Whether your small business niche is plumbing, SEO services, or wedding planning, you want your small business’s website to meet your business goals.
One of the many benefits of using the WordPress platform is the ability to use plugins. They extend functionality and add essential features to help you grow your small business.
In this article, we’ll discuss ten plugins every small business website needs:
- Yoast SEO
- WordFence
- Social Warfare
- Akismet
- Checking broken links.
- Shared W3 Cache
- Optimizing, Compressing and Lazy Loading Smush Image
- Google XML Sitemaps
- Simple Authors Window
- Google Analytics Dashboard
Yoast SEO
Drive more visitors to your site and improve your search engine rankings with Yoast SEO
This SEO plugin for WordPress has millions of users worldwide and offers the necessary set of tools to satisfy search engine and user queries.
Below are some of the powerful features of the free SEO Yoast.
- Create an XML sitemap.
- Avoid duplicate content by specifying canonical URLs.
- Add a title and meta descriptions to enhance branding.
- Take control of your site’s breadcrumbs by defining major categories and defining taxonomy.
- Write SEO friendly text, including keywords and SEO snippets.
- Get SEO analysis and useful suggested results.
- Review the code snippet to show how your post or page will appear in search results.
- Optimize your site structure with internal links and content features.
- Control access to different sections of the plugin for teams or colleagues.
- Use the bulk editor to create large-scale edits.
SEO Yoast offers a premium version with even more options. They also offer paid tuition. Anyone can read helpful tips on their blog.
If your target audience can’t find you online, they won’t be able to buy your products or services. SEO Yoast helps your potential clients find you.
WordFence
WordFence makes your WordPress site harder to hack and protects it from potential hacks, brute force attacks, and other security vulnerabilities. WordFence will crawl your site, monitor and warn of suspicious or malicious behavior.
View your website’s security information from the dashboard, including status features, notifications, and attack statistics.
Some of the features of the free version include:
- Blocks and identifies malicious traffic using the web application firewall.
- Limits login attempts to protect against brute force attacks.
- Secures your website at the endpoint.
- Checks core files, plugins, themes, backdoors, invalid URLs, malicious redirects, SEO spam and code injection with a malware scanner.
- Warns of known potential security issues and vulnerabilities.
- Scans your files, comments and messages for suspicious content and dangerous URLs.
- Blocks administrator login when entering passwords. hacked.
There is also a premium version with additional security options and resources.
Social War
Social Warfare is a fast and attractive social media plugin. Unlike other plugins that can slow down your site, Social Warfare doesn’t.
It is not overloaded with unnecessary code and loads faster.
The plugin is easy to configure and allows users to customize the share buttons.
If you move or change your domain name, there is no need to worry about losing your existing social networks. The Social Warfare Stake Recovery feature protects your social proof and keeps your stakes count.
The free version of Social Warfare includes:
- social sharing buttons for major social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
- Counting the total.
- Click-to-tweet.
- Button layout.
- Content protection.
- Popular posts widget.
- Shortcodes.
The free version can be downloaded from the WordPress repository If you want advanced features, there is also a premium version.
Akismet Anti-Spam
Akismet automatically checks all comments on your site to filter out spam. Site owners can see which sites have been identified as spam in the comments section of the admin panel.
Akismet comes preinstalled in WordPress, but you need to activate it to use it. You will need an Akismet API key to use the plugin. Keys are free for personal use. Commercial and business sites must have a paid subscription.
Why is Akismet needed? You want to prevent hackers from creating new user accounts on your small business website. If they add spam hyperlinks, Google could fine you. This also includes spam comments.
See general statistics in the settings of your activated plugin. Click “Detailed Statistics” to see a breakdown by month.
Broken Link Checker
Broken links will hurt your search engine rankings Broken Link Checker will track your site for broken links and missing images. He will inform you if they are found.
With the Broken Link Checker, you can:
- see broken links in your content differently than other links if they are selected in the settings.
- Track links in comments, posts and pages.
- Edit broken links on plugin page.
The broken link checker is highly customizable. Change the settings in the plugin control panel.
Fixing broken links can improve user experience, decrease bounce rate, and increase page views.
Total W3 Cache
Website speed and user experience are important ranking factors for SEO. Web pages that take too long to load will lower your site’s search engine rankings. They will also create a negative experience for your users who don’t want to wait.
W3 Total Cache increases the performance of your site by increasing the loading speed. It creates cached HTML files so that visitors don’t have to wait for all of your site’s features to load every time they land on the page.
Image smoothing, slow loading, and compression
Large, unoptimized images take up a lot of space on your website, slow down your website speed and damage your search engine rankings.
Some of the many features and benefits of Smush include:
- Optimize your images while maintaining quality.
- Automate the image optimization process.
- Incorrect image dimensions detected.
- Compress any image in any directory.
Boost your rank with Smush to speed up loading of your small business website.
Google Maps XML
Every website needs a sitemap to tell search engines which pages and posts on your site to crawl.
If you’re using Yoast SEO, you don’t need a separate plugin. Google XML Sitemaps helps you create and load them without coding or using HTML.
With this sitemap, it is easier for search engine crawlers to see and extract your site structure.
In addition, every time you create a new post or page, search engines will receive a notification. The plugin is free for personal and commercial use.
Simple author box
For sites that employ multiple bloggers, Simple Author Box is a must. Easily add a mobile responsive box at the bottom of your blog posts.
Key features allow you to:
- customize options to match your brand design.
- Show author name, website, gravatar, description and social media icons.
- Automatically insert author field at the end of every post.
With the Simple Author Box, you can clearly distinguish between different authors on your site. The plugin is free, but if you need more features, you can upgrade to Simple Author Box Pro.
Google Analytics Dashboard
It’s important for small business owners to know how visitors get to your small business site, how long they stay, and which pages they go to.
Instead of logging into your Google Analytics account, track your stats and get detailed messages and page reports inside your WP installation using your Google Analytics dashboard.
Some of the robust features include the ability to:
- Easily track events.
- configure tracking parameters.
- use Google Tag Manager as an alternative to tracking code.
- View your analytics in real time right from your WP dashboard.
The Google Analytic Dashboard is compatible with multi-site installations.
One of the many reasons people choose to use WordPress for their websites is the ability to improve and customize it with plugins. Consider the plugins listed above to help your small business grow.
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