WordPress is a versatile CMS used to power millions of websites. It’s easy to use, flexible, and has a large and unique developer community behind it. Because of this active community, thousands of different WordPress plugins are available.

Finding the right one for your business website can be tricky – especially if you’re new to WordPress and just browsing the plugin library for the first time. And you may find yourself asking questions like these: 

• What functionality does my website need today? 
• What will I need to scale my business in the future? 
• Are premium WordPress plugins more effective than free ones? 

To help you find the best WordPress plugins for business, we’ve put together this list of the top 10 must-try options for business owners. 

MailChimp for WooCommerce

First up, we have MailChimp for WooCommerce. This marketing plugin is designed to help you grow your email list. It’s easy to install, and you can use it to create beautiful signup forms on your site. You can also import email addresses directly to your MailChimp account. This means you can grow your email list without having to manage a list manually.

You can also customize MailChimp for WooCommerce to suit your needs. Use it for everything from a newsletter subscription form to a more advanced marketing campaign. New businesses need a plugin like MailChimp for WooCommerce to grow your email list without daily manual exports. Best of all, you can use this plugin even if you don’t sell physical products online  — all you need is a WordPress site and a MailChimp account. Overall, MailChimp is one of the best WordPress plugins for growing your email list and strengthening your marketing strategy.

Microsoft Clarity

Using data to make informed decisions will help you streamline your design. The Microsoft Clarity plugin provides web analytics services that help you understand how your site is functioning and where visitors get stuck. With session recordings and heatmaps, you’ll better understand how your users interact with your website, and gain key insights  on how to enhance your design to increase revenue and user retention.

You can review how users interact with your site by reviewing session recordings to see where your users are getting stuck and where things go smoothly. Using data-driven decision-making available for free through the Microsoft Clarity plugin, you can streamline your site design by identifying irrelevant user sessions and eliminating problems such as clicks that go nowhere, rage clicks, and excessive scrolling.

Chatbots by Tidio

Tidio is a powerful AI chatbot tool allowing one to deliver an excellent customer experience. It comes in the form of chatbots, a live chat, email templates, and a ticketing system. Adding Tidio to a website can be done in 5 minutes, and no coding is required. One can easily customize the chatbot, and the widget will blend in with the look of any website. Moreover, tons of ready-made chatbot templates are available if you don’t want to spend time customizing your own.

Chatbots can take care of all basic customer requests like welcoming new visitors, offering discounts, saving abandoned carts, asking for feedback, giving product recommendations, and more. By automating your customer service with an AI chatbot, your support team will have a chance to grow by taking care of challenging and complicated requests. Chatbots will do the rest: they speak multiple languages and are available 24/7 to assist your customers.

Tidio Chatbots can integrate with the most popular selling platforms like WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Woocommerce, and more. The tool is easy to use with any CRM, and an IOS and Android mobile app is available. There are some unique features like viewed pages to explore what a visitor has already viewed on the website to tailor the responses better and visitor lists to see who is viewing a website in real-time.

Live Chat by Formilla

Many consumers today expect instant answers and often contact you when they’re on the cusp of making a purchase. Consequently, small businesses are including a live chat function on their website. The Formilla Live Chat tool has an adaptive design that caters to smartphones of any size, making it simple for your website visitors to interact. With Formilla’s WordPress Plugin, you can provide free or paid live chat services for your WordPress site. 

The Formilla Live Chat plugin allows you to begin chatting with customers immediately. After installing and activating this plugin, the live chat button will appear on your WordPress or WooCommerce site. To make things easy for business owners and managers on the go, you can reply through dedicated iPhone and Android apps that notify you as soon as a customer asks a question. 

However, there are pros and cons to using live chat software on your site. A well-managed chat system provides your users with instant gratification and helps you get a conversion from shoppers who are ready to buy. And plugins like Live Chat by Formilla make it easy to implement and reap the benefits of 24/7 support. Still, small or single-person customer service teams can often get bogged down with minor questions or upset customers looking for an immediate solution. So make sure you and your team have the resources to offer this feature. 

Five Star Business Profile and Schema

WordPress sites using the Five Star Business Profile and Schema Plugin can integrate schema structured data into any page or post. Additionally, you can create a simple contact card to include all your business details and the appropriate Schema.org markup. 

