Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners (Step by Step)

Improving your WordPress SEO is crucial for getting more traffic to your website. Sadly most WordPress SEO guides are too technical for new users to get started.

If you are serious about increasing your website traffic, then you need to pay attention to the WordPress SEO best practices.

In this guide, we will share the top WordPress SEO tips to help you improve your WordPress SEO and get more organic traffic.

You might have heard experts saying that WordPress is SEO friendly. This is actually why a lot of people choose WordPress to start a blog or a website.

While WordPress makes sure that the code it generates follows the SEO best practices, there is a lot more you need to do if you want to maximize your SEO efforts.

We have a number of actionable steps that you need to take to properly optimize your WordPress SEO.

To make it easy, we have created a table of contents to help you easily navigate through our ultimate WordPress SEO guide.

Table of Contents

Introduction

• What is SEO?
• Why SEO is important

The Basics of WordPress SEO

• Check your site’s visibility settings
• Using SEO friendly URL structure in WordPress
• WWW vs non-WWW in URLs

The Best WordPress SEO Plugin

• Choosing the Best WordPress SEO plugin
• Add XML sitemaps in WordPress
• Add your site to Google Search Console
• Optimizing your blog posts for SEO
• Doing keyword research for your website

WordPress SEO Best Practices

• Properly using categories and tags in WordPress
• Make internal linking a habit
• Optimize WordPress comments
• NoFollow external links in WordPress
• Full posts vs summaries (excerpts)

Speed and Security for WordPress SEO

• Optimize your site’s speed and performance
• Optimizing images in WordPress for SEO
• Security and safety of your WordPress site
• Start using SSL/HTTPS

Finally, see more SEO tools and resources to take your WordPress SEO even farther.

Introduction

We know the idea of optimizing for WordPress SEO can be intimidating for beginners, especially if you’re not a tech geek.

But don’t worry — it doesn’t have to be complicated. Start here to learn the basics, and then you can start applying them to your own website.

What is SEO?

SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a strategy used by website owners to get more traffic by ranking higher in search engines.

Search engine optimization isn’t about tricking Google or gaming the system. It’s simply about creating a website that has optimized code and formatting which makes it easy for search engines to find your website.

When people search the web for the topics you write about, your search-engine-optimized content will appear higher in the search results, and you’ll get more people clicking through to your website.

[Back to top ↑]

Why SEO is important

Search engines are often the biggest source of traffic for most websites.

Google and other search engines use advanced algorithms to understand and rank pages appropriately in search results. However, those algorithms aren’t perfect — they still need your help to understand what your content is about.

If your content isn’t optimized, then search engines won’t know how to rank it. When people search for the topics you write about, your website won’t appear in the search results, and you’ll miss out on all that traffic.

It is really important for all business owners to make their website search engine friendly, so that they can maximize their search traffic.

[Back to top ↑]

Basics of WordPress SEO

SEO can get technical, but it doesn’t have to be. Just learning a few basic SEO tips to optimize your site can give you a noticeable boost in your website traffic.

You don’t have to be a tech genius to use the techniques below. If you’re already using WordPress, then you’ve got what it takes!

Let’s get started optimizing your website.

Check Your Site’s Visibility Settings

WordPress comes with a built-in option to hide your website from search engines. The purpose of this option is to give you time to work on your website before it’s ready to go public.

However, sometimes this option can get checked accidentally and it makes your website unavailable to search engines.

If your website is not appearing in search results, then the first thing you need to do is to make sure that this option is unchecked.

Simply log in to the admin area of your WordPress site and visit Settings » Reading page.

You need to scroll down to the ‘Search Engine Visibility’ section and make sure that the box next to ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ is unchecked.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your changes.

[Back to top ↑]

Using SEO Friendly URL Structures in WordPress

SEO friendly URLs contain words that clearly explain the content of the page, and they’re easy to read by both humans and search engines.

Some examples of SEO friendly URLs are:

https://www.wpbeginner.com/how-to-install-wordpress/
https://www.wpbeginner.com/common-wordpress-errors-and-how-to-fix-them/

Notice that these URLs are readable and a user can guess what they will see on the page just by looking at the URL text.

So what does a non-SEO friendly URL look like?

https://www.wpbeginner.com/?p=10467
http://example.com/archives/123

Notice that these URLs use numbers unrelated to the content, and a user cannot guess what they will find on the page by looking at the URL.

