When you have your site up and running, you always want to make sure that you are keeping up with the latest technologies and tools. Having a site that can stand up against that of the “big guys” in search is important if you want to rank in the search engines and provide a great user experience.
Knowing which plugins are going to help your site function better is important, but also make sure that you do not install plugins that haven’t been updated recently. If plugins aren’t updated, there can be security holes that leave your blog open to the possibility of being hacked. Let’s go on to talk about these 5 must have WordPress plugins for business.
#1. Yoast SEO
WordPress is known to be one of the most SEO friendly platforms online. When you add Yoast SEO to this CMS, you are off to the races and by races, I mean the race to the top of the search engines. Everyone is vying for the first page position.
How does the Yoast SEO plugin help your site’s functionality?
When you install the Yoast SEO plugin you will be able to be able to easily edit your title, meta description and input a target keyword (or multiple target keywords with the premium version) in order to ensure that you have the proper keyword density and other important ranking factors.
Having the ability to properly optimize your WordPress website will enable you to rank in the search engines, but it will also give your user a great experience. Yoast SEO encourages you to do best practices on your posts. This makes them more enjoyable to read and easier to find when you search for them thus improving the function of your site.
#2. Backup Buddy
If you’ve never had a site crash on you, I hope that you never have to. No one wants to think that their site is going to be the victim of a virus or that their server is going to catch on fire along with the backup server. The truth is that this can happen and that is why it is important to back your website up often. If you make a change, make sure that change is backed up.
Using Backup Buddy is an easy way to ensure that your site is never lost and having to start over again at ground zero. The plugin is easy to install but can literally save you thousands of dollars in the case of a website crash.
Some other backup plugins only back up your pages and posts but when you use Backup Buddy, your entire site is backed up so you do not have to worry about any loss of data.
#3. W3 Total Cache
According to qnimate.com, “Web caching reduces the number of requests made to the server. Due to which less bandwidth is consumed and web server load is reduced. It also helps users to visit a web page if web server is down.”
When you use W3 Total Cache, you can easily get the benefits of caching your website without having to figure out how to do it manually. This plugin is a simple install with an easy walkthrough and it is all set up.
Having a cache of your site makes sense all around. As noted above, it helps to reduce the load on your server and if your website decides to take a dive, your readers don’t have to suffer because of it. Hopefully you have Backup Buddy from the point above.
#4. Shared Counts
We all want our content to go viral, but if you don’t have share buttons on your site, you are making it very difficult for that to happen. Even if you do have share buttons, but they are extremely unattractive or you have too many buttons, you aren’t going to get the shares that you want.
When you sure Shared Counts, not only do you get the count of how many shares you have on the network associated with the button, but you also do not have to have networks listed that you do not want to use. Oftentimes it is good enough to have the main 3 or 4 social media sites that your users like to frequent.
#5. Slack
Do you have a team of people that you want with and need to be in communication with? If you are still stuck in the stone ages with email strings and confusing conversations that don’t make any sense, you need to look into Slack.
Slack makes it easy for everyone to communicate no matter where they are or what time zone they are in. You can use the “channels” on slack to keep conversations organized and if you need privacy, you can get on a private channel. You also have the ability to direct message anyone on your team through Slack.
The ability to share files and search through previous conversations makes Slack a sight for sore eyes. No more playing “search through the inbox” since you have the search function in Slack.
These are just a few reasons why Slack is great for teams. Being able to have it right in WordPress will increase your productivity and ability to function as a team and that is why this plugin has made it on our list of easy plugins to help your sites function. If your team isn’t functioning, your site isn’t functioning and nothing is getting done.
Was this article helpful and informative? Leave us a comment with your thoughts in the section below.
Comments are closed.