10 WordPress Plugins That Will Save You Time & Improve Your Business Website

When you’re running a business, you want to ensure your website will run as smoothly as possible. You don’t want to be spending endless amount of time and money fixing constant errors. Fortunately, if you’re using WordPress, there are plugins that are designed to make your life that much easier. The plugins will improve your website's aesthetic and functionality, as well as lead to more conversions.

Here are 10 must have plugins for any business:

1. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the most popular conversion rate optimizer software, with the website boasting the software is used on 300,000+ websites. This tool will allow you to convert website visitors into subscribers and customers. Features include an OptinMonster Builder, multiple form types, Exit Intent technology, A/B split testing, page level targeting and built-in analytics.

2. Yoast SEO for WordPress

This is the number one WordPress SEO plugin. Yoast SEO for WordPress includes everything you need to achieve effective SEO. This includes a snippet editor, real time page analysis functionality, focus keywords and content analysis, post titles and meta descriptions, readability check and robots meta configuration, to name a few of the many features. Best of all, most of the features on this plugin are free.  

You can also purchase Yoast SEO Premium, which includes a redirect manager, multiple focus keywords, social previews and premium support. Prices for this vary from US$69 for a single site all the way up to US$1499 for 200 sites, with various other pricing options available.    

3. Hummingbird

Google recommends that your website should load within two seconds. The average visitor isn’t going to sit on your website and stare at a blank white screen while they wait for the content to load. They’re going to leave and go to a competitor’s website. You’ve lost your customer before they even got onto the website.

You can fix this by using a caching plugin. Caching will speed up your website. Hummingbird will speed up your website by compressing files or using minification to browser caching. You can try the plugin free for 14 days, and then it will cost $49 per month. This is also included for free in your WPMU DEV Membership.

4. Defender

As a result of WordPress being such a popular platform for websites, it’s also become a popular target for hackers. The last thing you want is for your business to be hacked. In 2012, more than 117,000 WordPress installations were hacked. You can imagine how high that number would be now.

You can decrease your hacking risk by having a difficult username and password, and not downloading malicious plugins. To save time, you can also use Defender. This plugins features includes regular security scans, vulnerability reports, safety recommendations, and will restore and repair changed files. You don’t even need to worry about remembering to scan your computer, you can set the plugin and it will automatically schedule scans. Defender comes free with your WPMU DEV Membership, includes a 14 day free trial, and like Hummingbird, will then cost $49 per month. 

5. Akismet

Comments are pretty important when you’re trying to improve your SEO. Online reviews will often be the deciding factor when comparing businesses. Google will also rank your website higher if you have lots of positive reviews. So it’s important to ensure the comments on your website are positive, legitimate and not spam.

Akismet filters out any comments on your blog that look like spam. It constantly updates, so you won’t have to worry about the latest spam comments going unnoticed and falling through the cracks. It will also leave a history for users, so they can see which comments were flagged as spam. This will save you tons of time you would otherwise have to spend constantly monitoring your comments.

Akismet has three plans: basic, which comes with the price tag of “name your price”, plus, which is $7 per month per site, and premium, which is $12 per month per site.   

6. Snapshot Pro

Backing up your website can save you a lot of hassle in the future. It’s easy to break WordPress, or end up hacked. If you’ve backed up your website, then that’s no problem, you just restore your website. If you haven’t got it backed up, it’s a major problem that could cost you time and money you don’t need to waste.

Snapshot Pro will take care of the backup process for you. This plugin will backup your entire site, or exclude certain files if you wish. The backup will automatically occur monthly, daily, or hourly, depending on your choice. Don’t worry about your backup getting lost! Snapshot Pro will save backups to multiple locations such as Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, as well as to your computer. As with Defender and Hummingbird, Snapshot Pro is part of the WPMU DEV Membership, which includes a free 14 day trial and costs $49 per month afterwards.  

7. Ultimate Branding

When you’re running your businesses website through WordPress, you’re going to want it to look as professional as possible. This is sometimes difficult with WordPress’ logo and branding on your website.

Use Ultimate Branding to put your businesses branding throughout your website. No need for difficult coding or spending ages getting the logo in the right place, Ultimate Branding will make it easier. The plugin allows you to display your colours, logo, company name and brand messaging across your whole site, and to remove the WordPress branding. Now visitors will just see your branding, and not the WordPress logo. Ultimate Branding is part of the WPMU DEV Membership deal.

8. Smartcrawl

You’ve used all the plugins to make your website look and function to its full potential. Now you have to produce content to increase conversions. But maybe you’re not getting the amount of viewers to your content as you could be.

Smartcrawl will drive more traffic to your content. It makes your content easy to find on search engines by telling web crawlers when your site has content changes that need registering. The plugin will also optimize your website by including site maps, Moz integration, title and meta and auto-link keywords. Now you have more time to write amazing content, instead of worry about promoting it. Smartcrawl is also part of the WPMU DEV Membership deal.   

9. WP Smush Pro

Images are a crucial factor of any business website. You can’t look professional without them. But they do come with their own problems. They take up a lot of space, and will slow your website down. This will lead to a higher bounce rate, and therefore a drop in conversions. You don’t want to lose money just because your images are too big.

It’s too much of a pain to manually shrink every image that appears on your website though, right? It doesn’t have to be. WP Smush Pro will do all the hard work for you. It is the fastest, easiest and best-performing image compression plugin for WordPress. It will compress your images, while ensuring their high quality remains intact. Now your website will still look professional and load faster.  

There is the free WP Smush version, but users of WP Smush Pro will get more than two times the savings than the free users. WP Smush Pro is also offered in the WPMU DEV Membership deal. 

10. Redirection

Nothing is more frustrating than loading a webpage only for it to show up as a “404 error.” The visitor hasn’t found what they’re looking for, and the business is very quickly losing conversions.

Redirection manages 301 redirections, keeps track of 404 errors and will tidy up any loose ends on your website. If you’re moving your website or updating it, this is a vital plugin. You don’t even need to be a technical expert to use it. Features include 404 monitoring, custom ‘pass-through’ redirections and full logs of all redirected URLs, to name a few.

Perhaps the best feature of all is that it’s completely free!

If your businesses WordPress website is a big hassle, installing these plugins is guaranteed to save you time and money, improve the functionality of your website, and ultimately improve your SEO and conversions.