It’s almost 2020, and that means it’s time to start gearing up for the new business year. This might mean improving your digital ad strategy, planning for events and webinars, or updating your website. If you’ve got a website, there’s a great chance it’s run on WordPress. WordPress makes up a significant portion of all global websites — about 34% in 2019 to be precise. That’s why our team of designers and developers has curated a list of WordPress Plugins that we feel can help you drive results in 2020.
While we’re confident most recommendations on this list can help your WordPress site, it’s important to understand that some may not be applicable to you and your business. Let us know if you have any questions as our team is here to help!
1. Gravity Forms
This plugin is a must. It’s a feature-rich tool that helps you create professional forms. This tool is great to ensure you are accounting for all inbound leads and collecting contact information. We love this plugin as it integrates seamlessly HubSpot, MailChimp, Zapier, Slack, Twilio, PayPal, Stripe, and many more.
2. Broken Link Checker
A must-have plugin that will help monitor links on your pages and posts. It will automatically detect links that are not functioning properly, as well as missing images and redirects, alerting you via an e-mail or dashboard.
3. Calculated Fields Form
A great tool for dynamically calculated fields to display values (without requiring any custom development). Great for calculators that can be used in finance, health/fitness, ROI calculators, etc. Calculated Fields Forms is great for both single or complex calculations.
4. Title Experiments Free
The content you create is only as effective as its title. Without impactful titles, your content will go unread. Title Experiments Free allows you to A/B test titles for a post, giving you the ability to find out which title creates more page views and higher click-through rates.
5. Yoast SEO Plugin
Need help with your website’s SEO? Yoast SEO has been a huge asset for many of our clients. This will help improve your organic and paid search rankings and drive more qualified traffic to your site over time. There are free and paid versions, depending on how in-depth of an SEO effort you want to implement. This plugin also plays well with agency partners, or vendors, who are helping with SEO efforts.
6. Smush Image Compression & Optimization
This is for all our photography lovers out there! Smush allows you to compress and resize huge photos into a size that’s easier to load for your visitors. It allows you to deliver images at half the size without having to sacrifice a visible decrease in quality or clarity. This is great for websites that are really graphically intensive, or just reducing overall hosting bandwidth.
7. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache helps your SEO and user experience by reducing load times, thus increasing website performance. You will also see an improvement in search engine result page (SERP) rankings. When fully configured, we’ve seen clients experience up to a 10x improvement in their site performance.
8. All In One WP Security and Firewall
WordPress is an extremely secure platform given its abundant use on the web. With that being said, WordPress, like any other platform, is prone to some security threats. All-in-One WP Security and Firewall will help provide that additional layer of security and peace of mind. It’s an extremely easy to use and intuitive tool, which reduces security risk and is constantly checking for vulnerabilities. We feel this is a must for every site moving into 2020.
9. RafflePress Plugin
Every marketer knows that some of the best promotions come in the form of giveaways and contests. RafflePress Plugin is built to help you increase your e-mail list, web traffic, and social media following by incentivizing others to share your giveaway. This helps improve the virality of your contest, and the best part is that this tool is built with lead generation and contact information capture in mind. RafflePress has a variety of tiers to select from based on the size of your business and your goals.
10. WP Mail SMTP by WPForms
If you’ve ever experienced any issues with your WordPress site not sending e-mails (so — all of us), this plugin is a must. WP Mail SMTP fixes any issues you may experience with e-mail deliverability by reconfiguring WordPress to utilize the correct SMTP provider when sending. SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the standard for sending e-mails. This plugin ensures that the proper authentication is there so your e-mails will not end up in SPAM, or maybe not get delivered at all. This plugin requires a basic understanding of DNS/SMTP settings, so it may be best to include a developer to help with this one.
Last, but certainly not least, Insert Headers and Footers plugin allows you to add scripts to the header and footer sections on your website without having to edit your theme’s code. This is great for people running digital campaigns, or looking to install third-party add-ons like HelloBar. We recommend installing Google Tag Manager on your site so that the number of scripts installed on your site is minimal. As long as your digital plumbing is set up properly, you will be able to track your website visitor’s journey.
Contact Single Origin
Building trust starts with a well-designed website and continues with ongoing digital marketing expertise. Client success depends on the ability to anticipate needs and solve problems. We do all that and more here at Single Origin. Contact us today to learn how we can help you foster trust with your customers at 925-289-8879.