Using SEO friendly permalink structure improves your chances of getting better positions in search results.

Here is how you can check and update your WordPress site’s permalink structure.

You need to visit the Settings » Permalinks page. Select the post name option and then click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.

For more detailed instructions take a look at our guide on what is a SEO friendly URL structure in WordPress.

Note: If your website has been running for more than 6 months, then please don’t change your permalink structure unless you’re using the numbers option. If you’re using Day and Name or Month and Name, continue using that.

By changing your permalink structure on an established site, you will lose all of your social media share count and run the risk of losing your existing SEO ranking.

If you must change your permalink structure, then hire a professional, so they can setup proper redirects. You’ll still lose your social share counts on the pages.

[Back to top ↑]

WWW vs non-WWW

If you are just starting out with your website, then you need to choose whether you want to use www (http://www.example.com) or non-www (http://example.com) in your site’s URL.

Search engines consider these to be two different websites, so this means you need to choose one and stick to it.

You can set your preference by visiting the Settings » General page. Add your preferred URL in both the ‘WordPress Address’ and ‘Site Address’ fields.

Despite what someone else might say, from a SEO standpoint there’s no advantage to using one or another.

For more detailed information on this topic, take a look at our guide on www vs non-www – which is better for WordPress SEO.

[Back to top ↑]

The Best WordPress SEO plugin

One of the best parts about WordPress is that there’s a plugin for everything, and SEO is no exception. There are thousands of WordPress SEO plugins which makes it harder for beginners to choose the best WordPress SEO plugin.

Instead of installing separate plugins for individual SEO tasks, we will help you choose the best WordPress SEO plugin that does it all, and it’s 100% free.

Choosing the Best WordPress SEO Plugin

When it comes to choosing the best WordPress SEO plugin, you will most likely narrow your choices down to the two most popular solutions: Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack.

They are both effective solutions, and we’ve done a pros and cons comparison of Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack.

At WPBeginner, we use Yoast SEO, so in this tutorial we’ll be using Yoast SEO for screenshots and examples.

Regardless, we have a step by step guide on properly setting up each of these plugins:

• How to install and setup Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress
• Users guide for All in One SEO Pack

[Back to top ↑]

Add XML Sitemaps in WordPress

An XML Sitemap is a specially formatted file that lists every single page on your website. This makes it easy for search engines to find all of your content.

While adding an XML sitemap does not boost your site’s search rankings, it does help search engines find the pages quickly and start ranking them.

If you’re using the Yoast SEO plugin, then it will automatically create an XML sitemap for you. To find your sitemap, just go to this URL (don’t forget to replace example.com with your own domain name):

http://example.com/sitemap_index.xml

We will show you how to submit your XML sitemap to Google in the next step.

[Back to top ↑]

Add Your Site to Google Search Console

Google Search Console, also known as Webmaster Tools, is a set of tools offered by Google to give website owners a look at how their content is seen by the search engine.

It provides reports and data to help you understand how your pages appear in search results. You also get to see the actual search terms people are using to find your website, how each page appears in the search results, and how often your pages are clicked.

All this information helps you understand what’s working on your site and what’s not. You can then plan your content strategy accordingly.

Google Search Console also alerts you when there is something wrong with your website, like when search crawlers are unable to access it, find duplicate content, or restricted resources.

We have a step by step guide on how to add your WordPress site to Google Search Console.

If you’re using Yoast SEO, then follow step 6 in our Yoast SEO setup guide.

If you’re not using Yoast SEO, then you can watch our video that shows an alternative way:

Once you have added your website to Google Search Console, click on the Sitemap from the left menu and then paste the last part of the sitemap URL.

Click on the submit button to save your changes.

Google Search Console will now check your sitemap and use it to improve your website’s crawling.

Once you have successfully added your sitemap, it will appear as pending. It does take Google some time to crawl your website. After a few hours, you would be able to see some stats about your sitemap. It will show you the number of links it found in your sitemap, how many of them got indexed, a ratio of images and web pages, etc.

We recommend that you check your Search Console at least on a monthly basis for gathering insights and see your website’s SEO progress.

[Back to top ↑]

Optimizing Your Blog Posts for SEO

Often beginners make the mistake of thinking that installing and activating a WordPress SEO plugin is all that’s needed. SEO is an ongoing process that you must keep up with if you want to see maximum results.

All top SEO plugins allow you to add a title, description, and focus keyword to every blog post and page. It also shows you a preview of what users will see when they Google your website.

