Small businesses face a lot of challenges. They have to compete with larger businesses, be efficient, and stand out from the crowd.
Luckily, some WordPress plugins can help with most of these challenges, giving small business owners the time and freedom to focus on more important things.
WordPress plugins can help design unique websites. They can help improve efficiency, and promote your business on social media while you focus on creating content, making connections and writing emails.
If you’re looking for some of the best WordPress plugins that you must have as a small business, your search ends here! This post has all you need for your small business website.
Before we jump in, we need to understand what the important features are that a small business website should have.
What are the most important features of a small business website?
Before you begin installing plugins, you need to know what features are important to most small business websites.
From there, you can choose the features that matter the most to you and then jump to finding the right plugins for that feature.
This will reduce the effort that you’d otherwise spend trying every single plugin out there.
1. An attractive design
Designing an attractive website for your small business does not have to be complicated or expensive. There are many simple design elements that can make a big impact on the overall look and feel of your site.
Color choice: One of the most important aspects of website design is choosing the right colors.
The colors you use on your site should be complementary to one another and should also reflect the overall tone of your business.
For example, if you are a law firm, you might want to use serious colors like navy blue or black. On the other hand, if you are a florist, you might want to use brighter, more vibrant colors.
Website layout: The layout of your site should be easy to understand and use.
Navigation should be clear and concise, and visitors should be able to find the information they are looking for easily.
Remember, first impressions count, so make sure your site makes a good one!
Typography: Your choice of fonts decides how people perceive your website. We want to ensure that the typography appeals to the audience we’re catering to.
For example, if you’re selling kids’ toys, using a few funky fonts and designs may be just perfect. The same cannot be said if you’re operating in a more serious niche like business technology.
If you can’t think of the right font combinations, stick to the basics and go with a sans font for your entire website or, if you want variety, add a sans-serif font for headings.
2. Product and service information
Many small business websites do not provide enough information about the products and services they offer.
As a result, potential customers may not be able to find what they are looking for, or they may not be able to understand what the product or service is.
To make sure that your website provides enough information about your products and services, you should include the following:
By including this information, you will be able to give potential customers the information they need to decide whether or not to buy from you.
3. Ability to purchase products and services
One of the key advantages of a business website is that it provides an easy way for customers to purchase your products and services online. This can be a great convenience for both your customers and your business, as it can save time and money.
Customers can browse your site, select the items they want and pay for them using a secure payment gateway. This can be a great way to boost sales and increase customer satisfaction.
eCommerce can slowly turn into your main channel for sales as it does not limit how far and wide you can market your products. With a website, your audience is no longer restricted to the people living around your store and you can now reach out to global audiences!
4. Contact pages
Every business should have some way for customers to get in touch with them. The best way to do this is to include a contact form on your website.
This will allow customers to send you a message without having to leave your site. You can also include your email address on your contact page so that customers can reach you that way.
Either way, make sure you have some way for customers to get in touch with you online. It will make it easier for them to do business with you.
5. Strong SEO and online presence
Setting up a website is one part of the equation. You need to then spend time ensuring people can find your page through search. This is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
There are two key ways to optimize your website for the search: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.
On-page optimization includes things like keywords and making sure your website’s title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags are all optimized. This helps improve your ranking in search results.
Off-page optimization is more about promoting your website and its content through things like link building and social media. By promoting your website on other websites and on social media, you can help improve your ranking in search results.
Both on-page and off-page optimization are important for helping people find your website.
6. Email and social media marketing
It’s important to have a strong presence on both email and social media. By utilizing both channels, you can reach a wider audience and ultimately drive more sales.
Email marketing is a great way to keep in touch with your customers and promote new products or services. Plus, it’s relatively inexpensive and easy to set up.
Social media is a great way to connect with potential customers and create a rapport with them. It’s also a great platform for sharing content and promoting your brand.
Ultimately, both email marketing and social media are important tools for small businesses. By utilizing both, you can reach more people, promote your brand, and drive more sales.
7. Automation
Automation can help you optimize your time and resources. By automating some of the tasks associated with running your website, you can free up your time to focus on other areas of your business.
Here are just a few of the ways that automation can help you run your small business website more efficiently:
By automating some of the tasks associated with running your small business website, you can free up your time to focus on other areas of your business.
