If you are even remotely interested in web design and development you must have at least heard of WordPress. Since its introduction in 2003 WordPress has established itself as a user friendly blogging platform and reliable CMS (Content Management system) for personal and business websites. According to data from April 2016, 26% of of the top 10 million websites. That in itself is a really high number, but let’s just mention that more than 60 million web pages uses WordPress as CMS. This can be addressed to its ease of use, open source nature and maybe most importantly plethora of themes and plug-ins available around the Internet. Further on in this article we’ll introduce you to just a few essential plug-ins that will make your business web page flourish with functionality.
Woo Commerce
Woo Commerce is the closest thing to having a perfect e-commerce plug-in. This website extension makes it easier for owners to sell items, products and merchandise from the site itself. It has features that offer discounts, free shipping, PayPal payments integration and cash on delivery. The Woo Commerce plug-in also has option to allow front end users to write product reviews on the e-commerce pages of the site. Using this plug-in in co-operation with WordPress is most likely the easiest way of setting up your web shop without much of programing knowledge.
Simple Sitemap
Google’s web master guide suggests that websites should submit their site map to web master tools. This is so that it would be easier for spiders to index the links required to improve organic traffic and indexation rate. This also automates the update of the site map every time a new post is published. This is where Simple Sitemap comes into play. Its tag line, “The simplest responsive HTML sitemap available for WordPress”, actually stands correct. It is easy to use, requires no setup and it’s highly flexible and customizable. Your visitors will have handy overview of all content on your site, while you will improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well.
Google Analytics WD
To be able to keep track of the progress of your website in terms of traffic, Google Analytics WD should be used by the administrators. It adds Google Analytics tracking code to your website with option of easy customize its behavior in order to fit your needs as best as possible. With possibility to generate reports on practically any property you might think of Google Analytics WD is easily one of the most useful plug-ins, no matter if you use it for personal or business web page.
Social Media Auto Publish
No matter of what’s your opinion about the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and rest of social networks is, it’s undeniable that many people use it on daily basis. Having that in mind, it’s easy to understand why you shouldn’t miss the chance to market your content and products on such networks as often as possible. Through this plugin, you’ll be able to automatically post your new content on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, with additional image to give your post most needed visibility on timelines. This means less time manually pasting individual links on the business accounts and more time to devote to more urgent matters in running your business.
Yoast SEO
On the market since 2008, this plug-in has gained much popularity among users for easy integration and functionality. Yoast SEO will take care of all the technical optimization and will guide you how to write better optimized content in general. Through snippet preview, Yoast SEO will let you know how your page will look among Google search results, will give you guidance on your meta description and so on. This is overall really useful plug-in with plethora of functions that you might not appreciate at start, but will grow to like it as you learn more about SEO in general.
These plug-ins are just some of the most useful that every serious business site will have use of. But no matter what type of site and business you are running, keep in mind that you can always expand and adjust functionality of your web site with appropriate plug-ins. All plug-ins described above, as well as many others, are available on the official WordPress plug-ins page.
