WordPress holds the majority market share in the CMS industry. It’s one of the most preferred platforms for blogs and websites. It’s user-friendly and is equipped with loads of attractive themes that are right for your business. Today we are talking about some must-have tools to manage your WordPress website.
There are some essential plugins and tools that you’ll need to keep your WordPress website running. Let’s check out some essential options that you should install to get the most out of your WordPress powered website.
Google Analytics
Understanding customer behavior is imperative for every business or blog owner. It helps you develop an effective marketing strategy and deliver better. Google Analytics is good at helping you do this.
Google Analytics Helps You Achieve These Things:
- User Traffic – You’ll know exactly where your visitors are coming from. If you have an online store and you get mobile traffic, it may be better to build an app as it’s more convenient for your customers.
- Geographical Area – Knowing where your customers are located can help you formulate strategies that will bring in more sales.
- Tracking Campaigns – Campaigns are good for business. However, it’s not enough to just create campaigns, you’ll need to measure whether they are actually working or not. You can keep track of your campaigns through Google Analytics.
- SEO – To attract traffic and be visible on Google’s search results page, you’ll need to have the right keywords. With Google Analytics, you’ll find out which keywords attract more visitors to your website.
Google Calendar
An excellent way to let your audience know the events you plan to host or product releases is through Google Calendar. This way they can keep track of what’s going on in your website and business.
There’s an article that can help you easily set up Google Calendar for WordPress here: hostingwiki.org/how-to-add-google-calendar-to-WordPress/
The tool will allow you not only to keep visitors informed, but also efficiently manage your content calendar, and other website related tasks.
Yoast SEO
SEO wise, Yoast SEO is one of the most important plugins you’ll need for the website. It will help you create more search engine friendly content and improve how you handle SEO.
Yoast SEO improves the readability of your website and improves your content. Although you will have to pay for premium Yoast, the free version pretty much has the important features that you’ll need.
For website Readability, Yoast SEO tells you whether you have enough subheadings for your posts, good sentence variety, paragraph and sentence length, and transition words.
Yoast SEO also measures keywords uses, internal links, SEO title width, meta description, and other important SEO features.
Constant Contact
Email marketing is essential for building long-term customer relationships. You need an email list if you are selling a product or a service, or simply if you want to build more website followers. Constant Contact will help you with these endeavors.
Constant Contact is an email service provider. You can start building your contact list through this plugin. Also, it lets you design professional emails and send them directly to your list. It’s user-friendly and is a very helpful tool for your online marketing campaigns.
Constant Contact features professional email templates that are perfect for both mobile and desktop computers. Also, you are assured that the email will not end up on the user’s spam list.
Thirsty Affiliates
Affiliate marketing lets you sell products from another website and you get a commission for every sale. This is one of the many ways to monetize your blog. With this monetization method, there are no upfront investments involved as you will not be selling your own product or service. In order to do this, you will need to have an affiliate marketing plugin, such as thirsty affiliates, installed on your WordPress blog.
With Thirsty Affiliates, you will be able to keep all your affiliate links in your WordPress Dashboard – it’s extremely convenient as it’s all in one place. Also, it cloaks the affiliate links. Your customers will be seeing a nice-looking URL instead of a messy, unattractive link. So it’s not confusing and it prevents them from purchasing from your site.
The best thing about Thirsty Affiliates is in doesn’t slow down the upload speeds of your site. All its features are necessary for your website. It is completely free although they do have some premium plugins that you can buy.
Google Drive
Google Drive gives you free 15 GB cloud storage for your website. It makes it a lot easier to share documents and files with your visitors or users. You can easily embed the drive onto your site, and share files without issue.
You create documents, excel sheets, slides, forms, maps, and drawings through Google Drive. It’s extremely user-friendly and also completely free.
Canva
Professional looking visuals are important for every website. It will attract more visitors and improve your SEO by keeping them on your page and engaged. With Canva, you are able to create beautiful graphics even without graphic design skills. It’s perfect for your online business and blog.
Canva is equipped with loads of professional templates for different content needs. It’s arranged in categories to make it easier and faster to search for the right template. They also have a built-in photo library and you can choose from many illustrations and photos that you can use for your blog. Whether you need abstract images, landscapes, animals, textures – Canva has it. You can also enhance your images with their available filters.
Jetpack
Jetpack is designed by Automattic – the company behind WordPress.com. That’s how you know this plugin is truly a must-have.
With Jetpack you’ll get a large variety of features that can be enabled selectively thanks to the module system. Some are for improving website security, others for policing the comment section for spam, while others enable automated backups, helping make sure your site is safe from any potential crashes and data loss. Truly a must-have plugin.
There are both paid and free options for this plugin, so be sure to check out the different features offered, and carefully consider if you want to opt for the paid version.
Conclusion
The tools above are all essential for your business especially if you are a beginner website owner running a WordPress-powered site. You may be familiar with some of them especially Google Drive and Google Calendar. However, taking them from personal use to website use can greatly improve how you manage and grow your site. Good luck.
