WordPress for Business: 5 Essential Plugins for Your WordPress Site

WordPress is a powerful piece of software in its own right. But when you add the power of plugins to your business' WordPress website, there's pretty much nothing you can't get WordPress to do. There are plugins (which are pieces of software you can easily add to your WordPress site) that reduce spam, improve the security of your website, help with search engine optimization, add social media functionality to your site, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

With over 9000 plugins to choose from on WordPress.org, there's no shortage of choices out there. The question becomes which are the essential plugins you need for your WordPress for business website. As a shortcut to get you started, here are 5 plugins I install on pretty much every WordPress site I set up.

1. Google XML Sitemaps

A sitemap is a document which has information about all the pages on a website and how they all link together. Sitemaps are important for search engine optimization purposes because they help Google and the other search engines index your site better. This plugin takes all the work out of creating a sitemap. It automatically creates one every time you update your site with new content and then will notify the major search engines that there's new content for them to index.

2. All In One SEO Pack

With pretty much any business website, you're going to want it to rank as highly as possible in the search engines so your prospects will find your site before your competitors. The plugin will take care of a lot of the optimization required for your website right out of the box. Simply install the All In One SEO Pack and it automatically starts working to make the search engines love your website. For those of you who may be more advanced in the ways of SEO, you can make changes and tweak settings in the plugin to suit your purposes. (There are some themes, like the Thesis Theme for WordPress, that have SEO functionality already built in which makes this plugin redundant).

3. Contact Form 7

Would you like to give visitors to your site and easy way to contact you? Especially on a business website, that's a no brainer. You can just provide an email address or phone number, but you can make things even easier for site visitors by having a form on the site that they can use to contact you. Contact Form 7 makes creating and placing a form on your site a breeze. You can drag and drop fields to create a form with the fields you want in the order you want them. From there it's just a matter of copying a very short code and placing it on the page of your site where the form belongs. No programming necessary!

4. Google Analytics for WordPress

For any website, it's important to know how many people are visiting your site, what pages are they visiting, what keywords they're using to find you and more. This plugin helps you easily do that. You'll need to register for a free Google Analytics account first. Then enter your Google Analytics account ID into this plugin and you'll start collecting more data about your site's traffic than you'll know what to do with.

5. WordPress Mobile Edition

Mobile is huge. As more and more smartphones pour into the market, more consumers are using their phones to surf the web. If you don't have a website that can be easily viewed on a mobile phone's browser, you may be losing out on potential business. This plugin makes sure that doesn't happen. Once installed, the plugin detects mobile browsers and gives your site/blog a mobile-friendly interface so it looks great on mobile devices.

Adam Kreitman is a Saint Louis online marketing consultant. While he is not a designer, he got tired of seeing small business clients with overpriced, poorly designed websites so he started helping clients develop sites using WordPress. To get the word out to a larger audience he started a website which provides tips, video tutorials and resources for using WordPress for business.