Must Have WordPress Plugins for business websites

WordPress plugins are very crucial building blocks of your WordPress site. WordPress plugins allow you to add new features and functionalities to your website in the least amount of time and money. Plugins also affect your website’s performance like web speed, security, and performance, so you should be careful before using any plugin. It is important to have the right set of plugins for different functionalities to ensure the website’s smooth functioning and online success. There are more than 50000 WordPress plugins available for almost every feature you want to have on your WordPress website. However, not all plugins are built equally, some of the plugins include inefficient coding that can affect your website’s performance. In this blog, we are going to walk through some of the must-have WordPress plugins for your business website in 2021.

1.  WPForms

Contact forms are one of the most essential parts of every website, it allows you to be in touch with your visitors. WPForms is one of the most user-friendly and popular WordPress contact form plugins. It is an online drag and drops form builder that allows you to create online order forms, email subscription forms, contact forms, polls forms, payment forms, and other online forms without writing codes. It is also integrated with major payment and marketing platforms thus you can create powerful forms instantly using this plugin. Major benefits with the WPForms plugin are:

• It offers pre-built templates to create contact forms.
• Conditional logic allows you to show or hide fields according to user behavior.
• Forms with multiple pages to improve user experience.
• Geolocation option to display user’s geolocation.
• Surveys and polls functions.
• It captures the user’s email address even if they don’t finish submitting the forms.
  
  

2.  Yoast SEO

Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important practices in today’s business environment. It plays an important role in increasing the number of visitors to your website; WordPress offers to build SEO-friendly web pages, which increases their website traffic. Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins, it allows you to generate sitemaps, add meta tags, connect your site to Google search console, optimize your site for social media, and more. Features offered by the Yoast plugin that enhance your SEO are:

• Internal link suggestions.
• Readability check.
• Optimize for keywords, synonyms, related keywords, key phrases.
• XML news sitemaps.
• Allows creating custom Meta descriptions.
• Updates as per Google’s algorithm.
  
  

3.  WordPress Smush

Images can slow down your WordPress site, thus it is important to have all your images optimized for the web. WP Smush is a useful plugin that aims to optimize images on your website without losing the quality of images. It is an easy-to-use plugin that scans the entire website for images and compresses the images. It compresses JPEG files, PNG files, and GIF files which helps the website to load faster and enhances the site performance. Major benefits of using WP Smush are:

• Compress image while preserving image quality.
• Compress any image in any directory.
• Compatible with your theme, page builder, and media library plugin.
• Incorrect size image detection.
• Defer off-screen images.
  
  

4.  iTheme Security

According to WebARX report on average more than 30’000 websites are hacked every day, WordPress sites can be more vulnerable to attacks because of plugin vulnerability, weak passwords, and obsolete software. iTheme Security WordPress plugin provides more than 30 ways to secure and protect your WordPress site. It works to lock down WordPress, fix common holes, stop automated attacks, and strengthen user credentials. Key features that the iTheme security plugin provides are:

• Two-factor authentication
• WordPress salts and security keys
• Malware scan scheduling
• Password security
• Password expiration
• Google reCAPTCHA
• WordPress Command Line Interface (CLI) integration
  
  

5.  WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the e-commerce arm of WordPress. It is an open-source and customizable ecommerce plugin for WordPress designed for large and small online merchants using WordPress. It is regularly audited by Sucuri (an industry leader in security) which makes it safe for users. It allows you to add unlimited products and users and allows you to accept unlimited orders. From payments and shipping to marketing and accounting, WooCommers provides a wide variety of 400 extensions. Major benefits of using the WooCommerce plugin are:

• Creating an e-commerce store
• Manage orders and customers
• Setting up Google Ads through WooCommerce
• Setting up inventory on WooCommerce
• Enables shipping and marketing management
  
  

