The dynamism and scalability of WordPress lie in the fleet of plugins or extensions. In this regard, we get a ton of requests from our audience, especially from the solopreneurs, to craft an article that will guide them streamline their business website with the most effective WordPress plugins.
Well, to this end, in the WordPress.org repository, you will find an army of free plugins to scale your business website. In addition to that, you may also upgrade to the premium versions of some of these plugins to tackle the challenge of the skyrocketing performance of your website in the days to come.
Today in this article, we will be walking you through the ‘best WordPress plugins list of 2020’ which are the bare necessities for any business website made out of WordPress. Now, let’s hop onto them right away!
Here Are a Few of the Best WordPress Plugins – Free & Premium
Most of these plugins are not only available in the free version but also available in the premium version:
Yoast SEO (Freemium)
Whether you are conducting a business website or your non-profit website this plugin will be saving your day forever. Why? Because there’s no use of embellishing your website with unique content unless you perform an extensive search engine optimization for those contents.
The search engine optimization or SEO by Yoast helps your webpage appear in the top level of the SERPs which ensures organic traffic to your website. In addition, the plugin will also allow you to write copies that are decipherable even for a fifth-grader. It also automatically creates sitemaps for your website and guides you to give appropriate meta description, add focus keyword and alter text for images, edit URLs or slugs and lot more.
And wait! In case you wonder if we are the affiliates for this plugin, we will say a big ‘No’. In fact, there are a lot of other alternatives you can try out on your own.
weForms (Freemium)
As a business owner, you shall be looking for generating leads, building the subscriber list, carrying out surveys to study the user and so much more. For any business website, if not all, web forms such as a contact form, registration form, subscription form, etc. are the bare minimum. And if you would like to create these forms without coding a single line then this is the plugin to look at.
Even the free version comes off a few pre-built templates and a bunch of drag and drop featured field-sets for a quick setup of registration forms, sign up forms from scratch. You can also get notified as an admin on the submission of a form by a user.
We suggest you upgrade to the pro version of this form only when your website starts to bring a handful of traffic and in case you need some advanced services like Geo-location, integration with CRM tools, Stripe, PayPal, Google Analytics, Zapier, etc.
Akismet (Freemium)
Who loves to be spammed by bots? None! Even if you are simply running a personal non-profitable website you still keep hating spamming, aren’t you? You know what, this is where the plugin, Akismet shines!
This plugin is developed by Automattic, the founder of WordPress itself. So, no question asked about its quality.
What Akismet does is it identifies the spammy comments and suspicious links or contents and just keeps them aside from your website to have appeared. You will be able to view the spammy comments from the status history provided by the plugin.
Jetpack (Freemium)
For any website, things like faster image loading can play a key role when it comes to SEO. Because it reduces bounce rates. And the Jetpack plugin aims to do that pretty well.
As your business information is valued more than anything in the omniverse, you shall have to protect it from getting hacked. To tell you the truth, this plugin is skilled at wreaking havoc for the hacking attempts of the brute force.
Moreover, this plugin enables you to see the traffic stats, monitor the downtime of your website and automates the social sharing of contents.
On top of these free features, you can also avail of the pro version to get the premium features.
WP Project Manager (Freemium)
If you are operating a business, it’s quite common that you will often have to manage projects – it may be a myriad of projects that you may have to deal with.
While managing projects, the pain point is you will lose yourself in the jungle of data and information regarding the various aspects of the status of the projects. All the projects generally include many assigned employees, task deadlines, files and what not!
As an individual, it feels incredibly hard to be aware of the status of every aspect of the projects. This is why an automated project management solution like the WP Project Manager, needs to be employed in your business.
With this amazing WordPress plugin, you can create an infinite number of projects, categories, tasks, subtasks, add users, set a deadline for them, manage files with your teammates, integrate with other software platforms, communicate with each other and get notified via email and so on.
This is a highly recommended WordPress plugin for a business website.
W3 Total Cache (Freemium)
Research shows that a website with a loading speed of 4 seconds has a significantly higher bounce rate than the one which loads under 3 seconds. The W3 Total Cache acts as the life savior by increasing the page loading speed.
Technically what it does is minifies the heavy PHP files into light HTML files and saves a few parts of a webpage so that the user doesn’t have to fetch data from the database every time he or she requests for your web page.
Besides, Google is likely to rank your website higher if it observes that your web page has a faster loading speed than the crowd.
As a bonus, you will also be getting some cool yet useful features like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support, compatibility with shared hosting, SSL support, and much more.
If you do not want to lose your visitors or potential customers from your website then this is the plugin you should be looking for.
