A few years ago we posted an article called The Best 10 WordPress Plugins for Your Website (which you can revisit by clicking here). So much has changed since that article was published! WordPress has rolled out even more plugins for business owners who take their website and online marketing strategies seriously, or who want to take their content to the next level.
If you want to take your marketing to the next level right now, having a WordPress website package from our company can help, since once paid for it’s all yours. Before we go ahead with producing your new business website, we thought it would be worth the time digging into these 10 extra WordPress plugins that could really help your website out going forward.
- Envira Gallery
For anyone who wants to feature embedded videos on their business website but they don’t have a YouTube account or other means of video marketing (yet…here are a few reasons to change that!), Envira Gallery is one of the best plugins for featuring video content on your website. Not only does it support videos from YouTube, but also you can use videos from Wistia as well as self-hosted WordPress videos. There are plenty of advanced options for how you want the videos to look online, and you can either use a shortcode or drag and drop the widget into any area of the site where it’s ready for a gallery to display.
- SeedProd
Do you need to let people know your website is still in development if they visit it? SeedProd is considered to be the best WP maintenance mode and ‘coming soon’ page plugin to date. It can be used to create some beautiful Coming Soon landing pages while your website is under construction, and it can help your site collect leads and grow your followers even when and if it’s not yet available. It comes with a countdown timer, social media integration, email marketing service integration, and tons of templates to choose from.
- G Suite
This is a very popular array of web applications to help everyone stay on track with web development and all of the other related projects involved. Created by Google, this set of office applications is inexpensive, easy to start using, and hassle-free, consisting of email, spreadsheets, documents, and so on. It allows you to use professional email addresses with your own business domain name right inside of Gmail.
Alternatively, you can also get business email hosting from us by signing up for a VPS hosting package, or use Microsoft Office 365.
- LiveChat
Do you get a lot of customers wanting to talk to you in real time online? LiveChat is the best live virtual chat support software for both business and ecommerce websites. It allows you to add live chat to your WordPress website, and once activated it is incredibly easy to use. There are a ton of customization options for it and it even comes with a mobile app so you can provide real-time support. It can easily integrate with your currently existing support software, email marketing, CRM tools, and more. Best of all, it loads fast and offers an excellent user experience.
- Grammarly
A must if you’d rather not spend so much time proofreading your content even post-launch of your website. Grammarly’s premium packages give you the full extent of where to best improve your written content, including plagiarism detection. Even its free version comes with some excellent writing assistance, such as vocabulary enhancement, typo detection, and more. If you’re serious about your content marketing strategy and ensuring each piece of content is well-written prior to publication and distribution online, this plugin is worthwhile.
- Editorial Calendar
It’s very easy to get so caught up in creating new content for your blog that you may end up forgetting about scheduling future posts as well as other content management steps. Overall, these tasks matter as much as the words you write and post on your website.
That’s why now, there are plugins such as the Editorial Calendar to help you better manage your content. With it, you can view all of your posts, drag and drop them into different schedule slots, access their publication status easily, and use several tools to manage posts if there are different authors involved. If you’re serious about your content strategy for your business going forward, this plugin will help ensure that it’s shared with your audience every time, at the right time.
- Broken Link Checker
Don’t you hate coming across a link or image on your website that doesn’t work? The Broken Link Checker is a simple yet easily accessible means of identifying links that are not functioning the way they should on your website. You can check at a glance which links need to be fixed and where they are located, and you can set up the plugin so that you are notified of when something goes wrong by e-mail. With this plugin, you can easily find and fix any links and pictures that aren’t working properly before your customers do.
- Mailchimp for WordPress
If e-mail marketing is a part of your content strategy, this plugin can be easily set up on your website and features lots of display options for future newsletter campaigns. Once you’ve activated the plugin and entered the API key from your Mailchimp account into the plugin, your Mailchimp data will be accessible from the settings screen. There, you can determine how many forms you want for opt-ins to your newsletter. You can customize all of the details from your e-mail list to the call to action, even specify the colours you want for the text and buttons and match it with your site’s colour scheme. The premium version allows you to further alter the look and feel of the sign-up option.
- Social Snap
Got a lot of content to share, but it seems like no one is reading it? It’s pretty well-known that if no one knows about your content, it won’t help you very much. That’s why adding features to your content such as Social Snap can help make your content stand out and, most importantly, be shared a lot more often. What’s great about Social Snap is that once activated, it will allow visitors to share your content across all of the modern social platforms known. With this plugin, you can add sharing buttons on both the desktop and mobile versions of your website, ensuring that readers will see the option to share at just the right time and making them more likely to follow through with sharing.
- Seriously Simple Podcasting
For any business that wants to start using this form of content marketing, the plugin is just that: seriously simple. Once you’ve finished recording your podcast, you can use this plugin which uses the native WordPress interface to get it up and running on your website with minimal time and effort. The plugin allows multiple podcasts to run from a single website, and each one comes with its own RSS feed. The plugin also supports both audio and video podcasting if you prefer one medium over the other. In addition, several custom options are available in terms of presenting the video and colour choices, as well as YouTube compatibility so you can present your podcast over several other channels and grow your audience as a result.
Want these installed? Let us know
While these are all great suggestions it’s worth noting that the best way to ensure your website functions at its best is to make sure everything is tested prior to site launch—that goes for all plugins too. Depending on your site’s state currently, it’s way easier and way less expensive to have a new site built with these plugins installed from the get-go than it would be to install them after the fact. Keep in mind that while some of these listed plugins are usually available free of charge, you won’t get the full benefits unless you pay for pro or premium versions.
Still, if you really like the sound of these plugins, you want your business’s website to be WordPress-based, or you know enough about a website’s importance and want to get started, let us know by giving us a call. We can build you a beautiful, fast, and smooth-running website with all of the ideal features you’re looking for.