Technically speaking, the plugin provides JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) schema on all pages and posts and supports all organization types. But manual notation of this schema is difficult, and most users will benefit from the shortcuts this plugin provides. You may customize global schema data on the post edit screen, generate SEO-friendly content using Gutenberg blocks or shortcodes, add a Google map, and test any page on your website using Google’s Rich Results Test. When it comes to microdata, this plugin essentially does it all with no JSON-LD skills needed.

The plugin comes with a database of all schema types and all rich result types, so you can develop a new schema element and assign a specific data type to a page, a post, a post type, or your entire website.

WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a caching plugin designed to speed up your WordPress site. Increasing your traffic when your site is running slow can be difficult because users expect a fast experience. People will simply leave your site if it takes too long to load. The quicker your site loads, the more likely people will stay on it and engage with more pages. 

Keep in mind, if you are using EasyWP managed WordPress hosting, WP Rocket is entirely unnecessary. The EasyWP plugin comes pre-installed with our hosting plans and has three levels of advanced caching (Varnish, Opcache, and Redis object cache), delivering much faster performance than traditional WordPress caching plugins.

For those who have not yet migrated to cloud hosting, WP Rocket can speed up your site and increase engagement rates. It uses various technologies to help your site load faster. For example, compressing images to reduce image size. From basic functions such as page caching and browser caching to advanced options like delayed JavaScript execution, CSS minification, and LazyLoad options, WP Rocket is one of the best plugins for any business site. 

Site Kit by Google

Site Kit by Google for WordPress is a must-try plugin if you want to track your site’s data. You can easily add your Google Analytics tracking ID to your site by installing this plugin. Track your website traffic, new users, conversions, and more in a few simple steps. You can set up custom goals in Google Analytics and then use the plugin to track them, too. Site Kit even includes a GA4 setup wizard to easily get up and running with the latest version of Google Analytics. 

You can even view your Google Analytics data directly in your WordPress dashboard. This means you can easily see your most popular pages, where your visitors are coming from, and more. Site Kit by Google is a must-try plugin for every business owner. It is easy to install and set up, so you can start tracking your data instantly. To grow your business, you need to know where your visitors are coming from, what they are doing on your site, and more. 

Contact Form 7

Next up, we have one of the all-time undisputed champions of business plugins: Contact Form 7. Don’t let the innocuous name fool you. This is a must-try plugin to add a contact form to your site for sales leads or customer service inquiries. It’s easy to install, and you can use it to add a form to your site in just a few clicks. While the Mailchimp plugin is excellent for Mailchimp users who want to send email newsletters, Contact Forms 7 is a top choice for all other purposes.

You can also customize your form, add fields, and more. This means you can use it for a wide range of purposes. Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular WordPress plugins and has been used by millions of sites. It’s very reliable and constantly updated. To complement this plugin even further, it’s easy to install, and you can customize your form using shortcodes. 

Auto Amazon Links

For e-commerce companies that sell on Amazon, the Auto Amazon Links plugin quickly adds formatted Amazon Products to any page or post by using just the Amazon product ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number). This is a valuable marketing plugin that is designed to help you boost sales by directing attributable traffic from your website directly to Amazon. It’s easy to install and use, so you can start increasing your sales right away. 

Auto Amazon Links is very popular with affiliate marketers. Anyone with an approved Amazon Affiliate account can efficiently post about products after connecting your API keys in the Auto Amazon Links plugin. If you don’t have an Amazon Affiliate account, you can use Amazon Product Advertising API keys to operate this plugin. 

Redirection

While 301 redirects are not as exciting as heatmaps and live chats, they play a crucial role in any online business. As your business grows and changes, so will your website. And at some point, you’ll likely need to remove a page that’s no longer relevant to users. That’s where the Redirection plugin for WordPress comes in. 

With the Redirection plugin for WordPress, you can easily handle 301 redirects, track 404 errors, and clean up any loose ends on your site. This plugin can help reduce errors from deleted pages, and improve your site’s positioning. It has been a free WordPress plugin for over a decade and has been highly recommended by countless developers and experts.

Going beyond the 10 best WordPress plugins

These are nine of the best WordPress plugins for business owners. They are easy to install, customize, and use. They can help you grow your site’s traffic, generate leads, and more. From first launch through scaling up, any or all of these plugins will work hard for your company. Still, we understand that every business is different, so we’ve got a few other resources you can check out. For new websites, here are ten additional plugins to consider. If you’re already familiar with some of the essential plugins on that list, take a look at our Guru Guide to the best WordPress plugins, covering a wide range of plugins we’ve recommended this year.