Top 10 WordPress Plugins for Businesses

Whether you use WordPress to run your business website or another CMS platform, quality content is your key ingredient. But how do you make sure this content gets presented to the right audience in the most effective way possible?

The real success of a website depends on readability, speed, accessibility, social sharing and analytics to monitor your progress. Here are the top 10 WordPress plugins that will increase the reach of your content.

Sexy Bookmarks

Sexy Bookmarks is a bookmarking plugin that includes over 100 social platforms. You can choose which platforms you want represented and where they should be placed on the site. What’s more, the look and feel of the plugin – from the design to the wording on the action buttons – is fully customizable.

Social Media Plugins

Social media are a key component to spreading your content as far and wide as possible. There is no shortage of Facebook plugins for WordPress. What’s important to remember, however, is that your visitors need a way not just to like or share your content, but to subscribe to your Facebook updates. Getting a reader to like something on your site is a one-time success, but getting them to subscribe provides an opportunity for repeated exposure to your brand. The same goes for Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest.

W3 Total Cache

Internet users demand speed. You might lose valuable visitors if your site doesn’t load quick enough. Enter W3 Total Cache, which enables you to create static cached pages for your content that load considerably faster.

WPtouch

Considering the explosive growth of mobile devices over recent years, it’s surprising how many websites aren’t optimized for mobile access. WPtouch ensures a smooth user experience for visitors accessing your website on a touchscreen device. The plugin allows you to customize what content will be shown on a mobile browser without it affecting the regular site. WPtouch is available for all major mobile devices, including the iPad.

Google Analytics for WordPress

Google Analytics is a no-brainer for most web users. It requires you to embed a snippet of code for Google to find and start analyzing your site. Yoast Google Analytics for WordPress automates this process. But that’s not the real benefit of this plugin. In addition to the regular Google Analytics features, it offers a host of additional tracking options, including eCommerce integration and event tracking. Yoast also provides WordPress SEO, which allows you to create SEO templates and has a built-in engine to check the SEO on all the content you produce.

Social Metrics

Similar to Google Analytics, Social Metrics shows you how well your posts resonate with your audience. The difference is, Social Metrics focuses on social media statistics, providing a dashboard of the kind of activity your content is getting on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and Digg.

All in One SEO

SEO is key if you want to be noticed on the web. As a result, there is an abundance of SEO plugins for WordPress. All in One SEO, however, takes the cake for being the easiest and most comprehensive. This plugin automatically creates meta tags, notifies you of duplicate content and, in short, makes SEO best practices as user-friendly as possible.

Google XML sitemaps

Speaking of being noticed on the web, if you want to optimize your traffic, you’ll want to be friends with search engines such as Google.  Google XML sitemaps automatically notifies Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com whenever you update your site. This ensures your new content gets properly indexed and ranked.

Contact Form 7

Once you have a good amount of traffic on your site, you will want people to be able to drop you a line. Contact Form 7 offers various contact forms that allow for attachments and are translated into several dozen languages. Ajax, CAPTCHA, and Akismet spam-filtering are built-in.

GTranslate

The world is getting smaller and businesses need to address not just local markets but a global audience. While English is the most commonly used language for websites worldwide, many companies also offer localized versions of their website. That’s where GTranslate comes in, offering a remarkably good (albeit not perfect) translation of your website in a wide variety of languages. Translations are fast and automatic, and they can be opened in a new window so it’s easy to return to the original site.

Looking for more on other CMS platforms? The Business-Software.com Content Management Report compares and contrasts 10 of the top CMS solutions on the market today.