that can help a business’ online presence flourish? Share your thoughts below.

Joseph Stark
Joseph Stark
Joseph Stark Jr. is a freelance writer and blogger by day, focusing on technology and business. By night he is a tech junkie, gym member, and avid writer. He currently resides in Santiago, Chile where he continues to write and contribute to a number of high-profile blogs.

Would you recommend this article?

Share

Thanks for taking the time to let us know what you think of this article!
We'd love to hear your opinion about this or any other story you read in our publication.


Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

Featured Download

Latest Blogs

ITB in your inbox

Our experienced team of journalists and bloggers bring you engaging in-depth interviews, videos and content targeted to IT professionals and line-of-business executives.