6.  Creative Mail

You can use the Creative Mail plugin with WooCommerce. Creative Mail plugin is the WordPress-friendly email marketing solution. It offers a deep integration with WordPress, Jetpack, WooCommerce, and Creative Mail helps you to automatically add contacts from website forms. If you have a WooCommerce store, Creative Mail can manage your important transactional emails. As other email solutions require you to add contacts, API keys, SMTP servers, and more that take you away from WordPress. Creative Mail simplifies the task and lets you manage your outreach from your WordPress dashboard. It offers a smart email editor that automatically suggests ideal layouts and pulls your blog posts, images, and products into email content to share with your audience. Creative Mail also lets advanced marketers build multistep campaigns that take the audience through a series of emails based on their behavior. Benefits of using the Creative Mail plugin are:

• Enhanced ecommerce
• Interactive transactional emails
• Jetpack forms integration
• Build better branding
• Ensures better deliverability
• Live support
  
  

7.  Tidio

With 90000+ active WordPress Installations and 96/100 WordPress user ratings, Tidio is one of the most famous WordPress live chat plugins and chatbots. It enables easy and effective online communication with users. It allows you to engage with your audience, nurture leads, automate work and grow your business. Tidio comes with the following features:

• A free chatting plugin that lets you talk with your visitors
• A lightweight and customizable widget
• A free mobile app to communicate with your visitors remotely
• Incoming visitor notifications
• Viewed pages list
• Live typing preview that shows what visitor is typing before the message is being sent
• WordPress chatbots
• Chatbot templates
• Visual chatbot editor

Conclusion

Choosing the appropriate plugin for your website needs can make your web development easier and scalable. Selecting the right plugin involves considerations such as the scope of your website, the number of visitors, and more. You should evaluate how a specific plugin can affect your website speed, security, performance, and cost. Most good plugins have a cost so make to compare the cost.  The consequences of choosing the wrong plugin can be huge, according to a report, 22% of WordPress sites are hacked because of security issues with plugins. Plugin decisions are an important step in building your website, it should be evaluated carefully before a Plugin is added to your website.

4 Reasons How Entrepreneurs Can Benefit from a Great Web Design

Dubai has always been a great place for people with great ideas and a will to

succeed. You can check out a host of success stories in the past three decades like

Careem, Souq.com and a host of others. So, it is natural that many fresh graduates

and young people with an idea with which they think can bring a positive change to

the world.

Marketing for any business and raising awareness is key for its success. Even if you

are running a grocery store, you need to market it so that you can have enough

daily/monthly sales to make some profit. For a small business/startup, you need

social media presence and a great website to make a good impact on your target

audience.

Apart from other aspects, the design of a website is what most people look at with

interest. If they fall in love with it, you can have a field day in terms of attracting

your target audience; else you will find it difficult to move forward.

Let me offer you three important factors for which entrepreneurs must take the

design of their website seriously and how to go about it.

Purpose of your Website and your Target Audience

If you want to succeed in making your web design count, think about your audience

and how you want to attract them. Design is not always about flashy graphics and

mind-blowing videos. It can be much more than that as any website has some

design. It is up to you as to how you want to make it look to your visitors. Let’s start

with thinking about your perfect customer and reading his mind.

If a visitor is on your website, it means that he is interested in the can offer their

target market a customized design that they love to see and experience. If you are

offering IT related services, for example, think about incorporating such a design

that can complement your service well and hence can attract people looking for

such services instantly.

Make your Website Tempting

Design is not something that you can incorporate overnight. You need to think

about it hard, and if you think the decision is getting harder as you can’t finalize it

or stuck between two design, get some help. An expert website design dubai company or professionals in this concern can offer you great support.

Trying to build your business online through a website can be nerve-wracking for

young entrepreneurs. The reason for this is that there are many aspects that a

person new to this field can get overwhelmed with. And the design is certainly one

of them as not everyone is well aware of what they need in terms of website design

that can make their portal a favorite for visitors. Let me offer you some more tips to

make your design tempting and unique without going overboard.

Simple, Yet Attention-Grabbing

Lots of people not familiar with web design are of the viewpoint that a simple

website design can’t give a business portal a chance to succeed. Only lavishly

designed websites with outlandish design and videos can attract the audience in

hordes. This may be true for some people, but the fact is that you need to you need

a simple, yet irresistible design which can get you a lot more visitors than an

outlandish design.

