If you’re a marketer working with WordPress sites, plugins are the perfect way to streamline your efforts. We’ve found these plugins to be simple to use, insanely reliable, and approved by developers (so you don’t have to worry at all about site performance)!
So, where do you start? How do you know which WordPress plugins will help your marketing efforts, and in turn, help your business thrive?
In this article, you’ll find:
- The essential WordPress plugins every marketer should know
- 5 plugins for list building and contact management
- The best WordPress plugins for blogs, content creators, and SEO
- Plugins to boost site engagement and decrease bounce rate
- And bonus: a few plugins you might want to avoid!
Ready to install your new favorite plugin? Let’s dive in!
Essential WordPress plugins every marketer should know
Let’s start with the basics! Whether you’re looking at your WordPress site or creating one for a client, these plugins have a wide variety of benefits that most site owners are looking for.
Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection
This anti-spam plugin will keep your comments clean and free of malicious content. It checks every comment that your site receives to identify whether or not it’s spam. Not sure if you want it to do all the work? You can still manually mark comments as spam or approve comments that may have accidentally been flagged.
It also shows URLs in the comment, so you’ll be able to catch “hidden” links right away (instead of site visitors accidentally clicking something they shouldn’t).
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
Nothing ruins your credibility (or your clients’) faster than spam. Especially if you’re managing a blog, installing this plugin is a simple way to help keep spammers away and your comments clean!
MonsterInsights – Google Analytics Dashboard
Take the guesswork out of your marketing efforts by displaying your Google Analytics data right in WordPress. By housing everything in the same spot, you’ll be able to keep these stats front and center every time you log in to make a change, and in turn, monitor how those changes affect your site traffic.
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
When you’re focused on results, having accessible data can make the difference between guessing what works and knowing what works. By pulling Google Analytics right into your site, you’ll be able to keep it top of mind!
reCaptcha
Have you ever filled out a form and had to verify you’re not a robot? That’s what Google Captcha provides, as an added layer of security for your site forms. By adding this simple, extra check box, you have a much better chance of blocking attacks trying to spam your form.
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
Creating a great form experience is key to a lot of marketing efforts. This plugin is simple to implement and ensures entering an email address is a smooth and secure process for your users!
Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed, & Growth
If you’re familiar with WordPress, you’ve probably heard of Jetpack already, and for good reasons. All around, it’s just a solid plugin with some great, basic functionality. From powerful tools that help you customize the design of your site to intuitive services that help boost your marketing efforts, it comes packed with options to optimize each WordPress site.
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
This plugin simplifies a lot of tasks that once depended on custom development to implement. That means you can start here instead of trying to find time in your developer’s busy schedule!
5 plugins for list building and contact management
As a marketer in the digital age, you probably spend a lot of time thinking about email lists. Growing them, creating content for them, segmenting them, designing them…simply put, there’s no shortage of work to be done! Luckily, there are WordPress plugins that can help pull the pieces together and streamline your email process. Here are our favorites!
Contact Form 7
This classic form plugin is one of the easiest ways to add a form to a WordPress site. If your client communication starts with a “Contact” page, this is a great solution to get your site set up. It also offers customizable options, so it’ll blend right in with your site’s brand.
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
Besides being a quick way to get a form on your website, Contact Form 7 can forward any submissions straight to an email address, so you’ll always know if someone has filled out the form on your site.
Gravity Forms
This premium form plugin comes ready to use with tons of features. It has over 30 form fields built in and allows you to use conditional logic, so the form can change based on user input. There are also a bunch of other plugins that work well with it, giving you even more functionality if you need it.
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
For someone whose daily goal is to make users fill out a form, Gravity Forms helps quite a bit in making the form experience easy peasy instead of frustrating.
HubSpot – CRM, Email Marketing, Live Chat, Forms & Analytics
Whether you already use Hubspot or are just getting started with it, their plugin is an incredibly powerful tool for anyone growing a business on WordPress. It’ll help you capture new leads with forms and pop-ups, build your email list, and track visitor behavior on your site. The best part? There’s zero coding required, which makes this plugin easy to use and saves you time!
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
Unless you feel like becoming an expert in APIs, form authentication, and manual email list segmentation, Hubspot takes care of all of this for you in one single plugin. We can’t recommend it enough for anyone trying to grow their online business!
Mailchimp for WordPress
For any Mailchimp fans out there, this plugin will help you grow your list and write better newsletters. It’ll help you create custom opt-ins, plus it integrates with existing forms on your site, such as comment, contact, or checkout forms.
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
Sending email newsletters is an important part of digital marketing. By using a plugin like Mailchimp to simplify the process, you’ll be able to spend more time writing quality content and less time worrying about logistics!
Popup Builder by OptinMonster
If you’re interested in using advanced pop-ups and content upgrades to grow your email list, OptinMonster is a great option for displaying those short forms. You’ll be able to customize the look of each opt-in, plus it integrates well with email providers for seamless list building.
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
OptinMonster features a wide variety of opt-in styles with plenty of customizable options, meaning it’s pretty easy to make it fall in line with your brand. Plus, their dashboard provides plenty of data, so you’ll always be informed about which A/B test is performing the best!
