When someone asks why I focus so much on designing WordPress sites I always answer with “for some reason Google likes to rank them high.” It’s a debatable comment, but when most of your clients are on small budgets, you need to go with what you trust. The WordPress platform has grown over the last decade and is one of the easiest to customize and build a site on.
The reason for the ease of use? Plugins. WordPress offers hundreds of thousands of free plugins that give designers and small business owners the tools to truly make their site unique. If you need a lot of power from your site but have a small budget there are a number of plugins that will help you achieve your online goals.
Elementor. These days responsive sites are all the rage. Page builders allow you to build your responsive site by dragging and dropping custom text, headers, images, graphics and design layouts. Most of my clients like to opt for free themes rather than paying for expensive responsive templates. When I have to build off a free theme I always use Elementor. It’s simple, functional and gives me everything I need to take my client’s site to the next level. I even used it on this site.
WooCommerce. Before WooCommerce, e-commerce on a budget was next to impossible. WooCommerce has completely changed the game. While it does offer lots of premium features, most people selling online can do very well with the open-source, free option. The best feature? In my opinion it’s the automatic tax calculations. Years ago I built a site and had to fill out the tax cost manually, by state. It was tedious and cost my client more than it should have.
WP Forms. In my opinion WP Forms is the best contact form to use on WordPress. I have found it to be much more reliable than any other plugin, including Contact Form 7. It takes some getting used to and you have to make sure the settings on the forms are correct but once you get the hang of it WP Forms does all you need to do, with better reliability than the competition. WP Forms Lite is fine for most people’s needs.
Mailchimp. The WordPress Mailchimp plugin gives you another way to improve your email marketing. Now you can promote your newsletter directly on your website to increase your audience. Mailchimp’s plugin integrates well with all of the contact form plugins and you can add other features (like reCAPTCHA) through other 3rd party plugins.
Google XML Sitemaps. Sometimes it’s easy to generate a WordPress sitemap. Sometimes it seems impossible. With Google XML Sitemaps all you need is this simple plugin to update your sitemap. Most of my clients are building brand new websites and getting your sitemap sent to search engines will help speed up the indexing process.
Struggling to find the right tools for your website? Let me know how I can help design the perfect WordPress site for your needs. My affordable web design starts at just $200 and I’ll use all the proper plugins for your business’ online marketing goals. For more SEO tips and news like Chris Schieman Media on Facebook!