Best WordPress Plugins for Marketers

Marketers running WordPress sites understand the power of great plugins. But plugins do us no good if we don’t know about them.

So to help you take advantage of what’s out there, we reached out to our expert marketing community. And they delivered.

Keep reading to learn awesome tools for taking your marketing efforts to the next level with plugins.

Crazy Egg – User Interface Interaction

When users hit our web pages, what are the gravitating towards? Well, wonder no more. Because Steven Watts has the plugin to help you navigate user interaction. Here’s why he loves Crazy Egg.

Crazy Egg is a great tool for seeing how users interact with your website, which allows you to improve it for better conversions.

The tool has heat maps and scroll maps, the former shows the most popular areas of a website and the latter reveals how far down the page visitors scroll.

Crazy Egg also has an overlay map, which allows you to see where people are coming from to get to your website and where they click. This gives you valuable insights when organizing how your website is displayed, helping you give more importance to certain areas and components.

As a digital marketer, Crazy Egg enables me to convert more leads and see which funnels of visitors are the best to convert. This not only helps convert them when they get to my site but it also helps me improve and retain the not so good funnels for better overall improvement across all of my marketing efforts.

Gravity Forms – Lead Generation

Getting users to your content is good.. but capturing their lead data is even better. Which is why Julie Graff uses Gravity Forms. She shares why using this plugin is a must.

By far, the most vital WordPress plugin to our business is Gravity Forms. I can’t imagine how we would collect lead data without it. It makes creating forms and adding them to pages super easy. Better yet, it automates responses to the subscriber and routes their contact information directly to our email marketing service, MailChimp, so we can continue to engage with them.

It also allows us to set up automatic notifications to our team so we can see leads in real time. If you are doing any type of gated content and lead nurturing, this is a must-have.

Social Warfare – Social Sharing

For content like your blog, you need to make social sharing available. Simple as that. And to help make your content shareable, Maddy Osman shares her favorite plugin. Here are her reasons for using Social Warfare.

The one WordPress plugin I can’t live without is Social Warfare. It’s a social sharing plugin that I found after testing many lackluster alternatives. Social Warfare has many customizable themes so that you can seamlessly match to your existing blog. But my two favorite features of the Social Warfare plugin are:

A counter that shows how many people have shared your article (or page) on each network, which acts as instant social proof.
A built-in Click-to-Tweet function that encourages additional social sharing.

If you’re going to use a social sharing plugin (and you should), you might as well use the best one.

SEO Structured Data Schema – Search Engine Optimization

Ever wonder how some sites show information like star ratings, events, or search boxes, right in their Google result? What you’re seeing is structured data and schema at work. Here’s Aaron Hockel on SEO Structure Data Schema, his top plugin for making Google results stand out.

Despite the awkward name, SEO Structured Data Schema makes adding schema markup, or structured data, to your content a breeze.

Manually adding schema markup is incredibly challenging but is so important in the SEO process ever since Google introduced the rich snippet answer results. This plugin simplifies the process. It takes less than a minute and any digital marketer can use it.

WP Smush – Website Usability

Website speed is important for a few reasons. The first is that you want to provide outstanding UX. So slow sites don’t cut it. Second, search engines like Google factor in site speed for SEO ranking. Jessica Thiefels discusses WP Smush, a Plugin that compresses images making your site faster. Check it out.

It’s not very sexy, but I always use WP Smush. This automatically optimizes every image you upload to your WordPress site so it doesn’t slow down your page speed, which is, of course, critical to your SEO. It’s also free, and I’ve never had to upgrade to get more from it.

Plugin Organizer – Site Optimization

Let’s stick with the idea of website usability. Using WordPress Plugins are great. But too many can slow you down. Here’s Mark Scully on Plugin Organizer – a great plugin for those of us reaching plugin collector status.

One of the plugins I’m a big fan of is ‘Plugin Organizer’. One of the biggest complaints from any web developer (and rightfully so) is that plugins will negatively impact page load time as they fire on pages even when they’re not being used.

What this tool allows is the ability to disable any plugin for pages when they’re not required, and the option to select at what stage of the page rendering process you’d like it to fire. Definitely worth checking out if you want to find the balance between functionality and site speed in regards plugins.

Yoast – Search Engine Optimization

What WordPress Plugin for Marketers list would be complete without Yoast SEO. As a matter of fact, this plugin ranks #3 on the WordPress most popular list. Here’s Vishal Srivastava on why he loves it.

The one WordPress Plugin I can’t (and probably no one can) live without is Yoast SEO.

It’s like the Swiss Army Knife of SEO for WordPress.

You can do on-page optimization, generate sitemaps, control page level indexing, social sharing tags and set a canonical tag. You can even manage Redirects with the paid one. But above all, it is always updated to reflect the current best practices in SEO so I know my site is compliant with Google’s guidelines.

Pagezii SEO Agency Plugin

And to finish off the roundup, we wanted to highlight our own Pagezii SEO Agency Plugin for Marketing Agencies looking to capture leads from the site.

The plugin lets your site visitors create full audit reports on their own site, including site SEO, UX, Blog and social footprint analysis. Since the PDF report is emailed to the visitor, it’s also CC’ed to the Agency’s sales team for further follow-up. Make sure you give the tool a go.

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