We recommend that you optimize your title and description to get maximum clicks.

When writing your blog post, simply scroll down to the SEO section and take full advantage of it.

If you’re wondering how to choose a focus keyword or focus keyphrase, what is a good title, or what is a good meta description, then we have covered it in details in our beginners guide to optimize your blog posts for SEO.

We highly recommend that you read it because on-page SEO is crucial for your success.

Doing Keyword Research for Your Website

Many beginners use their best guesses to figure out what topics people are looking for and what they should add to their blogs and website.

It is like shooting an arrow in the dark. You don’t need to do that when you can use real data to find out what people are looking for.

Keyword research is a research technique used by content creators and SEO experts. It helps you discover words users enter into search engines to find content, products, and services in your industry.

You can then use those words and phrases into your website to get more search traffic.

There are a ton of keyword research tools (both free and paid) that you can use. We recommend using SEMRush, it helps you discover keywords and even find out the keywords where your competitors are ranking.

For more details, see our beginner’s guide on how to do keyword research for your WordPress website.

[Back to top ↑]

WordPress SEO Best Practices

If you follow the basics of WordPress SEO and use the best WordPress SEO plugin, you will already be ahead of most websites.

However if you want even better results, then you need to follow the WordPress SEO best practices below.

These aren’t too technical and most won’t even require you to touch any code. But they will make a big difference if you follow them.

Properly Using Categories and Tags in WordPress

WordPress allows you to sort your blog posts into categories and tags. This makes it easy for you to manage your content by topics, and for your users to find the content they’re looking for.

Categories and tags also help search engines understand your website structure and content.

Often beginners get confused on how to best use categories and tags. After explaining this to thousands of readers, here’s how we approach categories and tags.

Categories are meant for broad grouping of your posts. If your blog was a book, then categories will be the table of content.

For example, on a personal blog, you can have categories like music, food, travel, etc. Categories are hierarchical, so you can add child categories to them.

On the other hand, tags are more specific keywords that describe the contents of an individual post. For example, a blog post filed under the food category can have tags like salad, breakfast, pancakes, etc. Think of these as indexes section in a textbook.

For more on this topic, see our guide on categories vs tags and SEO best practices for sorting your content.

By using categories and tags properly, you make it easy for your users to browse your website. Since it’s easy for users, it also makes it easier for search engines to browse your website.

[Back to top ↑]

Make Internal Linking a Habit

Search engines assign each page on your website a score (page authority). The recipe of this score is kept secret so that people cannot game the results. However, the most common signals of authority are links.

This is why it’s important that you link to your own content from your other blog posts and pages.

You should make it a habit to interlink your own posts whenever possible. If you have multiple authors, then create a pre-publish blog post checklist that requires them to interlink at least 3 other blog posts.

This will help you boost your pageviews, increases the time users spend on your site, and ultimately will improve the SEO score of your individual blog posts and pages.

[Back to top ↑]

Optimize WordPress Comments

Comments can be a strong indication of user engagement on your website. Engaged users mean more links back to your site, more traffic, and improved SEO.

However, you need to make sure that your comments are real and not spam. Spammers submit comments with bad links which could affect and even ruin your search rankings.

This is why we recommend everyone to start using Akismet. It is one of the two plugins that come pre-installed with every WordPress site, and it helps you combat comment spam.

If Akismet alone is unable to handle comment spam, then see these tips and tools to combat comment spam in WordPress.

If your blog posts attract a lot of genuine, spam-free comments, then you should pat yourself on the shoulder for building such an engaging website!

However, too many comments on a post can make it load slower which also affects your search engine rankings. (Keep reading below to find out more about how speed affects SEO.)

To prepare your website so that it can handle the burden comments put on your server and speed, you can split comments into multiple pages. See our tutorial on how to paginate comments in WordPress.

(If you’d like to get more comments on your site, check out these 11 ways to get more comments on your WordPress blog posts.)

[Back to top ↑]

NoFollow External Links in WordPress

As mentioned above, links help search engines decide which pages are important. When you link to a website, you are passing some of your site’s SEO score to that link. This SEO score is called “link juice.”

For good search rankings, you need to make sure that you are getting more link juice from other websites than you are giving away.

Adding the “nofollow” attribute to external links (links to websites that you don’t own) instructs search engines not to follow those links. This helps you save link juice.

