10 Best and Essential WordPress Plugins for Small Business Websites

Before we get into the plugin details. Let us first try and understand what WordPress is and why it is so important.

WordPress, technically speaking, is an open source website / blog creation tool coded in PHP. In layman terms, it is a tool which one can you use to create websites and blogs. Not just that, WordPress is extremely easy to use and you can create a website or a blog, and go live within minutes!

Over 70 million websites depend on WordPress, and a significantly large number of small businesses have their websites built on WordPress.

Its ready to use themes and plugins developed by WordPress and 3^rd Party Developers enables small businesses to go online without much of a hassle.

Today, we are going to share the best and 10 essential WordPress plugins developed for small businesses.

1.       Akismet

This is a must have plugin for your WordPress website or blog. Akismet is a spam protection plugin that checks your comments against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam or not.

2.       Contact Form 7

It is a simple yet very effective plugin to manage contact forms. This plugin allows users to create customisable contact forms for website and blogs. This one is on our essentials list.

3.       Share Buttons by AddThis

Small businesses depend a lot on Social Media traffic, and it is important for businesses to reach out to their target audience. This can only happen through content sharing.

AddThis is a suite of website tools which includes sharing, following, recommended content, and conversion tools that makes websites smarter. With AddThis, you can also see how your users are engaging with your content, provide a personalised experience for each user and encourage them to share, subscribe or follow.

4.       Yoast for WordPress SEO

Just as much as content sharing is important for small businesses to drive traffic to the website, it is equally important for a business to generate organic traffic. This can only happen through effective SEO implementation.

Yoast SEO is a free WordPress plugin that is extremely useful and easy to use plugin for effective SEO implementation. It is very to use for SEO purposes and it does not require expert level SEO knowledge or experience.

5.       W3 Total Cache

As per Google updates, website speed is a ranking factor. No matter how good your SEO implementation is, if your website loading speed is low, you are likely to have a negative impact in the search results.

W3 Total Cache is a free to use WordPress plugin that optimizes a website in order to deliver best performance and speed. It uses Web Performance Optimization (WPO) technique using caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support.

6.       bbPress

A lot of small businesses love to use a forum or a bulletin board, but they either don’t have the budget or the infrastructure to support a bulletin board like vBullein or any other.

This is where bbPress comes in handy, it is a free to use forum software, designed specifically for WordPress websites. Plus, it is light on the web server, easy to install and customize. bbPress makes it very easy for small businesses to implement it, and engage with their audience.

7.       Google XML Sitemaps

This is one free to use plugin which no business can afford to ignore. Google XML Sitemaps is a plugin that generates Sitemaps for websites and blogs.

Sitemap is a file which contains a list of web pages on your site, and tells Google and other search engines about the organisation of your site content.

8.       WooComerce

If your business is into eCommerce, if you like to sell products online then, this is the plugin for you. WooCommerce is a powerful, extendable eCommerce plugin that helps you sell anything.

9.       Google Analytics by MonsterInsights

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin enables you to track your website using the Google Analytics tracking code and allows you to view key Google Analytics reports.

10.   WP Smush

WP Smush is a free to use plugin which optimizes all your images, using its image smusher technology. This will make your website load faster and keep your audience with a slow internet speed happy and glued.