WP User Frontend (Freemium)
This is another WordPress gem! With this tool, you can boost your business website’s security. When you are managing your website with your team, you might have to give access to your teammates.
This is exactly where the doubt arises! Yes, because, it’s very easy for a person to hack a website if that person is given access to the backend of your website. And you will never know whose actual intention is what.
Fortunately, this plugin skillfully allows you to give your teammates access to do everything from the frontend rather than the backend. The WP User Frontend also vigorously boasts of its special capabilities like user role-based content restriction, event registration form, contact form, profile builder, etc. You can also charge your user for users for posting on your site for built-in payment gateways for hassle-free transactions.
WooCommerce (Free)
If you want to create your own marketplace then there is nothing that can beat this most popular beast. Though this plugin is completely free, you can do everything with it and you will not miss anything.
Be it digital, physical or variable products, with this plugin, you can build your own online marketplace which will be able to sell any products. This plugin is not only free but also is open-source meaning that you can extend its functionalities. For example, if you want to create a multivendor website with WooCommerce, you can install Dokan which is basically an extension for WooCommerce.
Awesome Support (Freemium)
In the universe of WordPress, this is the only system that can give you revolutionary productivity when it comes to giving customer support. It is equivalent to the other SAAS based software solutions like Help Scout or Zendesk.
With this plugin, your customers can create unlimited tickets from the front end of your website and your support team can easily provide support from the backend.
If you are already using Zendesk, Help Scout, and Ticksy – Not to worry! – Because you can effortlessly import the tickets into Awesome Support from those. Cool, right?
MailChimp (Freemium)
MailChimp is a free email marketing solution aimed to send bulk emails to your website users. With this plugin, you will be able to add amazing subscription forms, comment form, checkout form and much more for your website. This is very much effective to build your email list.
However, for business purposes, it would be wise to use the premium version.
Elementor (Freemium)
Elementor is the ultimate & free WordPress page builder. With over 2M active installs, it’s the most advanced drag & drop editor out there, used by professionals worldwide to create high-end designs in no time, without coding.
Elementor comes with many built-in widgets to help you quickly build any part of your website: images, text, sliders, icons, testimonials, social media, animation and more.
Elementor works perfectly with almost any theme and plugin and will not slow down your existing website. You can start from a blank canvas or choose from over one hundred pre-designed templates that can be inserted to any page. The Pro version comes with super cool features like pop-ups, forms and theme builder which lets you design the header, footer and archive pages of your site
VaultPress (Freemium)
While we’re talking about security, there’s no better security than having a reliable backup system.
As a business owner, you will never want to lose your business data, will you? It’s only a matter of your single click that your entire database can get deleted or can be hacked or the server can crash anytime. In either of the cases, all of your hardships invested on your business website will go in vain.
This is why we highly recommend you install a backup plugin for your business website to keep all of your worries at bay. The VaultPress plugin, developed by Automattic, will help you do just that at ease and in real-time. In any mishap of your website, you can restore all of your data in no time.
Business Directory Plugin (Freemium)
If you want to increase website user interaction on your business website, want to streamline with the revenue-generating section and retain customers more then this is the plugin that actually works.
In other words, if you are looking for a directory plugin that will supercharge your listing business then this is undoubtedly the one to seek after! Despite the plugin has some powerful features in the premium version, the free version will be enough to impress you with a flock of free features.
Sucuri Security (Freemium)
WordPress website is a great follower of the well-known Murphy’s Law. Because when your site is up and running and starts to bring revenue, it will be hacked and looted.
But don’t be scared! Because the Sucuri Security plugin is ready to step into the battleground and prevent your website like the comics heroes. That’s sweet, right?
The Sucuri Security plugin mainly ensures the following:
- Activity auditing
- File integrity monitoring
- Remote malware scanning
- Blacklist monitoring
- Security Notification
- And what not!
This is flat-out a highly recommended security plugin for any business website.
MonsterInsights (Freemium)
The MonsterInsights acts as the bridge between Google Analytics and your WordPress site. With this tool, you will be able to say from which source the visitors came to your website not even in minutes but in seconds.
This plugin is pretty helpful to adjust your marketing strategy with the information you get with this plugin. All the plugin does is brings the Google Analytics dashboard right onto your WordPress dashboard.
Not only small businesses but also giants like Microsoft, FedEx, Yelp, Bloomberg and many more are availing its utility. If you are yet to employ it for your business website, you can consider it right now!
Wrapping up
If you find these plugin useful for your business website, share it with your friends so that others can also get benefited. You may also need to install more plugins according to your business needs. The plugins we mentioned here are the bare minimum for any business website.
If you do think there’s more to add to this article, you can mention them in the comment section below. We hope these plugins will help your business go a long way with their glowing aspects.