A normal external link looks like this in HTML:

<a href="http://example.com">Example Website</a>

An external link with the nofollow attribute looks like this:

<a href="http://example.com" rel="nofollow">Example Website</a>

By default, WordPress does not come with an option to make links nofollow. However, you can still easily do that by manually modifying links.

Simply select the block containing your link and then click on the 3 vertical dots icon present at the top bar.

This will open a menu where you need to click on the ‘Edit as HTML’ option.

You will now see the HTML code of your link. Go ahead to add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the link element.

If you see the rel=”noopener noreferrer” attribute in the HTML code, then add a space after noreferrer and add nofollow after that.

For more details and alternate methods, see our guide on how to add nofollow links in WordPress.

[Back to top ↑]

Full Posts vs Summaries or Excerpts

WordPress displays and links to your posts from a number of pages like home page, category archive, tags archive, date archive, author pages, etc.

By default, it shows the full article content on all these pages. This affects your site’s SEO, as search engines may find it to be duplicate content. Full articles also make your archive pages load slower.

Showing full articles everywhere also affects your page views. For example, users who subscribe to your RSS feed will be able to read the full article in their feed reader without ever visiting your website.

The easiest way to solve this is by showing summaries or excerpts instead of full articles.

You can do this by going to Settings » Reading and select summary.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to customize WordPress excerpts without coding.

[Back to top ↑]

Speed and Security for WordPress SEO

Even if you follow all the WordPress SEO tips and best practices above, if your site is slow or gets taken down by a hacker, your search engine rankings will take a big hit.

Here’s how to prevent your site from losing search engine traffic due to slow performance or lax security.

Optimize Your Site’s Speed and Performance

Research shows that in the internet age, the average human attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish.

Web usability experts believe that users decide whether they want to stay or leave within a few seconds of visiting a website.

That means that as a website owner, you only have a few seconds to present your content and engage users. You don’t want to waste this precious time making your visitor wait for your website to load. Search engines like Google now rank faster websites higher than slow loading websites.

If you need to improve your site’s speed, check out this expert advice on 18 useful tricks to speed up WordPress and boost performance.

[Back to top ↑]

Optimizing Images in WordPress for SEO

Images are more engaging than text but they also take more time to load. If you are not careful with image sizes and quality, then they can slow down your website.

You need to make sure that you use images that are optimized to load faster. See our guide on how to speed up WordPress by optimizing images for the web.

Another trick you can use to optimize your images for search engines is to use a descriptive title and alt tags. These tags help search engines understand what your image is about. They also help users with visual impairment as their screen readers can read the alt text to them.

WordPress allows you to easily add title and alt tags when you upload an image.

If you are a photographer or add a lot of images to your WordPress site, then you need to use a gallery plugin.

We recommend using the Envira Gallery. In our speed tests, we found it to be the fastest WordPress gallery plugin. It’s also fully responsive and SEO friendly out of the box.

For more tips, see our complete beginner’s guide to image SEO.

[Back to top ↑]

Security and Safety of Your WordPress Site

Each week, Google blacklists around 20,000 websites for malware and around 50,000 for phishing. When a site is blacklisted, it doesn’t show up in any search results at all.

This means that the security of your WordPress site is crucial for good rankings. You don’t want all your hard work on SEO to go to waste if your site is compromised by a hacker.

The good news is that it’s not that difficult to keep your WordPress site safe — see the step by step instructions in our ultimate WordPress security guide.

At WPBeginner, we use Sucuri to protect our website against attacks. To see why we recommend this service, check out our case study of how Sucuri helped us block 450,000 WordPress attacks in 3 months.

[Back to top ↑]

Start Using SSL/HTTPS

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a technology that encrypts the connection between a user’s browser and the server they are connecting to. This adds an additional security layer to your WordPress site.

Websites secured with SSL are indicated by a padlock sign in the browser’s address bar. This makes your website more trustworthy, and it is required if you are running an online store with WordPress and processing sensitive payment information.

All top WordPress hosting companies offer free SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt. See our guide on how to get a free SSL certificate for your website for more details.

If you want a premium wildcard SSL certificate or just a regular certificate with security warranty, then we recommend using Domain.com.

Their SSL certificates come with a minimum of $10,000 security warranty and up to $1.75 million security warranty. You also get a TrustLogo site seal to display on your site for added credibility.

[Back to top ↑]

More SEO Tools and Resources

Once you get the hang of WordPress SEO best practices, you’ll want to take your skills even further to get ahead of your competition.