The best WordPress plugins for blogs, content creators, and SEO
If your marketing efforts are centered around online content, you’re probably no stranger to all the moving parts that go into ideating, creating, publishing, promoting, and revising content. To help you stay organized and optimize your workflow, check out these plugins that are perfect for anyone working with a blog or SEO!
All in One SEO – Powerful SEO Plugin to Boost SEO Rankings
This WordPress plugin has been helping people optimize their site’s SEO since 2007. With features like XML sitemap support, Google AMP support, and automatic notifications to Google when you update your site, it can make a difference if you’re trying to rank higher in search results!
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
It’s hard to keep up with the latest and greatest SEO practices, but using a plugin like All in One SEO Pack means you don’t have to do all the work and research yourself!
Edit Flow
If you’re working with an editorial team, this plugin will greatly simplify your workflow. Edit Flow allows your team to work together on the content calendar right in WordPress, so you don’t have to jump in and out of different tools. It has a calendar view (so you’ll always know what’s publishing and when) and allows you to set content statuses (so you know what phase each piece is in).
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
Collaborating on content can be a little tricky, but with a plugin like Edit Flow, you can keep everyone on your team on the same page! It’s a great way to improve efficiency.
Editorial Calendar
If calendars are your view of choice, this plugin makes managing a WordPress blog so much easier! It automatically pulls in your posts and their scheduled publish date, giving you an easy way to visualize your editorial calendar. It also has drag-and-drop functionality, which allows you to easily move things around and prioritize your projects.
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
Knowing when a piece of content is getting published is key to a successful strategy. The Editorial Calendar plugin will help you visualize your content and be nimble with the calendar!
XML Sitemap Generator for Google
Sitemaps are incredibly important for SEO, but not always something you want to manually create. With a plugin like Google XML Sitemaps, it’ll automatically notify all major search engines whenever new content is created on the site.
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
This is an easy SEO win that works on auto-pilot. Once you install Google XML Sitemaps, you can leave the sitemap work to it while you focus on creating new content!
Yoast SEO
The Yoast SEO plugin can help you optimize every post and page for maximum exposure. While you’re editing content, this plugin will help you preview how it’ll display in search engine results and also make content suggestions to increase rankings.
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
This plugin prompts you to optimize every post and page, so it’s hard to not think about SEO! By keeping it top of mind, you’ll create better content habits while also boosting the rank of your site.
Plugins to boost site engagement and decrease bounce rate
You want your users to have the best experience possible on your site, that way they come back again, start to trust your brand, and eventually become customers! There are lots of ways you can do that, including using strategies to boost site engagement (and in turn, decrease bounce rate). These plugins can help!
Better Click To Tweet
Have you ever read a blog article featuring a quote or statistic that you could tweet just by clicking a button? As you might’ve guessed, that’s exactly what this plugin provides! It generates a shortcode you can use on any post to turn your text into a tweetable quote.
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
This plugin encourages site engagement and social engagement with your brand. A win-win! Need we say more?
Hello Bar Popup Builder
This plugin serves a lot of purposes, but we love it as a way to keep engaging users on your site. Similar to the list-building plugins we covered, Hello Bar creates pop-ups you can add to your site and allows you to collect email addresses. Beyond lead generation, however, Hello Bar also helps you show the right message to the right users at the right time.
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
This plugin will help you meet several marketing goals with a single tool. Plus they offer all kinds of educational materials to help you define your lead generation strategy and determine what message to show visitors when!
Redirection
No one likes a broken link, including your site visitors and search engines. By installing this plugin, you’ll have an easy to send traffic from old URLs to new URLs, which will result in a better experience all around (and possibly better SEO)!
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
This plugin is easy enough to use but powerful enough to do a job well done. By getting in the habit of always redirecting old URLs, you’ll avoid broken links on your site and none of your clients will ever need to see your 404 page!
The Events Calendar
If your marketing efforts include local events, pop-ups, or conferences, The Events Calendar is a great way to display the details to your site visitors. It’s fully customizable and features plenty of add-ons if you’re looking for more advanced features.
WHY IT’S GREAT FOR MARKETERS
If you have an event strategy, you also need a strategy for keeping your users informed about the events you’re attending and hosting. Using a plugin like The Events Calendar is one way to ensure the details will be easy to discover and optimized for your WordPress site!
Bonus: 4 types of WordPress plugins to be cautious of
As you’re looking at different plugins, there are a few types that we encourage you to use with an extra note of caution. These include:
- Backup plugins
- Caching plugins
- Performance plugins
- Security plugins
Why?
Your hosting provider might have settings in place around these topics already.
Your plugins should only increase your site performance, not hurt it
While there’s nothing inherently bad about backup, caching, performance, or security plugins, sometimes their settings are redundant to how the WordPress site is hosted. And that can negatively impact site performance.
Moral of the story: If you’re concerned about site backups, caching/performance, and security, talk to your hosting provider first. This way you know whether these types of plugins are actually necessary or if your site is already optimized for all these awesome features!
