wordpress plugins

10 best WordPress plugins for business in 2016

If you’ve just installed WordPress to begin creating yourself a new business website, you’re naturally going to want to find the best WordPress plugins and agency WordPress themes to make your site as effective as possible. For a business website, you’ll likely want to have your ultimate goal to be to collect sales leads that increase your revenue. However, to get that sales lead, you’ll need to figure out how to engage users and make them interact with your website and brand as much as possible.

There are a lot of WordPress plugins out there (over 44,000!), so figuring out which plugins you need can actually be a pretty cumbersome task. Even lists like these that offer the best plugins can be somewhat intimidating and unhelpful. You don’t need a list of 50 plugins that are useful– you just need to find the best 10. Identifying just a few plugins that will be helpful to you is smart because you don’t want to install a ton of plugins to your website. When you install a lot of plugins to a WordPress website, it tends to slow the site down. When your site slows, your user experience becomes poor and you also rank lower in search results. A bad user experience and bad search engine performance means that people are less likely to find and enjoy your website. This will lead to less sales leads (or less of whatever your primary goal is).

We’ve started this post out with a decent amount of writing, and think that we should probably dive into what you want to know: the best WordPress plugins for business.

1. Yoast SEO

Best WordPress Plugins Yoast SEO

Whenever we create a new blog or website, one of the first, if not THE first plugin that we install is the Yoast SEO plugin. We love using Yoast so much that we think it should just automatically come installed with WordPress.

Yoast makes optimizing your web pages and blog posts for SEO immensely easy. If you use this plugin well, it could end up significantly increasing your revenue. When your revenue is increased through simple SEO best practices, you’ve essentially found a free way to earn more money for your business.

Additionally, Yoast has the functionality to help you make sure things look good on social media. You have an easy place to upload a photo for Facebook and Twitter, while also writing titles and descriptions for both platforms.
Yoast is an absolute must-have plugin for any WordPress website. Click here to download it.

2. SumoMe

Best WordPress Plugins SumoMe

We use SumoMe at LeadBoxer and highly recommend it. SumoMe makes it so that you can effectively build a strong email list, understand how people are using your website better, and more.

The best way to describe SumoMe is that it is an all-in-one website traffic tool. This plugin gives you the tools to generate new website traffic, understand your web traffic, and make people come back to your website many times. Making it easier to turn website visitors into a recurring website is important for a business and it’s how you build a strong brand that has increased sales.

Click here to download it.

3. LeadBoxer

Best WordPress Plugins LeadBoxer

Our third plugin on this list may appear to be a shameless plug, but it’s a genuine suggestion that will help you increase your revenue. Using LeadBoxer will help you increase your revenue by giving you a real understanding of who is using your website. When you know who (which people and businesses) are on your website, your sales team knows who to reach out to and how to better interact with sales leads.

A sales team and marketing team that is more informed leads to big business results over time. LeadBoxer makes these teams more informed by effectively making website traffic not (or less) anonymous. For example, you may notice that Apple keeps visiting your website and then your contact page but never seems to reach out to you. This means that they’re likely very interested in what you offer. When you see this pattern arise, you know that you should try to reach out to Apple to work with them.

Click here to download LeadBoxer.

4. Disqus

Best WordPress Plugins Disqus

Disqus is the most widely commenting plugin for WordPress. It’s a great choice for you when trying to improve the commenting on your website. You would want a great commenting system because commenting is a way for people to engage with you, your brand, and other customers. Disqus makes it easy to comment, making it easier for you to grow your business using your blog or website.

Click here to download Disqus.

5. Zapier

Best WordPress Plugins Zapier

We greatly enjoy Zapier and have even created our own Zapier integration. Making Zapier a part of your WordPress blog is an amazing way to automate your digital marketing efforts. Adding Zapier to your blog actually isn’t a WordPress plugin, but it’s actually an integration that you enable on the Zapier website.

Zapier automates import digital marketing efforts. For example, when you post a new blog post to your WordPress website, you can make it so that Zapier automatically triggers an email newsletter to be sent about your post, Tweets to get scheduled, Facebook posts to get scheduled, and much more.

Click here to learn about the Zapier integration for WordPress.

6. Beacon

Best WordPress Plugins Beacon

The Beacon plugin is perhaps one of the best marketing resources available for WordPress. Interestingly, it’s not that widely known, which makes these extra fun resources for you to utilize to get results.

Beacon is a WordPress plugin that makes it so that you can turn your blog posts into ebooks in just a few minutes.

Creating ebooks is valuable because they are a tool that can be used to grow an email list and often even become a physical marketing aspect that is passed around offices.

To download Beacon, click here.

7. W3 Total Cache

Best WordPress Plugins W3 Total Cache

Speed is an important part of a website. When a website is fast, users are happy and your rank higher in search engines.

W3 Total Cache will help you speed up your site and boost your results. This plugin is the highest-rated and most comprehensive WordPress performance plugin. It will drastically improve the speed of your website. You can add a browser cache, page cache, add Javascript and CSS minify, integrate a content delivery network (CDN), and more.

Learn more or download W3 Total Cache here.

8. Click to Tweet

Best WordPress Plugins Click to Tweet

Click to Tweet is a simple WordPress plugin that boosts Twitter sharing. The plugin makes it so that your content can easily be Tweeted by readers. The plugin allows you to highlight nuggets of information in your post, and then when a person clicks the highlighted test they have the option to Tweet out that info with a link to your page or post. When it’s easier for people to share your content, the more often they will share it.

Click here to learn more about Click to Tweet and download it.

9. Visual Composer

Best WordPress Plugins Visual Composer

Visual Composer is a plugin that allows you to build pages in WordPress in a drag-and-drop way. Even designers often opt to use Visual Composer because it’s a powerful tool that offers a great amount of flexibility design-wise.

There isn’t too much to say about this plugin besides what we’ve said above. It’s a highly effective drag-and-drop WordPress page design tool that both designers and non-designers will find immense value in.

Click here to go to the Visual Composer website.

10. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Best WordPress Plugins Related Posts

That last plugin that we are going to recommend in this post is called Yet Another Related Post Plugin. This plugin is great because it helps keep people engaged with your website and browsing more pages. When people stay on your site longer, they have a greater amount of time to form a relationship with your brand.

The ultimate goal of a related posts plugin is to increase page views, and this plugin does that very well.

Click here to download it.

Should we add an eleventh or twelve plugins to this list? Let us know in the comments if you think there’s a plugin that should be here.