We have compiled a list of best WordPress SEO plugins and tools that you should use to boost your SEO. If you’re ready to try some more advanced techniques, you can also check out our archive of WordPress SEO articles.

[Back to top ↑]

We hope this article helped you learn how to properly optimize your WordPress site for SEO. Go ahead and implement a few of these WordPress SEO tips, and you should see an increase in your traffic within a few months as the search engines process your changes.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners (Step by Step) appeared first on WPBeginner.

February 11, 2020 at 05:00PM

How to Add Google Optimize in WordPress (2 Easy Methods)

Are you looking to add Google Optimize on your WordPress site?

Google Optimize is a free tool by Google that helps website owners optimize their sites by running A/B split tests. This allows you to compare two versions of a page and see which one converts better (i.e is more successful).

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily add Google Optimize in WordPress, so you can start running split tests.

What is Google Optimize?

Google Optimize is a free tool that lets you split test your pages and personalize them for your customers. You can link it to both Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Using Google Optimize, you can set up experiments to see if making changes to a page increases your conversion rate.

For instance, you might run an A/B split test where you have two versions of a sales page to see which one performs better.

You might have a different headline on each page or a different product image on your online store. By split testing, you can gradually optimize your page to get the highest conversion rate.

Google Optimize lets you create these split-tests with a drag & drop editor. After that it shows each variation to your visitors at random, so you can gather data about what works best.

What Will You Need to Use Google Optimize?

You need a Google Analytics account in order to use Google Optimize on your WordPress site. You’ll also need to have placed the Google Analytics tracking code on your site.

If you don’t already have an account, or if you haven’t put the tracking code on your site, then see our guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress for step by step instructions.

You’ll also need MonsterInsights, which is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.

It comes with a Google Optimize addon which makes it super easy to run Google Optimize tests on your website.

MonsterInsights is a paid plugin, and you’ll need their Pro plan to access the Google Optimize addon. If you don’t want to purchase MonsterInsights, then we also have a method on how to setup Google Optimize manually using a free plugin as well.

That being said, let’s see how to add Google Optimize in WordPress like a pro.

Setting Up Your Google Optimize Account

First, you need to go to the Google Optimize website and click on the Get Started button.

You’ll be prompted to decide whether or not you want to receive Google’s emails. After that, you need to click the options you want, and then click the Next button at the bottom of this screen.

You can now choose specific settings for your account. We suggest simply using the Recommended settings.

Make sure you select your country from the dropdown menu, so you can see the correct terms of service agreement. When you click on these to read them, they’ll open in a new tab, so you won’t lose your place during setup.

The checkboxes may also change depending on what country you select.

Next, you need to check the boxes once you’re ready, and then the Finished button will turn blue. Click on it, then Google will set up your Google Optimize account.

As part of this, Google has created your first container. This will contain your experiments (tests and personalizations), and it needs to be connected to your website.

Although you’re prompted here to create your first experiment, we suggest instead that you link Google Analytics to Google Optimize at this point.

Linking Google Optimize and Google Analytics

On the right-hand side of your screen, you’ll see the Link to Google Analytics step. Click the downwards arrow here and then click Link property.

On the next screen, select the website you want to link with. If you can’t see your website here, then that could be because you’ve not finished setting it up in Google Analytics.

Once you’ve clicked Link, you’ll see this pop up:

If you’re going to use MonsterInsights to add Google Optimize to your site, which is what we recommend, you can simply click Skip for now. Otherwise, you may want to view and copy the code now as you’ll need to use a line of it later on.

Add Google Optimize to Your WordPress Site (Easy Way)

The easiest way to add Google Optimize to WordPress is by using MonsterInsights. It is the best Google Analytics plugin on the market. Note: you’ll need to have a Pro subscription to the plugin in order to use the Google Optimize addon.

Installing MonsterInsights

First, you need to install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit the Insights » Settings page and enter your license key here. You can find this information under your account on the MonsterInsights website.

Next, you need to visit the Insights » Addons page and find the Google Optimize addon. Simply click the Install button next to Google Optimize addon, and it should automatically activate.

Once that addon is active, you can go to Insights » Settings » Conversions page to configure the settings.

You’ll need to enter your Google Optimize Container ID here. You can find this listed against your container under the My Account section of your Google Optimize dashboard. You can also easily find it in the Container setup panel when you’re in the process of setting up your container.

Simply enter this in MonsterInsights, and your site will be connected to Google Optimize.