Another aspect is about the use of written content and offers on the website. Laced

with good design and smart use of CTAs can get you positive results. Don’t overload

your target audience with loads of content. Lots of text can be like a boring speech

or sermon, which not many people would like to listen. It can be overwhelming and

can put off your target audience.

Most of the visitors don’t like to go through a lot of content, written in technical

jargon, which they can’t understand either. An overabundance of words and written

text can be bad for your website as it can give the impression that you are talking

to a niche audience which knows everything. Therefore, most of the visitors will be

offended by heavy vocabulary. Try to offer as much information in the form of

infographics and short videos/presentation rather than plain and long text.

Generate Marketing Leads and Ultimately More Sales

You may be surprised to hear that through good design, you will be able to generate

marketing leads, but this is true. Through your portal that is designed in the right

way, you will be able to get a design which is right on the money. So, what you

need to do? Creating a design which can lead your visitors to the order form or get

their contact information in return for an eBook or special offer can help you generate strong leads.

Not everyone will be willing to order your product right away in spite of a great

design. So, you need to educate your visitors as how to browse through your

website for their maximum benefit. Use phrases and CTAs like “Click here for

information” or “Limited Time Offer” to lure your visitors. There is no way you can

get to the information of your customers easily as leads are hard to come by. But

once done, it will take you to increased sales.

UI/UX of the design is critical hereof for the success. After the leads, you need to

create a design for the products’ page and shopping cart that is extremely eye

catchy. Include short 10-30 seconds video of the product in which a visitor is

interested so that he can get to know more about its features and how to select the

best product. Use of colors and layout that compliments the product well is one

aspect you need to keep in mind.

Final Word

A great-looking portal is not something that entrepreneurs can easily skip. For a

successful online presence for any website, use of a good design that can attract

visitors instantly is the need of the hour. Please use the comments section below for

any feedback or ask any questions.

Top 5 technology themes for wordpress

Today we going to discuss Top 5 Technology Themes for WordPress

Currently, we live in a tech-dominated world. If you plan to develop a technology WordPress website, then it is essential for you to take some advantage of a fantastic platform known as WordPress. Under this blog, there are some exceptional themes covered.Here are the best technology themes for WordPress

Arka host- WHMCS hosting, shop and corporate theme

1. It is one of the best ideas to convert HTML to WordPress theme. The best part about using this theme is that it is easy to use and professional at the same time. The issue features page builder, color variations, and awesome slideshows. The idea is easy to customize and wholly featured.

By using this theme, one can create a fantastic web hosting site in few minutes. Some of the crucial features of the issue include:

• Three different demos
• A lot of Different Features & Components
• Responsive WordPress Hosting Theme
• Build and Included Visual Composer Plugin ( Save $34 )
• Premium Revolution Slider
• Three Different Header Styles
• Three Different Footer Styles
• Support installing theme sections for every page
• Layout boxed & wide
• Lazy load effects
• Smooth Scroll effects
• Portfolio designs
• Page Layouts
• jQueryimproved
• Dedicated Support
• Unlimited Patterns
• Custom shortcodes
• Fast and Light Weight

The theme is available for $64.

Agile- Multipurpose app showcase WordPress theme

It is one of the most popular themes to convert HTML to WordPress theme in the current times of ThemeForest. The issue features fantastic design, rich features, and neat typography. The great features have resulted in the use of themes across all domains like product showcase, design agencies, mobile app showcase, personal portfolio, college or schools, travel agency, real estate, etc.

Some of the important features of the theme are:

• Fully Responsive
• Options for a single page or a multi-page site
• 6 Custom Post types
• Easy Parallax backgrounds with customizable scroll speed
• Visual Composer Page Builder
• Premium Shortcode Builder
• WooCommerce Integrated
• Smart Lava-Lamp menu
• Premium Revolution Slider, Flex 2 Slider, and Nivo Slider included
• Portfolio with AJAX features
• Unlimited Sidebars
• WPML Compatible
• 500+ Fonts
• Child Theme Included
• Awesome Responsive Smartphone sliders
• Modern Mobile Menu
• Widgets for Flickr
• 1500+ Retina ready icons
• A lot of Options
• More than 70 Shortcodes with visual Shortcode helper tool

The theme is available for $49.

