Building merely WordPress website is not enough. You need to build it so it makes website visitors want to visit again. It would be best if you made it search engine friendly and multi-device friendly.
A huge chunk of business growth depends on your website because it is your biggest content asset online. And, when you are using WordPress, you get thousands of plugins to choose from that help in business growth. You only need a few of them to run your website successfully.
Here’s what you need to meet your marketing and Google requirements and also the list of plugins that can help you achieve the feat.
Security
First things first, you don’t drive a car without wearing your seatbelts. Similarly, you don’t open up your website for everybody on the internet (even the hackers) without being double sure of security.
Spammers and hackers, too, have improved themselves. Initially, it was easy to figure out the spam emails and messages, but now their acts blend in so well that it’s hard to recognize what’s genuine and what’s spam. Most of the recent attacks we notice are for data collection or ask for ransom money.
The hackers didn’t spare even the previous U.S. President, Donald Trump.
So to avoid the situation where your data is compromised, or you have to deal with hackers and spammers, take the necessary steps to keep your website secure.
Top WordPress security plugins and what they do
Sucuri Security Plugin: Sucuri detects website monitoring and alerts, stops future website hacking attempts, speeds up your website, and helps you by keeping regular backups of your website, among other things.
Cloudflare Security Plugin: It offers Secure Access Service Edge, SSL for SaaS Applications, Malicious Bot Abuse Management, Automatic Platform Optimization, Mitigates DDoS and L3 DDoS Attacks, Web Application Firewall, Internet Application Acceleration, among others.
Wordfence Security Plugin: The plugin offers WordPress firewall, Leaked password protection, advanced manual blocking of malicious networks, Two-Factor Authentication, WordPress security scanner, File repairing, among others.
Jetpack Security Plugin: Jetpack security plugin offers spam blocking, downtime monitoring, Malware scanning, brute force attack protection, activity log.
Malcare Security Plugin: It offers malware scan and removal, WordPress firewall, and management, removing the website from the blacklist, login protection, and white label solutions, among others.
WordPress Website Speed
Compressed images and videos, JavaScript, and CSS minification, there are many ways to reduce page size and make your webpage load faster. People are more likely to revisit a webpage that loads faster. Speedy websites are also ranked well. People tend to close the window that takes more time to load, which directly impacts the website rank.
The good and poor speed has a difference of a couple of seconds only. If your website takes a couple of seconds more time to load, you are going to lose potential customers. Speed not only matters when the page is loaded for the first time. When users navigate the pages within the websites and see significant delays, they are likely to lose interest and leave your website.
Plugins that help you speed up your WordPress website
WP Super Minify: As the name suggests, the plugin minifies the JavaScript and CSS files. The plugin is lightweight. It also combines and caches the files to speed up the loading time.
WP Smush: Smush allows you to compress any image in any directory of the website, turns on lazy load, and ultimately improves your website page speed. You won’t lose the quality of the images with WP Smush.
Lazy Load by WP Rocket: The plugin reduces the number of HTTP requests and improves the page load time. You can lazy load iframes, avatars, text, similies, images, and the complete script weighs less than 10Kb.
WP-Optimize: The plugin cleans and optimizes the database, compresses your images, caches your website pages to speed up your website speed.
On-Page Optimization
On-page SEO tasks are those which are performed on the website to make it Google-friendly and user-friendly. On-page, optimization is important to make your website rank well.
The meta title of the page, Meta description of the page, alt tags of the images, setting up focus keyword for the page, keyword density, interlinking, length of the text, use of headings and sub-headings and their respective tags, among other options are considered while setting the on-page of a WordPress website.
Plugins that help you setup on-page in a WordPress website
Yoast Plugin: The Yoast plugin allows you to set up Meta tags, improve the readability of the content, insert tags within the content, interlink content, and much more.
The SEO Framework: In The SEO Framework, the plugin intelligently suggests the right Meta titles and descriptions following the White-Hat rules and guidelines set by the Google search engine.
SEOPress: With SEOPress, you can build custom XML and HTML sitemaps, create and optimize website SEO, boost traffic, improve social sharing, create optimized breadcrumbs, manage redirections, add Google structured data, among others.
SEO Squirrly: SEO Squirrly is your personal AI-based private SEO consultant. This automatically detects what’s missing on your website, activates and configures the missing features.
Lead Generation
Your SEO works well, and you have the desired traffic hitting your website, but what good it is if you don’t convert the website visitors into potential customers.
Lead generating elements are designed to achieve the specific feat on your website so you can have a decent list to nurture the leads through email marketing or other mediums. These elements make it easy for the users to contact you and vice versa. Whether you are running a subscription-based website, want people to download your ebook, or order your digital products, you need a lead generating, engaging, and converting elements on your website.
Lead generating plugins for your WordPress website
OptinMonster: Get more email subscribers with this powerful popup form-building tool that helps you boost your business. Ecommerce website owners reduce the cart abandoned rate. You can also create a sticky navigation bar, wheel opt-in forms, gamified spinning forms, among other elements to capitalize on the user experience.
WPForms: Get beautiful contact, sign, subscription, and other form types within minutes with WPForms. The no-code, simply drag and drop functionality make it super easy to build the desired forms.
LiveChat: Engage your website visitors in real-time through the LiveChat plugin installed at the bottom of the website. People love getting their queries resolved in real-time, and LiveChat helps you do that. Customer retention rate increases with LiveChat. Build stronger customer relationships.
SeedProd: Landing pages are great marketing assets to capture leads. With SeedProd, you can create landing pages, coming soon page, custom 404 pages, site under maintenance page, site under construction page, thank you page, among others.
Web Design and Development
The web design and development is going more drag and drop and less code. If you don’t know to code, you can still design a pretty decent website and have the desired functionalities. There’s a plugin for everything, even for page building. The plugins allow you to build both small and large website sections.
Nothing gets impacted at the user’s end with page-building plugins, but these do simplify work at your end. You accomplish the web design and development tasks quicker than ever.
Page Building Plugins for WordPress website
Elementor: Build awesome web pages using only drag and drop. Hero sections, sliders, text on image, there are many prebuilt sections available that you can use on any page. Also, you can build a custom section by placing images, texts, animations on an empty canvas, all this through drag and drop only.
Gutenberg: Still in its early phases, Gutenberg is WordPress’ own tool for website building and publishing. It was started to compete with Elementor. You can also read our detailed blog on Elementor vs. Gutenberg page builder.
Divi: The Divi builder offers both back-end and front-end builders to build any type of website from scratch. The visual editor has three main elements, namely, sections, rows, and modules, to build websites.
Visual Composer: Supporting the no-code culture, Visual Composer, too, offers a drag and drop feature to create web pages for any type of website. For assistance in designing, the visual composer also has prebuilt 500+ templates, elements, and add-ons.
Have a brainstorming session with our WordPress experts about the must-have features you should have on your website.