You can also enable “Google Optimize’s Async Page Hide” here. This may improve users’ experience on your website, especially if they’re on a slow connection.

It hides the page for a small amount of time, so the variation you’ve created during your experiment can load. Otherwise, your regular content could load before it’s actually modified which will make the page “flicker” from your users’ perspective.

Now that you’ve connected Google Optimize to your website, you’ll want to start running some A/B tests.

Manually Add Google Optimize to Your WordPress Site

You can also add Google Optimize to your WordPress site manually. This method is not recommended for beginners as you’ll have to manually modify your Google Analytics code.

There are different ways to do this depending on how exactly you’ve added your Google Analytics code to your website.

In a moment, we are going to cover the process for adding Google Optimize to an analytics.js tag, as this is what many people will have used to set up Google Analytics.

If you set up Analytics quite recently, you might instead be using Global Site Tag (gtag.js) to deploy Google Analytics. In this case, you can find instructions for this within Google Optimize itself. Just click the blue ‘Install Optimize’ link to get the instructions and code.

If you’re using Google Tag Manager (GTM), see Google’s instructions on installing Optimize with Google Tag Manager.

Assuming that you’re using the analytics.js tag, let’s cover the installation process.

First, you need to find your Google Analytics code in your WordPress dashboard.

Note that this code must be in the header part of your pages in order for the Optimize code to work. If you’re using a plugin or theme that places Google Analytics in the footer, then you’ll need to move your code to be in the header instead.

Next, add the line ga(‘require’, ‘GTM-XXXXXXX’); to your Google Analytics code as follows, replacing GTM-XXXXXXX with your Optimize Container ID.

<!-- Google Analytics -->

<script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');

ga('create', 'UA-XXXXXXXXXX-1', 'auto');
ga('require', 'GTM-XXXXXXX');
ga('send', 'pageview');
</script>

<!-- End Google Analytics -->

Note that UA-XXXXXXXXX-1, in your code, will show your Google Analytics property ID.

Once you are done, please make sure to save your changes.

Tip: If you’re not sure where to find and edit your Google Analytics code, then you may want to see whether you have a plugin like Insert Headers and Footers installed.

If you’re using a premium WordPress theme, then there may be a place within it where you’ve put your Google Analytics code. You can check the theme’s documentation or contact their support team for help.

If you’re using this method, then you’ll need to also manually add the anti-flicker snippet code to your site if you want to use it. You can’t just click a button to do this, like you can when using MonsterInsights.

Once you have setup Google Optimize, you’re ready to setup split tests. You can follow our guide on how to do A/B split testing in WordPress using Google Optimize.

We hope this article helped you learn how to add Google Optimize in WordPress. You may also to see our proven tips on how to increase your blog traffic, and how to create an email newsletter for your website.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Add Google Optimize in WordPress (2 Easy Methods) appeared first on WPBeginner.

February 10, 2020 at 05:00PM

24 Must Have WordPress Plugins for Business Websites in 2020

Looking for the best WordPress plugins to take your business to the next level in 2020?

There are over 55,000+ WordPress plugins that you can choose from. This makes it extremely overwhelming for new users to find the right plugin for their website.

We are often asked by readers for the best WordPress plugin suggestions for SEO, social media, backups, speed, etc.

Being the largest WordPress resource site, our experts test over a thousand best paid and free WordPress plugins every year, so we can make it easy for our users (you) to find the best solutions.

Having the right set of WordPress plugins and tools can help you grow your online business. In this article, we have shared our expert pick of the must-have WordPress plugins for business websites in 2020.

Note: these are the plugins that our team installs when we start a new blog or make a new website for our own businesses.

1. WPForms

Every website needs a contact form because it makes it easy for your visitors to get in touch with you. WPForms is the most user-friendly contact form plugin for WordPress.

This drag & drop online form builder allows you to easily create contact forms, email subscription forms, online order forms, payment forms,
surveys, polls, and basically all other types of online forms with just a few clicks.

WPForms integrates with all popular marketing and payment platforms, so you can build powerful forms in less than 5 minutes.

It even comes with options to help you create a custom WordPress user registration form and login page.

We use WPForms on the WPBeginner website and all of our other websites. But we’re not alone. Over 3 million websites use WPForms, and they have consistently maintained a 4.9 out of 5-star rating average for over 3 years now.

There’s a free WPForms Lite version available for those who are looking for a simple solution.