Grizzly- Responsive app showcase-

If you are looking for PSD to WordPress theme, then grizzly is the best theme. It is an entirely responsive theme, and it is perfect for the corporate website.  The idea is easy to customize.  Above all, there is also simple to set up.Some of the fantastic features of the item are:

• Subscribe Form integrated with Mail Chimp API
• Feedback Form for sending Comment, Request and Bug Report
• Contact Form with jQuery Validation
• Unlimited Styles
• 3 Way to Showcase your App: Slide, Magnify and Video (
• Sidebar Generator
• 179 Ready to Use Icons from Picons
• Custom Login Logo & Favicon
• 7 Custom Widgets (Ads, Contact Info, Contact Form, Twitter, Flickr, Social, Sub Nav)
• Ready for Multi-Language Translation (.POT provided

You can buy the theme for $44 and also extend the support for $12.

Alaska- SEO WHMCS hosting, shop, and business WordPress theme-

One of the most amazing themes is Alaska. It is a simple WordPress premium theme. The PSD to WordPress theme is entirely compatible with the WHMCS-Bridge plugin. The bridge is known to connect WordPress and WHMCS.

The theme is perfect for hosting websites and technology and software companies, organizations, or agencies. Some of the amazing features of the theme are:

• The theme features a revolution slider that ensures you can create remarkable slides on your site.
• It has an elegant design that is both clean and sharp.
• The theme also has a visual composer drag and drop page builder integrated so one can build their website by just selecting and dragging the builder.
• The included visual composer also has video and parallax backgrounds that will help you develop the background section.
• The theme includes 25 PDS
• Eight post formats
• 600+ Google Web Fonts
• You can also easily add google analytics.
• Unbranded powerful Theme Option

The theme is available for $49, and you can get the support for $17.63.

Appdev- Mobile app showcase WordPress theme

– This theme is exceptional for mobile app developers to showcase their skills. The theme is built on a neat modular framework, and it has multiple features that can help you build an amazing site.  It can also act as a Launchpad for iPhone and Android.

Some essential features of the site are:

• Retina ready
• Smart Lava-Lamp menu
• SEO Optimized
• 500+ Fonts
• Unlimited Sidebars
• WPML Compatible
• Contemporary Mobile Menu
• Widgets for Flickr, Instagram, and Dribble
• Amazing Responsive iPhone slider
• Perfectly layered PSD files
• 70+ Shortcodes with visual shortcode helper tool

One can buy this theme for $49, and you can get support for $13.88.

Thus these are some amazing WordPress themes that are about technology.

How to Create An eCommerce Marketplace Using WordPress?

Creativity and commerce with CMS, come with endless possibilities, which seriously doesn’t cease to amaze anybody who is making use of the same. With a certain degree of imagination, mashed and combined with WordPress’s huge variety of plugins and themes, you have to power to do almost anything, starting from minimal blogs, eCommerce stores and ending up with web applications.

Apart from the creation process being simple, another point that acts as an advantage is the fact, that WordPress theme does not require you to spend a lot of money. Websites, that generally will take thousands of dollars to build, along with a team full of developers, can just be built and managed by just one individual, using this platform.

You wanting to build an online marketplace is very much similar to the one mentioned above. Traditional custom solutions are extremely difficult for any average user to execute, especially the process of e-commerce development. This is where this platform comes to play, with which anybody can spend a few hundred dollars and create their next big online market place. For error free development it’s essential to go with a wordpress development agency who can design, develop and market your website throughout.

This blog will focus on how anybody can very easily create an e-commerce website. However, before getting to know about the steps involved in creating a website, you need to be informed about what is meant by a WP marketplace. Getting to know all this will also help you to be sure if you even need to hire WP developers, to get the wordpress development services

What Is Meant By an Online Marketplace?

An online marketplace is basically another name for an eCommerce website. To define it simply, it allows all the users to become a seller. They have the freedom to sell any kind of product. One important thing to note is, being a marketplace owner, you are not the owner of any kind of inventory. Your job is to allow different users to list and sell their products on your marketplace.