8. Cost-effectiveness
We recommend businesses have a website. Your customers expect you to have a website and some form of social media presence too. However, the cost of building and maintaining a hand-coded website may be too high for small businesses.
Lucky for us, that’s not the only way to build websites!
The most cost-effective way to set up a small business website is to use a content management system (CMS) like WordPress.
With WordPress, you have thousands of free themes and plugins available. They help extend functionality and design beautiful websites without requiring design and coding experience.
Just get a highly flexible theme like Astra and pair it with Starter Templates for hundreds of beautifully designed templates.
Use Elementor for its drag-and-drop site builder interface and you’ll be designing professional websites in no time!
Top 15 must-have WordPress plugins for small businesses
WordPress plugins can help you save time and money, and improve your website’s functionality and appearance.
Let’s now look at the 15 must-have WordPress plugins for small businesses.
1. Starter Templates
One important thing that’s often overlooked is having a well-designed website. You’ll see a lot of small business websites that are halfway done, have buttons that lead nowhere, or they’re not properly customized for mobile screens. And, if you’re just getting started, building your website from scratch can be daunting.
That’s where Starter Templates come in.
Starter Templates is a huge library of pre-made website templates that you can customize to fit your brand. They are a great way to get a professional-looking website up and running quickly, without spending a lot of time or money.
After you take the time to find a good template, just add your photos, text, and branding and your website are ready to go!
Here’s what Starter Templates can do for your business:
If you’re starting a small business, Starter Templates are a great way to get your site up and running quickly and easily, without breaking the bank.
Elementor is a powerful WordPress plugin that allows small businesses to easily create and manage their website content. It provides a visual drag and drop interface, making it easy to design custom web pages without having to code.
With Elementor, you can create professional-looking websites in minutes. Additionally, it includes a wide range of features and options, allowing small businesses to create sophisticated websites without spending a lot of money.
Elementor is an essential tool for small businesses that want to create a professional website on a budget. It is easy to use, packed with features, and relatively inexpensive.
If you are running a small business, Elementor is a plugin that you cannot afford to be without.
Here’s what Elementor can do for your business:
While it offers a lot of different elements by default, you can create even more advanced layouts, gradients and animated headings with the help of Ultimate Addons for Elementor.
So if you want to create stunning websites on a budget, Elementor + Ultimate Addons for Elementor is all you’d need!
The more streamlined your business is, the more efficient it is. You can spend the extra time on scaling your business further, finding ways to improve your sales, optimizing your funnels, or maybe even creating new products.
Setting up an online store is the most powerful way to make things more efficient.
WooCommerce and CartFlows are important for small businesses because they help to streamline the process of setting up an online store. When you set up your website as a WooCommerce store, you can list your products and enable online sales.
But you need to do more to get sales.
CartFlows helps you convert more of your visitors into customers through automated funnels, email sequences, and other powerful strategies that you can easily configure from your dashboard.
By automating some of the tasks involved in setting up and managing an online store, the plugin makes it easier for you to focus on other aspects of your business.
In addition, both WooCommerce and CartFlows offer a wide range of features and extensions that can be used to customize the store to meet the needs of your business.
Here’s what CartFlows can do for your business:
CartFlows is a solid platform for small businesses. If you are looking to streamline your operations, then it is definitely worth considering.
Small businesses need to be able to communicate with their customers easily and WPForms makes that possible.
By creating forms that are easy to use and mobile-friendly, you can allow customers to get in touch with you easily.
WPForms integrates with popular CRM software like Salesforce and Constant Contact. This makes it easy to manage your customer relationships.
Here’s what WPForms can do for you:
If you’re running a small business, WPForms is a must-have tool. It makes it easy to communicate with your customers and get the information you need to run your business effectively.
Give WPForms a try today and see how it can help you connect with your customers and grow your business.
Small business owners have a lot on their plate. They’re often responsible for everything from marketing and sales to product development and customer service.
While you may not have the same resources as larger businesses, you still need to find ways to reach and engage your target audiences.
Enter Convert Pro.
Convert Pro is an all-in-one conversion optimization tool that helps small businesses increase website traffic and conversions.
It comes with a suite of powerful features that make it easy to create high-converting forms, popups, and other lead capture forms. Best of all, it’s easy to use and doesn’t require any coding knowledge.
Here’s what Convert Pro can do for your business:
So if you’re a small business owner who’s looking for a way to get more leads and sales, Convert Pro is well worth considering.
