Managing a small business or startup in today’s highly competitive marketplaces comes with a slew of challenges. Fortunately, with WordPress, you have a full arsenal of tools at your disposal to help you rise to those challenges. In the next few minutes we’ll run through a number of tools that are essential small business WordPress plugins for doing just that: making the challenges of small business life more manageable, and making your life easier in the process. We’ve identified some of the major needs of a small business below, right alongside the small business WordPress plugins and services that offer a solution for them. Hope you enjoy!
Analytics and SEO
Every business needs to stay on top of their customers’ needs to remain relevant. You’ve got to understand the folks that use your products and how they use them in order to grow and continue to meet their needs. You also have to put yourself on the map and be visible for the folks that haven’t discovered you yet. These plugins (and services) will enable you to do exactly that, and ensure that you remain as visible as possible to those that need what you offer.
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
Google Analytics’ official WordPress plugin. Bring all the power of Google’s analytics machine to your WordPress dashboard.
Crazyegg
Crazyegg’s heatmap tracking gives you really neat visuals of where your customer’s attention is focused.
Kissmetrics
Like Google Analytics and Crazyegg, Kissmeterics is an industry leading analytics company that you really can’t go wrong with. They just don’t have a WordPress plugin.
Yoast SEO
Getting visible on Google all depends on SEO. Use Yoast SEO to optimize your content for exactly that.
Security
It’s hard to overstate how important security is in today’s environment. You’re probably not handling billion dollar offshore accounts, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t nefarious individuals who will take advantage of weak security if you leave the door open.
Sucuri Security
Sucuri is an industry leader in website security chosen by enterprise level businesses around the world. They integrate seamlessly with WordPress via this plugin and bring a high level of peace of mind to your website.
iThemes Security
Formerly Better WP Security, iThemes Security is a rock solid protection solution for your WordPress website.
VaultPress
There’s nothing like the security of knowing that, even if something catastrophic happens to your website, with just a nominal amount of effort it can be restored to a pristine state. VaultPress can make that a reality for you.
Performance Optimization
Study after study has shown us the benefits of lightning quick website performance on sales and SEO. An extra couple of seconds really does make a difference in how many people not just interact with your website everyday, but with how often they turn browsing into sales. These plugins will help shave off precious time for your visitors and increase your bottom line.
WP-Optimize
Trusted on over half a million WordPress website, WP-Optimize is a database cleanup and optimization tool that will make your visitor’s experience faster and cleaner.
CloudFlare
CloudFlare is a global industry leader in website performance optimization. This plugin puts that service right where you need it in your WordPress dashboard.
WP Rocket
Though they don’t have a WordPress plugin, their caching service will work just fine to speed up your WordPress website and can be used alongside one of the above options for even better performance optimization. They are consistently the strongest performer in side-by-side tests of caching plugins.
Email Marketing and Customer Relationship Management
Every bit as important as staying on top of your customers’ analytics is staying in touch with your customers. Communication with your customer base is critical for your success. Whether you’re looking at a simple but vital ‘contact me’ feature, the beginnings of a newsletter mailing list, or full fledged customer relationship management, you have it with WordPress.
Ninja Forms
Obviously we’re a little biased here! Ninja Forms may not be the oldest or largest of WordPress form building plugins, but we have everything you’ll need for establishing and maintaining great customer relations and outreach from the startup to enterprise levels.
Newsletters and Email Marketing
With almost a dozen integrations and growing, you can harness Ninja Forms with your favorite newsletter or email marketing service to bring your business to the people.
Customer Relationship Management (CRMs)
When your mailing lists have taken off and your email marketing efforts have reached a level where you need integrated customer relationship management, you can use Ninja Forms to seamlessly integrate with all of the major CRM services out there without missing a beat.
Customer Support
Everything isn’t perfect for every customer every day no matter how well we do our jobs. It’s a fact of life and a fact of business. Great customer support mitigates the problems your customers face and shows that you’re in it with them for the long haul.
Help Scout for Easy Digital Downloads and Help Scout for WooCommerce
Integrate Help Scout’s world class support desk service with your ecommerce solution of choice easily for great results! Create Help Scout tickets from form submissions on your website to make reaching our to your team even easier!
Groove Help Desk
Groove Help Desk software offers a robust support management solution for taking care of your customers.
Social Media and Content Sharing
Email marketing may dominate the market on getting your content and offers out to the masses, but social media’s role cannot be overlooked. Getting your users engaged from a variety of different traffic sources is important for the growth of your business, and these plugins will make it a breeze.
Social Warfare
This is our social media plugin of choice. It’s highly professional, very customizable, and integrates wonderfully with WordPress even though you won’t find it in the WordPress plugin repository. At shy of $30USD for a year, it’s a steal.
Mashshare and Better Click to Tweet
If you’re looking to try and replicate the features of Social Warfare without the price tag, these two plugins combined do the trick. You’ll be missing some of the features offered by Social Warfare, but you’re still looking at a stellar social media combo in these two.
Website Customization
Getting the look and feel of your website just right and having a home on the web that really speaks to your customers can be extraordinarily time consuming and require learning new skills just for the task. These two plugins take some of that burned off of you and make crafting a custom website manageable without a potentially enormous time investment.
Beaver Builder
Take control of your website’s aesthetics with Beaver Builder’s drag and drop page builder that works from the front end face of your website.
SiteOrigin CSS
Learning CSS to change the appearance of your website requires a lot of time and practise to get it just right. SiteOrigin CSS substantially decreases that burden, making good CSS obtainable for beginners even if you don’t have a clue what a CSS selector is going in!
Communication and Workflow Management
Great communication within your team and managing time and efficiency well can be a big step forward for your business’ productivity. These tools put heads together and automate workflow unlike quite anything else!
Slack
Slack was used by NASA for communication while sending robots to Mars. I’m not sure there’s much more that needs to be said about its efficacy as a communication tool. Use their plugin to integrate with your WordPress site as well for pinging a selected Slack channel whenever given events in WordPress occur.
If you want to integrate Slack notifications with any form on your site, you should check out the Ninja Forms Slack extension as well!
WP Trello
Connect Trello with WordPress to display organization, boards, lists and more in WordPress with this great plugin from Pole Vault Web. You can even create Trello cards from form submissions!
IFTTT
IFTTT (if this then that) has dedicated WordPress functionality to make automating with WordPress simple.
Zapier
Zapier is the ultimate automation software between services, and it’s specialized to work with WordPress! Create Zaps with Ninja Forms too!
Webmerge
WebMerge + Ninja Forms means you can easily turn the contents of any webform into a physical document formatted in any way you please. Makes maintaining paper records a world easier. Check out their service now, and click the link above for their integration with Ninja Forms!
eCommerce
There are a ton of ecommerce solutions out there, but you have to highly selective about something this foundational to your business. Depending on your needs, one of these three plugins will fit the bill like few others can.
Easy Digital Downloads
If you sell digital products, this is your solution. It’s that simple.
Woocommerce
Your solution for retailing physical products online. They do digital, too.
iThemes Exchange
A simple, easy to learn ecommerce solution for entrepreneurs of all levels, iThemes Exchange offers a solid foundational solution to your ecommerce needs.
Hopefully this list of small business WordPress plugins has given you plenty of options to consider! Sorting through everything you need to be competitive and successful in online markets can be one of the largest barriers to entry for many budding entrepreneurs. If we can make your experience easier by any measure, we will. The plugins we’ve listed out here today sure will!
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