If you are looking to create a professional-looking yet easy-to-make website for your business, WordPress is the way to go today. WordPress powers almost 40% of the world’s websites on the internet in 2021. Big companies such as Sony Entertainment, Facebook, and even Disney have sites that are powered by WordPress.
What Is WordPress?
What makes WordPress unique is that it is the best platform that allows you to create sites for free and its open-source space creates more room for tweaks. What does open-source mean? Open-source software means you have the freedom to use, modify, build upon, and redistribute the software in any way you like.
It gets even better. Not only does it allow you to integrate with other platforms, but it also allows you to customize your site as you see fit in numerous ways.
Users with zero experience in creating websites or coding can easily put together a website for their business with simple steps. However, those who are avid coders or desire to add more functionality to their sites, have endless options to choose from using WordPress plugins.
Extended Functionality With Plugins
For business sites that require specialized functions related to their specific business needs, the WordPress plugins are an excellent way that business owners can use to increase the functionality of their sites.
Plugins are additional blocks of software that you can download that allow you to add extra features to your website. Free WordPress plugins only work with self-hosted WordPress sites. Hosted versions like wordpress.com offer other customizing options as well.
Best WordPress Plugins
WordPress has more than 55,000 plugins for you to utilize on your website. Various plugins exist for different features such as photo galleries, newsletters, e-commerce stores, membership sites, contact forms, carousels, and so forth.
The following is a list of the best WordPress service plugins for you to choose for your business site depending on the additional functionality you require.
Ninja Forms: Build Custom Forms
Whether it be submission forms, contact information forms, or registration forms, almost all business websites require some sort of form from its user to fill. Ninja Forms is one the most popular plugins for users for such purposes. The plugin for Ninja Forms comes with an editor that allows you to easily create a form with various fields.
Statcounter: Analyzing Site Traffic
When launching your business website, monitoring site traffic can be highly beneficial. The Statcounter plugin has made site monitoring so simple that you do not require a digital marketing expert to analyze the detailed view of your site visitors.
Statcounter’s Recent Activity feeds to show you a real-time, live feed of your visitors to see their location and system stats and understand their behavior and engagement.
Brianne, a regular user of the Statcounter plugin says,
“I’ve been using Statcounter now for around 13 years which is probably before WordPress and it’s been great. It keeps getting easier to set up and for WordPress, it couldn’t be easier. What I like in particular is that I can see the stats for all the websites I have running all on one page. Statcounter gives all the relevant information and I find it much easier to analyze the figures on Statcounter than I do on GA. On the odd occasion, I have a query, they are very quick to respond.”
Sucuri Security: Protecting Your Site And Acquired Data
Every website needs to be secure and safe for its users especially if personal information is being collected. The Sucuri Plugin service provides security to your site by protecting it from hacks and attacks and creating firewalls to protect it. It even allows you to scan your site for any malicious malware and to expose any security vulnerabilities that may exist.
wpDiscuz Comment Plugin: Analyzing Comments
If you would like to allow your users to stay connected with you, you need to make sure your website features a comment section. This will keep your views engaged and as well as provide you a chance to receive constructive criticism to improve your business experience for your consumers. One of the best WordPress services allows you to do just that.
WordPress’ wpDiscuz plugin version 7.0 has been launched recently with some additional features. Although there are too many options: below is a list of some of the best plugin features that wpDiscuz has to offer:
- Adds interactive comment box on posts and other content types
- Online commenting and feedback. Commenting on post content.
- Live Notification with real-time updating Comment Bubble.
- Full integration with Social Network Login plugins (Facebook, Twitter…)
- Subscribe to User / User Follow
- Highlighting new comments since the last visit with different background
- Secure and Anti-Spam features will not allow spammers to comment
WooCommerce: Online Shopping
WooCommerce is the world’s most popular open-source e-commerce solution. Anyone looking to create a professional-looking yet easy to create e-commerce storefront to display their products, the WooCommerce plugin allows you to do it easily on your own. With easy customization options and the option to own and control the data you collect, WooCommerce allows you to conveniently display physical and digital goods, product variations, custom configurations, instant downloads, and affiliate items.
NextGen Gallery: Creating Galleries
Launched in 2007, the NextGen Gallery plugin still is downloaded at least 1.5 million times each year. This plugin feature allows you to display images in a gallery for professionals creating sites related to photography, visual arts, and imaging.
The nextGen plugin lets you manage your gallery by uploading photos in batches, importing metadata, adding/deleting/rearranging and sorting photos, editing thumbnails, grouping galleries into albums and so much more.
Yoast: Optimize Your Website For SEO
Nowadays it is essential that your business website is optimized for search engines so that it can receive maximum traffic and appear high in search rankings by Google. The Yoast plugin service is one of the plugins to increase the engagement of your viewers and get more visitors to look at your site. A bonus feature allows complimentary access to the Yoast SEO Academy as well.
Conclusion
One of the biggest reasons for business owners to create websites using WordPress is because of the large number of plugins it provides. WordPress offers you some of the best WordPress service plugins, both free, and premium. This makes their use feasible for businesses with even a limited budget. Using these plugins can make your business experience for your consumers comfortable, engaging, and efficient, all at the same time.