PrestoPlayer is a powerful video player that offers a number of great benefits for small businesses. The platform makes it easy to upload and manage your videos, so you can easily promote your products or services.
It offers powerful features like splitting videos into chapters, uploading to multiple servers so the video is served from the fastest one available, and CDN support for smooth content delivery.
Here’s what PrestoPlayer can do for your business:
Overall, PrestoPlayer is an excellent video player that can help small businesses improve their online presence.
The platform is easy to use and offers a number of great features that can benefit your business. If you’re looking for a way to improve your website’s video content, PrestoPlayer is definitely worth considering.
If you own a small business website, hosting a community forum can be a great value add to your business in the long run. While you can always run a community on Reddit or Facebook, these are not owned by you.
That’s where MemberPress can help.
As a small business, you can use MemberPress to build and manage your own community forum on your website. This way, you’re in control of everything and your community is always accessible to customers.
You can also redirect your Facebook and Reddit community members to your website’s forums for the added advantage of free existing traffic from these sites!
Here’s what MemberPress can do for you:
So if you’re looking for a way to add more value to your website, consider using MemberPress to build and manage your own community forum. It’s an investment that will pay off in the long run.
Yoast SEO is a must-have for small businesses serious about ranking higher in search engine results. It helps optimize your website for the right keywords and create XML sitemaps, which are essential for search engines to find and index all your website’s pages.
Yoast SEO makes it easy to get the traffic and customers your business needs to thrive.
Here’s what Yoast SEO can do for your business:
If you want to increase your traffic organically on your business website, Yoast SEO can simplify a lot of the technicalities!
If you’re like most small business owners, you rely on your website to bring in new customers and help grow your business. But if you have a lot of broken links on your website, it can make your site look unprofessional and give visitors a bad impression.
A broken link checker can help find and fix these problems so that your website looks its best.
It can be a huge time-saver, and it can help improve your website’s overall user experience.
Broken links can occur for many reasons, including:
A broken link checker is a valuable tool for small business owners who want to make sure their website is in tip-top shape. It can help you find and fix broken links, improve your website’s appearance, and boost your SEO.
So if you haven’t already, be sure to add a broken link checker to your website maintenance toolkit.
Schema Pro is an important tool for small business websites because it can help with website ranking and appearance in search results. With Schema Pro, you have more control over how your website looks to potential customers.
Additionally, creating rich snippets can further improve click-through rates from search results pages.
Here’s what Schema Pro can do for your business:
If you’re serious about marketing your small business online, Schema Pro is essential!
Websites are unfortunately prone to downtime. It’s an inescapable fact of technology and something we all need to mitigate against.
If you’re running a small business, the last thing you want is for your website to go down and lose customers. This is where UpdraftPlus comes in.
UpdraftPlus is a WordPress plugin that helps you keep your website backed up and running smoothly. It’s easy to use and comes with a variety of features that make it a must-have for any WordPress website.
It is the most popular backup plugin for WordPress, with over two million active installs.
Here are some of the things UpdraftPlus can do:
If you’re looking for an easy way to keep your WordPress site backed up and running smoothly, UpdraftPlus is the perfect solution.
Small business websites are easy hacking targets as they usually don’t have the budget to invest in top-notch security to keep hackers at bay.
iThemes Security protects your site with WordPress security features like two-factor authentication, malware scanning, and user activity logging.
With iThemes Security, you can rest assured knowing your small business website is secure from hackers. It provides features like two-factor authentication, malware scanning, and user activity logging to keep your site safe.
Here’s what iThemes Security can do for your business:
iThemes Security is the perfect solution for small businesses looking to secure their website from hackers. With its robust security features, iThemes Security will keep your site safe and sound.
Hubspot is a powerful marketing and sales tool that helps small business websites attract more visitors, convert leads into customers and close more sales.
It’s easy to use and offers a wide range of features, making it an essential tool for any small business looking to grow its online presence. Plus, it integrates with a variety of other business tools, making it even more versatile and valuable.
Here’s what Hubspot can do for your business:
When you need a powerful all-in-one marketing solution, Hubspot is a tool that’s worth putting first in your choice list.
14. Better Click to Tweet
If you’re a small business owner, you know that every little bit helps when it comes to promoting your business. What could be easier than using a Click to Tweet snippet in your content?
Just add a few words and a link, and people can tweet about your business with just a click.
