Wordpress is amazing for building business blogs and websites from the ground-up. According to stats, it is by far the most popular CMS out there, used by small businesses as well as large multinationals and corporations to power their online presence.
We’ve spoken in length about how easy it is to set up a Wordpress website for your business on Wordpress. And if you’ve already set up your business website on Wordpress using our guide, it might be time to have a look at some of these excellent, must-have (free and premium) Wordpress plugins for business websites and blogs that you should be using.
1. Wordpress SEO by Yoast
(Free | Download)
When it comes to business blogs, SEO is essential. You want maximum visibility for your website, as well as the ability to get traffic on your website, and in order to get that you need high search engine rankings. Yoast’s Wordpress SEO is easily one of the best Wordpress SEO plugins for all kinds of blogs out there – including business blogs and websites. It’s free, really simple to use, and allows you to easily optimize your website for search engines.
2. Thrive Content Builder
(Free | Download)
As a small business owner you probably have some product or service you are selling. With the default Wordpress install, creating a fancy product page with beautiful pricing tables, testimonials and call to actions is a difficult, if not impossible challenge for someone who doesn’t know how to code.
Enter Thrive Content Builder, a wordpress plugin that seamlessly integrates with your chosen Wordpress theme. It features a replacement Wordpress editor that allows you to drag and drop elements on your page and see how it looks in real-time. It’s easy to use, and the best way for you to design the next sales page for your site.
(Full Thrive Content Builder review)
3. SEOpressor
(Starting at $5 per month | Download)
Easily one of the best SEO plugins for Wordpress! SEOpressor is essential when it comes to optimizing your website for search engines and getting strong rankings in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). SEOpressor takes care of a lot of the on-page and off-page SEO optimization for you. It performs keyword analysis and optimization (LSI), does automatic smart-linking and over-optimization checks, for instance, and much much more. It’ll integrate your content with social mediums such as Facebook, enhancing your credibility and giving you a nice SERP boost as well. An excellent plugin.
4. Content Aware Sidebars
(Free | Download)
Don’t get me wrong, I love Wordpress for many reasons – flexibility being one of them. However Wordpress can be a bit, well, non-flexible at times. And that where plugins come in! Content Aware Sidebars is a free plugin that lets you create a unlimited amount of sidebars or widget areas anywhere on your website and assign them to specific pages, posts or so on. You can then essentially place widgets anywhere on your pages, which is something Wordpress doesn’t allow you to do otherwise.
5. Backup Buddy
(Starting at $80 per year | Download)
Backups are important for your business website, essential rather. You need something that allows you to easily backup your website, all backups should be completely secure and easily restorable if something goes wrong. Enter Backup Buddy, an amazing and comprehensive premium Wordpress plugin that allows you to just that, and more! You can create full and complete backups of your Wordpress-powered business website, and even save them anywhere, including your webhost, or cloud-services such as Dropbox.
(Alternatives: Wordpress Backup to Dropbox)
6. Contact Form 7
(Free | Download)
A Contact Us page is essential for any business website – it lets your customers, clients as well as visitors to easily and quickly get in touch with you. Contact Form 7 is the most popular form-creating plugin for Wordpress. This free plugin lets you create different, highly-customizable contact forms, customize them, and have the contents of the form mailed to you easily. The plugin comes with Ajax-powered submissions, spam filtering as well as CAPTCHA.
(Alternatives: Â Contact Form)
7. Digg Digg
(Free | Download)
Social media integration is absolutely essential for your business website, and for that, you need a plugin that capable and up to the task. Digg Digg is a simple, easy-to-use, customizable and free social-sharing Wordpress plugin that adds a ‘social buttons’ box on your website. The plugin comes with the option of putting a floating social buttons share bar on your website, ala Mashable. You can change the location of this box, add which social buttons you want displayed, and completely customize it as well. Social buttons include all popular social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Reddit, and many many more. This integrates your business website with social networking websites, and allows your visitors to share your content on these websites as well.
(Alternatives: ShareThis | Shareaholic)
8. Testimonials by Aihrus
(Free | Download)
Do you sell something on or off your website, perhaps products or services? Then your business website should have a place where your customers and clients can post their testimonials. Testimonials by Aihrus is an excellent plugin which allow you to display testimonials and reviews anywhere on your Wordpress business website along with images or videos. You can insert testimonials via shortcodes, theme functions or widgets.
(Alternatives: Easy Testimonials)
9. 404 Redirected
(Free | Download)
Broken links are bad for business as well as for the health of your website. If a visitors is browsing your website, he or she expects all links to be functional and go to the page where they’re supposed to. Bad or broken links are not only bad from link-juice perspective (page rank isn’t passed where it is supposed to be passed), it looks unprofessional and portrays a bad image of your business in the eyes of customers and clients, who may assume that if your website is broken, so is your business, product and/or your service. the 404 Redirected plugin for Wordpress will redirect those bad links to the right place easily.
10. W3 Total Cache
(Free | Download)
Last but not the least, W3 Total Cache easily ranks as one of the most essential and important plugins for business websites. It instantly improves website performance by giving a nice kick to your website’s overall loading speed and page load-times, which as a result also improves your Google search result rankings and makes browsing your business website a much faster and better experience for your customers and clients.
(Alternatives: W3 Super Cache)
Great set of plugins for business websites. Yoast SEO plugin is a must for any WordPress site. What are your thoughts on CommentLuv?
Ah yes of course, CommentLuv is an excellent plugin as well, especially for business websites. One of the best comment plugins out there in my opinion. Thanks for your feedback!