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Having a website for your small business is a must in today’s world, but there are a few important elements you must consider in order to get the most out of it. SEO (Search Engine Optimization), security, and web based forms are just some of the features that can help make your website stand out from the competition.
Luckily, there are a few free WordPress plugins that can help supercharge your small business website. These plugins offer a range of features, from helping you improve your SEO to adding extra security to your website. They also provide easy-to-use forms to help you capture more leads. Here are 6 free WordPress plugins that can help you take your small business website to the next level and get the most out of your online presence.
What are WordPress Plugins?
WordPress plugins are add-ons that enable you to extend the functionality of WordPress. Since WordPress is an open source platform, developers have been able to create plugins that extend its functionality.
WordPress plugins can come in all shapes and sizes, and some are more useful than others. There are also WordPress plugins that extend the functionality of other websites, enabling you to build your own online business presence. While some may be more useful than others, they can all be a great addition to any WordPress site.
NOTE: We recommend using tested, secure and recently updated plugins on live websites. Don’t use old and outdated WordPress plugins and also don’t use every single plugin you can install on your site. That will most certainly cause performance and speed issues. Also, you will need to keep these plugins updated every week or so when patches come out.
Six10 Digital can help you with that! Contact us for more details about our WordPress Care Plans.
Benefits of Using WordPress Plugins
- Easy to customize: As WordPress plugins are add-ons that enable you to extend the functionality of WordPress, they are easy to customize. You can modify them to suit your needs and meet your business goals.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Being able to custom your on-page SEO elements is key when running a WordPress website. The more content you have on your site, the more Google will be able to crawl, rank, and offer your website in search results. Having an optimized site for SEO improves your chances of ranking higher in Google. You can also use SEO plugins to help improve the SEO of your website.
- Security: Security is another important consideration when it comes to website presence. If someone were to try to hack your website, they would need to be able to access your server to do so. That means they would need to be able to log in to your server. WordPress plugins can greatly increase your security by preventing unauthorised access to your website.
6 of Our Recommended WP Plugins – that are free
While there are many WordPress plugins you can install for your business website, these six are some of the best options you can use to supercharge your small business website (and we use them in our development builds).
RankMath SEO
It’s important for your site to rank in Google, and the first step is optimizing the title, meta description, and social graph site and pages. Rankmath is one plugin that we definitely install on all site builds and comes in both a free version and paid Pro version for more features. Most of the time you can get away with using the standard version of Rankmath to quickly and easily update your on-page SEO.
Wordfence Security
With all the dangers out there today, it’s more important than ever to ensure the security of your small business WordPress website. That’s where Wordfence Security comes in, an easy-to-use and fully integrated security plugin. With Wordfence, you can easily create login pages and track visitor access to your site. You can also protect your site from brute-force login attempts, malicious code exploits, and other malware or hacking attempts. Wordfence also will actively block IP addresses after a customized threshold of failed, or invalid, login attempts.
There is a premium version of the plugin which we have used a handful of times, but the free version works just fine and is sufficient for what’s needed for the majority of WordPress websites.
wsForm
Web forms are a great way to collect data from your customers and wsForm Lite is our TOP choice for a WordPress form solution. However, we do want to mention that we use the fully paid PRO version of wsForms that gives you way more features and addons.
In general, WordPress forms can help you collect some important information about your business, including their contact information, interests ,etc. With wsForm, you can easily create beautiful, responsive, and accessible web forms on your site. If you need more customization options, upgrade to the Pro version and you’ll be amazed at all the awesome things you can do with wsForm. Here’s a few of those awesome-things:
- all forms are Accessibility friendly
- Conditional logic
- email validation
- form field repeaters (an easy way to allow your web visitor to enter one or more repeating field sets – super great feature!)
- conversational and multi-step forms
- the list can go on!
Image Optimization Plugin
We are split between using EWWW Image Optimization or ShortPixel Image Optimiser, so we’ll include a write up about the benefits of using an image optimization plugin and you can check out each on your own time.
Using an image optimization WordPress plugin like EWWW or ShortPixel can provide several benefits, including:
- Improved website performance: Image optimization plugins can reduce the size of images on your website, which can help improve website loading times and overall performance. This can result in a better user experience and improved search engine rankings.
- Reduced storage space: By reducing the size of images on your website, image optimization plugins can help you save on storage space. This can be particularly useful if you have a large number of images on your website.
- Improved SEO: Search engines take into account website loading times when determining search engine rankings. By improving website performance, image optimization plugins can help improve your SEO.
- Faster backups: If you use backups for your website, reducing the size of images can also help speed up the backup process.
- Automatic optimization: Image optimization plugins can be set up to automatically optimize images as they are uploaded to your website. This can save you time and ensure that all images on your website are optimized for performance.
Overall, using an image optimization WordPress plugin like EWWW or ShortPixel can provide several benefits that can help improve the performance, SEO, and overall user experience of your website.
WP-Optimize
WordPress is great at serving up content to your readers, but it can be a bit slow. That’s where WP-Optimize comes in, an easy-to-use plugin that optimizes your site to ensure it loads quickly. Better yet, it won’t slow down during regular updates like other plugins do.
The caching plugin does these three things (according to their plugin page)
- It allows you to clean and optimize your database.
- It gives you the option to compress your images.
- It allows you to cache your pages, for super fast load times (read more caching information below).
Conclusion
It’s important to remember that your website is one of your most important marketing tools for your small business. In order for it to reach its full potential, though, you need to make sure it’s as optimized as possible. That means making sure it loads quickly, doesn’t have viruses on it, and is fully secured. You can do this by using the best WordPress plugins available.
These plugins can help you ensure your website has the maximum amount of SEO and security, making it a great place for visitors to find and stay on your site. They can also help you create beautiful forms and collect valuable data from your customers.
There are a variety of plugins out there, and it can be difficult to find the best ones. If you want your small business website to be as strong as possible, though, you need to use the best WordPress plugins available.