Better Click to Tweet makes it easy to do just that with a simple shortcode. You can also make it easier for your audience to share some of the powerful, quotable snippets from your content on their Twitter account.
Here’s what Better Click to Tweet can do for your business:
So why not give Click to Tweet a try? It could be just the boost your small business needs.
WP Rocket is a powerful tool that can help small businesses improve their website performance. It can cache your pages and posts, compress your files, and optimize your images to load faster.
It also has a host of other features that can help boost your site’s speed and efficiency.
Overall, WP Rocket is an essential tool for any small business looking to improve their website performance and speed. It can make a huge difference in your website’s loading times, which can lead to improved user experience and higher search engine rankings.
Here’s what WP Rocket can do for your business:
So, if you’re looking for a way to improve your small business website, then WP Rocket is definitely worth considering. It’s an essential tool that can help you achieve better website performance, higher search engine rankings, and a better user experience.
There are plenty of reasons to use JetAppointments for small businesses. For one, it can help keep track of your customers and appointments more easily. Additionally, it can help reduce stressful no-shows or cancellations by providing a better way to communicate with customers about their upcoming appointments.
Finally, it can help improve customer satisfaction by ensuring that customers have a better experience when they visit your business.
Here’s what JetAppointment can do for your business:
All of these reasons can help increase revenue and improve the bottom line for small businesses. So if you’re not using JetAppointment, it’s time to start!
Small businesses have a lot to keep track of, and Pretty Links can help by organizing and managing links.
By shortening, tracking, and cloaking links, Pretty Links makes it easy to see which links are working well and where improvements can be made.
Pretty Links can also help small businesses track their affiliate links and see which ones are performing the best. By monitoring clicks and conversions, businesses can adjust their strategies to maximize their earnings.
Pretty Links integrates seamlessly with many popular WordPress themes and plugins. This makes it easy for small businesses to get started with Pretty Links and start seeing results.
Here’s what Pretty Links can do for your business:
So if you’re a small business owner looking for a way to streamline your link management and improve your affiliate earnings, Pretty Links is one plugin that you should definitely consider.
Here are a few more plugins that can help your small business website. While they’re not absolutely essential, they can be useful in certain situations.
1. LearnDash
LearnDash is perfect for small businesses because it allows you to create and manage your courses, learners, and progress all in one place. Plus, its features are designed to help you get the most out of your learning content and keep your learners engaged.
If you run an Edutech business, LearnDash can streamline your operations and help you deliver a better learning experience to your customers.
What’s more, LearnDash is affordable and easy to use, so you can get started right away without having to invest a lot of time or money.
Here’s what Learndash can do for your business:
So if you’re looking for a learning management system that can help you grow your business, LearnDash is a good choice.
Get started today and see how LearnDash can help you take your business to the next level.
AffiliateWP is one of the most popular affiliate management plugins for WordPress. It makes it easy for small businesses to add an affiliate program to their website and start growing their business by partnering with other businesses.
AffiliateWP also offers a suite of tools to help you manage your affiliates, track their sales, and pay commissions.
Here’s what AffiliateWP can do for your business:
If you’re looking for an easy way to add an affiliate program to your WordPress website, AffiliateWP is the plugin for you. Get started today and see how AffiliateWP can help you grow your business.
WPML is useful for small businesses because it allows you to easily manage multiple languages on your WordPress site. This can be extremely helpful if you have customers or clients who speak different languages, as it will allow you to easily provide them with content in their native language.
Additionally, WPML can help you reach a wider audience by making your site available in multiple languages.
This can help you attract more visitors and potentially generate more business.
Here’s what WPML can do for your business:
Overall, WPML can be a valuable tool for small businesses that need to manage multiple languages on their WordPress site.
Running a small business website can be a daunting task. There are so many things to think about and keep track of. But with the right tools, it can be just a little easier.
Of all the tools mentioned here, do take the time to identify the ones that perfectly match what you need. Fewer plugins are always better as you do not need to add all the functions that every other business has!
However, we’d highly recommend you focus on the design and appeal of your website which can be simplified using Starter Templates and Elementor.
Also, don’t forget to track your website traffic using Google Analytics. And take the time to choose the rest of the plugins from the list!
Which WordPress plugins do you already use and love for your small business website? Do you know of a plugin that we missed but would be great for other small businesses? Let us know in the comments below!
This content was originally published here.