If you are seriously looking to grow your business, then we recommend getting the Pro version because it comes with all the powerful features you need to boost your lead generation efforts. Use this WPForms coupon to get 50% off your purchase.

Alternative: Formidable Forms is an excellent alternative for creating advanced solution-focused WordPress forms.

2. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to “properly” connect your website with Google Analytics, so you can see exactly how people find and use your website.

The best part is that it shows you all the important stats that matter right inside your WordPress dashboard.

You can then optimize your website accordingly to increase your traffic, subscribers, and revenue. We have detailed guides on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress, how to use Google Analytics to enable eCommerce tracking, and how to track user engagement.

MonsterInsights has a free version, but the true power of it only unlocks when you upgrade to the premium version.

You can use our MonsterInsights coupon to get 50% off your purchase.

MonsterInsights is used by over 2 million websites.

3. Yoast SEO

SEO helps you get more visitors from search engines to your website. While WordPress is SEO friendly out of the box, there is so much more you can do to increase your website traffic using SEO best practices.

Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugin of all time. Out of all the WordPress SEO plugins, Yoast offers the most comprehensive solution with all the features and tools that you need to improve your on-page SEO.

It helps you add meta tags, generate sitemaps, connect your site to Google Search Console, optimize it for social media, and more.

Yoast comes with a powerful Redirect feature that lets you easily create 301 redirects which is extremely helpful. It also detects change of URLs and create auto-redirects, so you don’t have any broken links on your website.

For complete SEO setup on your website, follow our ultimate WordPress SEO tutorial for beginners with step by step instructions.

Alternative: All in One SEO Pack is a great alternative for Yoast SEO.

4. Constant Contact

Email is the most effective and most reliable marketing tool at your disposal as a business owner. It allows you to stay in touch with your users even after they leave your website. This is why we recommend every business owner to start building an email list right away.

Constant Contact is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world.

Their platform allows you to build an email list and send beautiful email newsletters to your subscribers.

It offers a quick and easy setup for non-techy users. It also works well with popular lead generation plugins for WordPress like OptinMonster and WPForms.

Alternatives: SendinBlue and ConvertKit are good alternatives if you want something more advanced, but they are more pricey.

5. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the most popular conversion rate optimization software in the market. It allows you to convert abandoning website visitors into email subscribers and customers.

This WordPress plugin and application helps you get more email subscribers, fast.

OptinMonster comes with pre-made high-converting opt-in forms that you can easily customize with their drag & drop builder. Their powerful display targeting features allow you to personalize the campaigns for each user, so you can show the right message at the right time.

It’s a great solution for bloggers, business websites, and eCommerce websites. Basically, if you want to make more money from your website traffic, then you need OptinMonster.

It helps you recover abandoned cart sales, convert website visitors, and grow your email list. Read these case studies to see how much success other businesses are having by using OptinMonster.

We use OptinMonster on WPBeginner and our other websites.

6. Sucuri

Security should be a top priority for all online business owners. Sucuri offers a WordPress security plugin and web application firewall that is probably one of the best protection you can get for your site.

They monitor and protect your site from DDoS, malware threats, XSS attacks, brute force attacks, and basically every other type of attack. If you don’t have a firewall on your website, then you need to add one today.

To learn more on how to strengthen the security of your website and protect your business, see our ultimate WordPress security guide with step by step instructions for beginners.

Sucuri help us block hundreds of thousands of attacks every month on WPBeginner.

7. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is the most popular WordPress backup plugin on the market. It allows you to set up automatic backups and safely store them on a remote location like Google Drive, Dropbox, S3, Rackspace, FTP, email, and more.

It also makes it super easy to restore your website from a backup. Their base plugin is free, but they also have a paid plan with extra features and priority support.

Alternative: BackupBuddy and VaultPress (Jetpack Backups) are also excellent solutions, but they are paid only.

8. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is the best WordPress caching plugin on the market. It allows you to instantly improve your WordPress website speed and performance with no technical skills required.

It automatically turns on recommended WordPress caching settings like gzip compression, page cache, and cache pre-loading. You can also turn on optional features like lazy loading images, CDN support, DNS pre-fetching, minification, and more to further improve page load times.

Most importantly, WP Rocket doesn’t wait for someone to request a page to save it in the cache. It automatically crawls and build your website cache which results in an instant performance boost.

WP Rocket also offers Imagify which is a free image optimization service to help you speed up your website even further.

