6 WordPress Plugins Every Small Business Needs

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If you’ve finished getting your website up and running, give yourself a pat on the back. The next step is making your site work for you. Here are six of the best WordPress plugins for business that will improve your site’s SEO performance and let you get back to the important things like getting new clients. Each of these plugins are free but may have a premium option that provide extended functionality.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a popular SEO plugin that takes the guesswork out of optimizing your site correctly for search engines. It’s critical that your website can be found by search engines like Google. Yoast SEO has a wealth of knowledge on their blog and guides you through the process of adding canonical tags, titles, meta descriptions, and much more!

UpdraftPlus

When you need a simple, but robust backup/restore solution, look no further. Updraft Plus allows you to back up your WordPress files and database manually and on an automatic schedule. Store backups on your web host via FTP, or in the cloud with services like Google Drive or Dropbox. Opting for the paid version gives you more options, including backup to more services and dedicated support. Check out this article for a full comparison.

With a proper backup/restore solution like UpdraftPlus, you can rest assured that your website is protected from loss like web hosting failures, bad plugin or theme updates, server crashes and more.

WP Mail SMTP

Many web hosting providers allow users to send/receive email using what’s called their “local mail exchange”. This just means that the same server in which you’re hosting your website, is also sending your email. Some deliverability problems can arise from this method. Where WP Mail SMTP shines is setting up your website to use an SMTP server such as Gmail, SendGrid, Mailgun, or another SMTP service to send mail. Ensuring proper email deliverability is critical for reaching your users and letting them know you are the person sending the email.

WP-Optimize

From the makers of UpdraftPlus! Caching plugins are important for speeding up your website for SEO and providing a better user experience. This is especially true when using shared hosting plans, where your main goal is to keep costs down. WP-Optimize does an excellent job of compressing images, caching and minimizing CSS and JS files, and even optimizing your database tables. The final result is a highly optimized site that performs better in page speed tests and loads faster for your visitors.

WooCommerce

Does your business sell products online? WooCommerce and Shopify are the two most popular platforms for setting up your ecommerce store online. Shopify is a cloud-based solution, whereas WooCommerce is an addition to your current WordPress site. WooCommerce has a higher learning curve than Shopify, but it’s completely free to use and has endless customization with free and paid plugins and themes. However, if you are looking for a more ready out-of-the-box option, you might want to choose Shopify. If some technical know-how doesn’t deter you and you want a free solution, WooCommerce is an excellent choice for those running a WordPress site.

Cookie Notice & Compliance for GDPR/CCPA

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was implemented on May 25, 2018. It explains the 7 principles related to personal data and privacy of EU citizens. Because of this, you may have noticed that cookie notices are everywhere, from small business websites to corporate companies. This plugin makes it easy to display a cookie notice to the user on how you handle their data.