With 58.55% of the entire internet built on WordPress, it’s an understatement to say that it’s a powerhouse in the world of web development. From teen blogs to enterprise-level companies, websites of all shapes and sizes are based on this completely free content management system.
WordPress seems to be very popular with Fortune 500 companies such as TechCrunch, The Times, Sony, MTV, Time, BlackBerry and many others. Besides B2C, it’s becoming increasingly interesting for the B2B vertical as well.
Plugins are the bread to WordPress’ butter and there are heaps of them for B2B users to maximize their marketing and sales performance. However, with over 50,000 available plugins, it’s not that easy to make the right choice.
So, let us do it for you.
Yoast SEO
If you ask a WordPress developer about their most essential plugins, the vast majority always includes Yoast SEO. Over the years, it has become the go-to name for on-page optimization and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, anytime soon.
Yoast allows you to track your page performance in regards to SEO, including keywords, meta descriptions, alt tags, external linking and much more. The Readability score is particularly handy for creating blogs and other long-form content.
You get most of Yoast’s options with the free version. However, the premium allows handy features such as help with internal linking, setting up redirects and recognizing keyword synonyms. Coupled with Broken Link Checker (free to use), Yoast can make creating and pruning your content incredibly simple.
Gravity Forms
One of the essentials of a B2B marketing strategy is capturing leads, and perhaps the most intuitive way to do that is through forms. Boasting the incredibly powerful and simple to use visual editor, Gravity Forms is the choice of many B2B businesses for building lists and capturing leads.
Perhaps the most attractive feature in Gravity Forms is the conditional logic, which allows you to hide or show fields, depending on what website visitors click on. For example, an ecommerce business selling shoes can first ask for a country in the form, and if the user selects USA, the next form contain US shoe sizes.
Starting at $59 per month for one website, it’s not the cheapest plugin out there, but it’s worth the investment. If you’re looking for a free alternative, you can opt for Contact Form 7. Although nowhere near as sleek and powerful as Gravity Forms, it offers the basic form functionalities for free. If you think the price is too steep, there are also some great alternatives out there.
Akismet
There are good plugins, great plugins and then there’s being included automatically with every WordPress installation in the world. Akismet is the number one plugin for battling spam comments on WordPress and it’s not looking to lose the title any time soon.
This extremely handy plugin automatically filters all website comments and weeds out spam before you even get to see it in your inbox. If you think you’re not getting any spam anyways – do a double check, you probably already have Akismet installed.
The premium doesn’t offer anything spectacular in terms of features so you can use the free version and get all the functionality. However, at $5 per month for a single website, it’s a great investment for businesses that handle a lot of comments on their content.
OptinMonster
Forms can only do so much, and tech-savvy digital marketers have come up with some impressive tools for lead generation that do a better job. One of the best is OptinMonster, a plugin designed to make B2B lead generation a breeze.
One of its most powerful features include an intuitive drag and drop builder, which ensures that even a complete newbie to WordPress can create amazing lead gen forms.
For B2B users, the most interesting feature is certainly geo-location targeting. OptinMonster allows business owners to sort visitors according to where they come from, making lead segmentation easier than ever before.
MonsterInsights
Once you get a significant stream of leads coming in, you’ll quickly realize that you need a way to track where they’re coming from. Google Analytics is the go-to resource, but MonsterInsights provides a better package deal.
Once installed on your website, it allows you a deep-dive into your analytics, including your most popular posts, your most downloaded files, most clicked ads, most purchased products, etc. If you already capture lead data through OptinMonster, this is the perfect extension to analyze performance.
BackupBuddy
Even though all you want is to generate some leads and improve your bottom line, others may not be playing so nicely. There’s plenty that can go wrong with your WordPress website, and just like insuring a car or a house, it needs a safety net.
BackupBuddy was built in 2010 as the easiest way to back up an entire WordPress website and it boasts over half a million users. The cheapest plan starts at $80 per year, which is a small price to pay for peace of mind for both you and your website visitors.
CSS Hero
The building blocks of WordPress websites are themes, pre-set templates which make creating pages as easy as pie. What’s not easy as pie is editing those pages, especially if you’re not a WordPress developer and you couldn’t write a line of code to save your life.
As a business owner, you don’t have to know how to code, because CSS Hero does the heavy lifting for you.
It allows you to easily edit fonts, images, effects and other page building blocks. No more emailing your web developer at 2AM to change that background image on your About Us page!
- if you want the super-easy way out, you can simply use a website builder instead.
Conclusion
With the immense amount of WordPress plugins available to B2B business owners out there, it’s incredibly hard to make the right choice and cut through the clutter. With these 7 choices, you’ll be on the right path to generating and converting leads and improving your bottom line.
About the author:
Dave Schneider is the founder of LessChurn, churn reduction app. In 2012 he quit his job to travel the world, and has visited over 65 countries. In his spare time, he writes about SaaS and business at DaveSchneider.me.