My top ten must have WordPress plugins for small business, startups & entrepreneurs
The idea of building a website can be quite daunting, as I found out several years ago when I decided to build my first website. About 5 years ago now I needed to get a website built for my new business, I had created the business idea and now needed to promote that business to the world. So I started my journey as you do, by doing a google search. I found several local businesses that offer this service but they were either too expensive or simply lacked the ability to provide any semblance of customer experience.
After discussing my experience with a number of people, I found out that I could do it all myself for free and so the journey began. Fortunately for me, the introduction of open source code made the job a great deal easier than it was for the pioneers of website development, who had to grapple with endless amounts of script and coding. Today, with the many advances in website development, the job of building a website is a lot easier. Here is my number one tool
Open source code is the main reason for the growth and diversity of today's websites and one of the great benefits of open source is the proliferation of what are known as “plugins,” pre-written programs that have the ability to bolt on to your WordPress website with relative simplicity, due to the fact that they all speak the same language.
Hundreds of thousands of developers and code writers are creating brilliant programs to assist your website produce better results with just about anything you can think of. What's more, the majority of these plugins come with a limited free version, that for the small business owner or startups is usually quite adequate, until such time as you start getting real traction with your website traffic.
The top 10 must have plugins for small business, startups and entrepreneurs from my experience in building websites for myself and my clients are;
1 Jetpack
Is part of the same company as WordPress and therefore integrates seamlessly and brings a number of additional features, including; always-on security letting you know if your site goes down, providing social media sharing for posts and a built-in site accelerator for improved performance.
Major Benefit: Security and social sharing
2 Yoast
This is the world's favourite SEO plugin, and I am sure you have heard a lot about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), now you can pay a lot and be totally bambusaled by all the information out there on this topic. However, install Yoast and follow the instructions and you would have nailed about 85% of what you need to get started.
Major Benefit: Search Engine Optimisation
3 Smush
These guys have a number of great products on the market but what I like about them is there image compression plugin. Images are one of the main reason websites load slowly and that’s that’s the number one reason to leave the site before it even loads (bounce rate)
Major Benefit: Loading Speed
Total Cache is exactly that, it refers to the process of creating static versions of your content and serving that up when you visit a website saving on loading time. In addition, W3 also has many other performance optimisations features such as minify and compression of commonly used files.
Major Benefit: Loading Speed & performance
5 Updraft
The guys at Updraft have a great suite of products to help improve your website, however, my favourite is the backup system. They have the simplest one step back up, restore or transfer I have found. Now the free version is great but the paid version (from $42 USD) offers exceptional value. PRO TIP add the one drive option to the free version for $15 USD
Major Benefit: Scheduled backups
From the same company as Updraft, this plugin clears out unnecessary data and cleans up your data tables making them lean fast and thoroughly optimised. Most people forget about the database tables because they are quite removed however, they obviously have a big say in how your website performs.
Major Benefit: Database Performance & operational speed
Google and others are pushing to have SSL encrypted sites and it can appear to be difficult, but with this really simple SSL plugin, it is, really simple. Once you activate the plugin, it does 90% of things you need done automatically. Simply purchase a certificate from your hosting provider (we recommend Bluehost) and activate the plugin.
Major Benefit: Security
Every website has numerous internal and external links and as you know, there is nothing more annoying than clicking on a button, only to get a 404 or something similar. Well, link checker will scan your site and list all the possible issues and the good bit is, it shows you what they are and how to find them.
Major Benefit: better customer experience
This should really be further up the list because as far as security for your website goes, this plugin does just about everything and unlike some other popular security plugins, this is easy to use. The dashboard security meter and breakdown points make identifying trouble spots child’s play.
Major Benefit: Complete Security
This plugin is nice to have because it will pinpoint where your performance issues are and who you should contact to fix them, it's simple, quick and covers the major areas that can affect your website performance including; web hosting, plugins and WordPress.
Major Benefit: Performance, optimisation & security
Top ten must have Plugins
Reviewed by Swap Design
on
March 05, 2019
Rating:
Reviewed by Swap Design
on
March 05, 2019
Rating:
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