10 Best WordPress Plugins to Improve Your Website’s Functionality
Gone are the days when a website was just an online shop front. Customers are looking for more engaging, interactive and seamless buying experiences. On the other hand, businesses need their websites to do more for them to streamline key business processes, saving them time and making them money. Adding functionality to your website through these top WordPress plugins is one of the best ways to fulfil all these needs and more.
Why Use WordPress Plugins?
WordPress plugins make your website work for you. With a few clicks, you can add a whole new feature to the front end of your website and how your customers interact with it or the back end of your website including the data you collect and the way you process it.
They’re like ready-made apps you add to your website. That means you don’t have to be a developer or even touch the code of your website to customise it to your needs. Plugins do all the hard work for you and they’re easy to set up, manage and edit through the WordPress interface.
There are thousands of different pre-made plugins, you can add to your website. Some of the most popular and therefore seen as the best plugins for WordPress are WooCommerce for selling products and Yoast SEO for optimising and tracking search engine performance.
What are custom WordPress Plugins?
As well as the pre-made plugins you can access through WordPress, WordPress websites integrate with custom plugins. You can hire a developer to create custom plugins that do exactly what you want them to do while having a user-friendly interface that makes them easy to edit and manage in the long run. These are some of the best plugins for WordPress because you get custom website features without complicated or costly upkeep.
Top 10 WordPress Plugins that Expand Your Website’s Capabilities
These are the best WordPress plugins to add to your website to turn it from a passive digital shopfront into a system for attracting, converting and servicing clients.
Themes and design
The design of your website impacts your brand perception – what customers think of your business. So ensuring the design of your website reflects the quality and personality of your brand matters. With plugins for themes and design features, you can make your website look impressive without making it more difficult to maintain and update later down the line. For example, have you heard of sticky elements? This is when an element of the webpage stays in place as visitors scroll down the page such as the main menu remaining at the top. It not only looks good but helps with user experience and navigation.
Optimisation
Load time is one of the biggest determiners for how long visitors stay on your website. Simply, if it takes too long for a page to load, people won’t wait around, they’ll click away. So it’s important to optimise all the data on your website, particularly images and videos as they can massively slow down load time. Installing a WordPress plugin that compresses images and identifies anything redundant that could be slowing the site down keeps your website in good shape for browsing customers.
Security
As businesses, we can’t operate online without a security strategy. Attacks are only becoming more prevalent and harder to catch. Security plugins give you a line of defence at all potential areas of attack such as spam form inputs and attempts to access payment details. Security plugins give your customers the confidence to shop with you and ensure all your processes are in line with best practices.
Lead capturing
Conversion often takes multiple touchpoints so using your website to capture leads and keep them in your world for longer increases the chance of making a sale. There are many plugins that capture lead data on your website including contact forms, lead magnets, taking a quiz or messaging you on live chat. What’s particularly important when using lead-capturing plugins is that they connect with your lead-tracking system. It’s all good collecting this data but if it’s not transferred to a place where it will be used such as your CRM, it’s not helpful!
Customer communication
Some visitors will be on your website to find a way to contact you about getting started or the service they have already paid for. Make that easy for both sides. You could have a plugin for dynamic forms that collects and organises all the data you need to get the query to the right team member and come up with a quick resolution. Live chats are becoming popular too.
Again make sure the communication plugins on your website integrate with your existing tools for customer communication, lead tracking and the sales pipeline. It ensures the message gets to a team member ASAP and helps them find relevant information such as customer profiles so they can deliver responsive and personalised customer service.
Booking system
Wouldn’t it be great if customers could go on your website and book a service then and there? Plugins can make this possible by outlining the different services available to book, showing accurate availability, collecting all the necessary information and sending a confirmation, reminders and any other follow-up. This makes it easy for customers to follow through and takes work off your plate. You just have to show up to deliver the service!
Analytics
Your website is a key part of your ecosystem so it’s very useful to know how it’s performing. Most websites collect basic analytics about traffic and visitor sessions. With a specific plugin, you can collect more information about how people are using your website, indicating what’s working and where you’re losing people. Feeding this data into performance metrics will give you up-to-date information about where to direct your efforts and how to make the most of your website.
Marketing
An omnichannel marketing experience is the standard these days. Customers want to interact with their favourite brands on social media, email and even through text messages. Encouraging website visitors to engage with your brand on other platforms enables repeat interactions that can lead to sales.
You could have a plugin that shows your last few Instagram posts, motivating them to follow you on there. Pop-ups with lead magnets and other benefits to joining your email list are effective. You could have a different pop-up for each service page to match their interests. Or how about offering text reminders for when a new product launches or a sale starts? All these interactions can be streamlined through plugins that integrate with tools for following up with leads.
Calculator
Personalising product recommendations is a great way to impress customers, make the buying journey easier and achieve great results for your clients. This can be automated through a custom calculator plugin. Customers input their information, the program is trained to process the information and match it with a product and then it shares the results with the customer, sending a confirmation and follow-up too. We did this for a mortgage broker and it massively boosted his business.
Client portals
Your website could support service delivery as well as client acquisition by housing individual client portals. Through their unique login, they access an area of your website that’s just for them. It directs them to digital products they have bought, custom deliverables, timelines, updates and the contact details of their account manager. Whatever they need, they can log in to their portal and find it. As client portals bring together all your work with the client, plugins with connectivity to other apps such as your booking system provide the best functionality.
When to Customise WordPress Plugins
You can access some of WordPress’ best plugins on the pre-made plugin market. However, the best WordPress plugin for you could be a custom one. A pre-made plugin might not meet your business needs or suit your workflow. With a custom plugin, you can ensure it does exactly what you want it to do. One of the biggest benefits of custom plugins is integration with third parties. We can build a plugin that communicates with your other tools so data captured on your website goes straight into your day-to-day systems without manual processing and vice versa.
At E2E, we make sure your website does more than sit there and look pretty. We create custom plugins that make it a functional part of your operational ecosystem, integrate with other key tools and connect it with your workflow for maximum efficiency. You can focus on getting great results for clients and growing the business without having to chase leads, decipher data or copy and paste key information. You have the best plugins for your WordPress website doing all that for you. Contact us today about creating a custom WordPress plugin for your business.