Many of the websites we host are for business’ and we often get asked for suggestions on useful and efficient plugins. Having the right set of tools at your disposal can make day to day activities much easier and really take your business to the next level. In this article, we will share what we believe to be the best must-have plugins for business’ in 2017.

WPForms

As a business owner, allowing your customers to contact you should be your top priority. WPForms is the most beginner friendly contact form plugin for WordPress. This drag & drop online form builder allows you to easily create contact forms, email subscription forms, order forms, payment forms, and other types of online forms with just a few clicks.

A pro version is also available with more advanced features.

Sucuri

Sucuri is one of the leading website security companies for WordPress. They offer a DNS level firewall which means the firewall will route your website traffic through their cloud proxy servers, allowing only genuine traffic to access your web server. As well as this Sucuri also offers intrusion, DDoS and brute-force protection, malware and hack prevention/cleanup and blacklist detection and removal.

Sucuri also improves your website’s performance by reducing server load through caching optimization, website acceleration, and Anycast CDN. It will protect your website against SQL Injections, XSS, RCE, RFU and all known-attacks.

Sucuri comes in 3 different versions. Basic starts at £155 per year whilst the Pro and Business versions come in at £233 and £388 respectively. All versions contain the same firewall and anti-hack measures, the only difference being the response time. The response time to malware removal and hack repair is 12 hours with the Basic package, 6 hours with the Pro and down to just 30 minutes with the Business.

W3 Total Cache

Speed is one of the most important SEO factors. Faster websites rank higher on Google, this means more visitors for your business website and more conversions.

W3 Total Cache allows you to serve compressed and cached files to your visitors. This reduces the load on your server and your website becomes faster.

Envira Gallery

While you can easily create image galleries in WordPress without using a plugin, these galleries are fairly basic. Envira Gallery allows you to create beautiful responsive galleries in WordPress.

Akismet

Although there are many plugins that help you combat spam, Akismet is one of the best options because it comes with WordPress out of the box and it’s free for personal use.

Setting up Akismet is a piece of cake. All you have to do is go to Akismet.com and register to get a WordPress key. Once you’re assigned a key, you can insert it in the Akismet settings on your website and say goodbye to spam!

Digg Digg

If you’re not taking advantage of social media for your business yet, it is time to start. The Digg Digg plugin adds a floating box on your website that enables your users to quickly and easily share the page they are on.

It supports all popular social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and Pinterest. You can customize which services you want to show to your users so that you don’t have to use social media services that are irrelevant for your business or niche.

404 Redirected

From my experience, business owners don’t monitor their broken links nearly as much as they should. Broken pages present a business and SEO problem for your website. On one hand, your potential customers might leave your website immediately when they see a 404 error, and on the other hand, Google will not pass PageRank to your 404 page.

404 Redirected plugin shows all URLs which return 404 errors and allow you to 301 redirect those to actual pages on your website. This will redirect traffic to the appropriate content as well as pass PageRank to the correct pages.

Soliloquy

Sliders on your WordPress landing pages allow you to easily display your featured content, products, and announcements in a beautiful interactive way. Soliloquy is the best WordPress slider in the market. It allows you to easily create your own beautiful sliders and add them anywhere on your WordPress site.

Visual Composer for WordPress

WordPress can be limited to the average users when it comes to how you want your page layout to look. Even though you can do anything with HTML and CSS, most users do not know these coding languages. That’s where Visual Composer for WordPress can help.

Visual Composer transforms the default WordPress page editor into a robust feature-rich editor that allows you to add columns, image galleries, accordions, tour sections, call-to-action buttons, videos, and much more.

For a more detailed breakdown on Visual Composer check out our article on the benefits of using it.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast is bar none the best SEO plugin for WordPress. It allows complete control of page titles and meta descriptions on a per page/post basis as well as for each taxonomy (category or tag pages).

Some other useful features include 301 redirections and setting up rules for search engine robots such as follow, nofollow, index, no-index, and so on. It also allows you to customize the Facebook and Google+ descriptions for individual pages or posts in case you don’t want to use the default meta description field.

Quick and Easy FAQ’s

When launching a new product or website, you may need to add a FAQs section in WordPress. You can add a new page with all the frequently asked questions (FAQs), but in most cases FAQs grows as your product evolves and as your customer base grows.

By adding the FAQ section, you can significantly reduce your support overhead and improve conversion.

CSS Hero

WordPress themes rely on CSS for the visual appearance of your website. If you want to make customization to your theme, then you will have to learn CSS. This can be time-consuming for a business owner.

CSS Hero is a WordPress plugin that allows you to customize any WordPress theme without writing a single line of code.

Freshbooks

Freshbooks is a cloud based accounting software for professionals, freelancers, and agencies. It allows you to easily send invoices to clients, receives payments, and manage your finances.

SEMRush

As a business owner, you need data to find out what your competitors are doing for their websites. SEMRush allows you to look at the keywords where your competitors are ranking. You can check out their paid keywords as well as their organic traffic. This way you can optimize your own content and marketing strategy.

Testimonials Widget

Testimonials allow you to showcase your past clients and their feedback about your services of products. People love to hear what others have to say about your business. It helps you gain trust and build lasting relationships with your clients. Testimonials Widgets makes it super simple to add customer testimonials on your WordPress site.