Almost all developers are familiar with the fact that this platform can be used to build an e-commerce store on any website. However, there exists a huge possibility that even though most people understand the basic concept of a marketplace, they might not be able enough to know how a marketplace is different from a store.

The fundamental difference between the two is the fact that in a store, a single vendor attempts to sell certain goods, whereas, a marketplace includes a number of stores, which is comprised of various vendors and sellers.

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After getting informed about what a marketplace refers to, it is time that you get to know in short about how much it costs to create an online marketplace.

How Much Does It Cost?

An actual physical marketplace takes years to get set up properly and also needs you to spend, millions of dollars. On the other hand, an online marketplace can cost as low as 6.95 dollars a month and can get created in one hour.

There are certain tools that you need to set up a marketplace, and each of it comes for a price:

● Domain name – This is the address to your website on the internet. It costs around 14.95 dollars per year.

● Web Hosting – It refers to the online location, where a user stores the content and files of their website. It costs around 13.99 dollars per month.

● SSL Certificate – This is the feature that adds a green padlock icon, to your address bar. This lets your customers know that your website is safe to visit. .

Benefits of Setting Up an eCommerce Marketplace

The biggest advantage of creating and running such a marketplace has already been talked about briefly in the previous section. The benefit that is most important for most people is the fact that as a marketplace like this grows in scale, your potential to generate revenue increases accordingly.

There however certain factors that are important for you to consider if you want to gain advantage from this feature. You need to have the ability to understand whether the current market you are targeting is good enough for your purpose. You need to be sure that the marketplace you are planning to build will be able to attract multiple customers and vendors at the same time.

Proving a good experience to the vendors and the customers, along with finalising the correct niche, wins half the battle for you. The vendors, who do make money from your marketplace will focus greatly on driving the traffic for you. In addition, the customers who will receive a good experience after visiting your marketplace will ideally inform their friends about it.

Finally, it is time for you to know in detail about the steps you need to take to create a WordPress marketplace. The following section comprises of the same.

Steps to Successfully Create A WordPress Marketplace

● Creating and Setting up of Your eCommerce Platform

The very first step involves purchasing a domain name and an account for web hosting. Just web hosting will not be enough, as you will need access to software that specialises specifically in creating e-commerce websites.

● Switching your Platform Into a Marketplace Using a Plugin

The moment your e-commerce platform is ready, you can install a vendor’s plugin and make use of it. This plugin is going to transform your single vendor store into a marketplace, which will attract multiple vendors. Once this setup is complete, a number of vendors can choose to sign up to your website and sell all their products online.

● Allowing Account Creation

This is an important step. You need to allow all your customers to create an account. For instance, while making use of a WooCommerce plugin, a customer needs to visit its ‘settings’ page, and then go to the ‘Accounts and Privacy’ tab and make use of ‘Account Creation’ feature.

● Adding an Accounts Page

The next step is to make sure that you have added a ‘registration’ option to your navigation menu. The purpose of this tab will be to ease up the registration process, and in turn, will allow all the users to sign up quickly and seamlessly.

● Run and Maintain Your Online Marketplace

This is undoubtedly the final step of the creation of an online marketplace. Once you develop the idea that your online marketplace is ready, then the best thing you can do to check is to create an account, to confirm that every feature is working as expected. 

Maintenance is an equally important function, so you must check whether there exist any pending vendor requests and if so, you need to address it immediately.

Wrapping Up

If you are certain about the fact that you want to create a WordPress marketplace, there is the presence of a huge variety of tools and resources online, which allows you to try the entire process by yourself.

There is however that fact you need to consider, that just building a marketplace does not assure that you will be successful. Just building a marketplace, will not make the sellers want to visit it, let alone wanting to sell their products on it. 

The solution is consistency. After you build your marketplace you need to focus on consistently promoting it and maintain it and give it the time it needs to grow. 

Author’s Bio

Ani Ray is working as a senior WordPress developer. He is passionate and proficient in his job and writing on new technologies like WordPress, DevOps, and E-commerce. One who wants to hire WordPress developer can check out Capital Numbers Infotech, which is a leading software development company.