As a small business owner, your company will of course benefit immensely from an online presence. And WordPress has proven to be one of the most versatile, flexible, and useful platforms for small business owners to develop their own websites. While the standard WordPress platform has a huge amount of customizability built in, lots of users find the self-hosted version of WordPress found at www.wordpress.org to be a more powerful and customizeable tool. And this preference is because of WordPress plugins.
With a self-hosted WordPress site designed through www.wordpress.org, you have access to a massive and ever growing library of WordPress plugins. With easy to install plugins, you will have an almost ability to customize your site. As a small business owner, check out these three essential WordPress plugins now.
1. Yoast SEO (for search engine optimization)
Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO,” is an incredibly important part of turning your website into potential leads. With Yoast Seo plugins, you can assure that your site is getting the most views that it possibly can, and that traffic is optimally directed towards your business as a result.
The flagship Yoast SEO plugin has a long list of features, many of which are essential for a successful small business’s website. By offering full control and visibility to users relating to post titles and meta descriptions, Yoast let’s you see how your different pages will appear in a Google search for different keywords. Importantly, a wide range of options are available to you to easily customize how your post will appear in Google Search results.
Additionally Yoast SEO makes it easy for you to make pages or sections of your website “unfindable,” meaning they will not be indexed for Google searches. You can use these two this features in tandem to be in complete control of what searches will lead to what sections of your site, and for what keywords, which will give you a lot of power in determining your site’s branding and traffic.
2. iThemes Security (to keep your website more secure)
With all of the effort you are putting in to your small business’s website, you want to be sure that your WordPress based site is as secure as it possibly can be. And with the iThemes Security plugin, your options for securing your site are presented simply and effectively.
iThemes’ biggest selling point is it’s ease of use: the idea behind their plugin is that you don’t need to be a security expert to get full functionality from their product. To reach this end, iThemes provides a straightforward checklist of all the things you can do to secure your site through their plugin, with “on” and “off” switches and plain language descriptions for every feature.
iThemes has a powerful backend as well, offering features like regular malware scanning to make sure your site’s code hasn’t been compromised and “two factor authentication” to guarantee that only people that should be are able to sign into your site’s dashboard. By providing wide ranging security solutions with an easy to use interface, iThemes is essential for keeping your site safe.
3. Quick Cache (to make your website faster)
Of course, you want your website to be easy to use for your customers and visitors, and there is a plugin to help achieve this goal, too. Quick Cache promises to make your website more enjoyable and easier to access for your viewers by speeding up your site, toting “speed without compromise.”
As any HTML coder or web developer can tell you, your site’s nuts and bolts behind the scenes can get messy, and a WordPress hosted site is no exception. In fact, the better your website looks, the slower it will usually load and appear for your viewers: as sites get more complicated, more connections and communication within your server must occur for every visitor’s interaction. But Quick Cache solves this issue, by storing a cached version of connections or your server.
Which is technical speak that amounts to Quick Cache making your website faster. Navigating from page to page will be faster, and everything on your site will load a lot faster than it would without the Quick Cache plugin installed. And you get all of these huge benefits with no down sides. Increased visitor loading speed without any big negatives is a no brainer.
The Bottom Line
Building your website with WordPress isn’t hard, but optimizing your site to make sure that your small business is getting as much as it can out of your online presence takes a little more work. With WordPress plugins, you can customize your site infinitely to make it more powerful and more valuable to your business. Start with Yoast to optimize your search engine rankings, iThemes Security to make sure your site is safe and secure, and Quick Cache to make your site run as fast as it can.