This is by far the easiest and most beginner-friendly caching plugin. The only downside is that it’s paid only.

Alternative: WP Super Cache is free, but it’s not as powerful or easy.

9. Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is the best drag and drop page builder for WordPress. It allows you to easily customize your website design and create custom page layouts without writing any code.

Business owners love it because it lets them create completely custom landing pages within minutes without having to hire a developer.

Alternative: Divi page builder plugin is a great alternative.

10. MemberPress

MemberPress allows you to build online communities and membership sites using WordPress. It is the best WordPress membership plugin in the market.

You can create subscriptions and restrict content to users based on their subscription plans. It works with all popular payment solutions and plays nicely with online stores using WooCommerce. For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to make a membership website in WordPress.

11. RafflePress

RafflePress is the best WordPress giveaway plugin on the market. It allows you to instantly increase your website traffic, get more social media followers, and email subscribers with viral giveaways and contests.

RafflePress comes with an easy drag and drop giveaway builder along with proven giveaway templates that you can use to create a giveaway that attracts visitor’s attention.

To enter the giveaway, website visitors must use their email address. This helps you get more subscribers for your email newsletter.

RafflePress incentivizes users to follow your social profiles and share the giveaway with their friends to get more entries into the contest. This helps you increase social media engagement.

The word-of-mouth marketing helps you get more traffic, FASTER! This results in more followers, more sales, and more revenue!

You can easily connect your social profiles, WordPress form plugins, and all popular marketing platforms and CRMs.

RafflePress has a free version called RafflePress lite that you can get started with. If you want more powerful features to skyrocket your growth, then you need to use RafflePress Pro.

WPBeginner users can use our RafflePress coupon code: wpbeginner20 to get an additional 20% off.

12. CSS Hero

WordPress themes rely on CSS for the visual appearance of your website. If you want to make customization to your theme, then you will have to learn CSS. This can be time-consuming for a business owner.

CSS Hero is a WordPress plugin that allows you to customize any WordPress theme without writing a single line of code. Check out our review of how CSS Hero makes WordPress customization easy for more information.

It’s not a drag & drop page builder like BeaverBuilder that helps you build custom layouts. Rather it helps you customize any WordPress theme available in the market within minutes to match your needs.

13. SeedProd

SeedProd is the best WordPress maintenance mode and coming soon page plugin that helps you collect leads and grow your followers even when your website is not available.

If your site is under construction, then you can use it to create beautiful coming soon landing pages. It includes features like integration with your email marketing services, countdown timer, social media integration, and dozens of templates to choose from.

14. LearnDash

LearnDash is the best WordPress LMS plugin to create and sell online courses from your WordPress website. It has a drag and drop course builder that allows you to quickly add lessons, quizzes, and assignments to build your course.

For detailed step by step instructions, see our guide on how to create online courses in WordPress using LearnDash.

15. G Suite

G Suite is a suite of web applications like email, docs, spreadsheets, etc. Created by Google, this powerful set of office applications is cheaper, easy to deploy, and hassle free.

It allows you to save costs on software licenses, hardware, hiring IT staff, managing backups, and more. Most importantly it allows you to use professional email addresses with your own business domain name right inside Gmail.

Alternative: You can also get a free business email from your WordPress hosting provider or use Microsoft Office365.

16. SEMRush

SEMRush is an all-in-one marketing toolkit for digital marketing professionals and business owners. It comes with powerful tools to help you improve your SEO, paid traffic strategy, social media, and content & PR strategy.

It also helps you gather competitive intelligence on your competitors, so you can outrank them and dominate your industry.

It helps you do keyword research, backlink audit, track brand mentions, spy on competitors, discover best-performing posts and pages on social media, ad strategy analysis, and more.

These short paragraphs are not enough to describe the true power of SEMRush. It’s a must have tool in our list for serious business owners.

17. LiveChat

LiveChat Inc is the best live chat support software for businesses and e-commerce websites. It is super easy to use and allows you to quickly add live chat on your WordPress website.

It has tons of customization options, and it comes with a mobile app, so you can provide real-time support.

It integrates with your existing support software, CRM, email marketing, and other tools. Most importantly, it loads fast and offers a great user experience.

Alternative: Sendinblue Chat is another popular service which lets you connect chat, CRM, SMS, Facebook, and email in one platform.

18. Pretty Links Pro

Pretty Links Pro is one of the best link management plugins for WordPress. It allows you to easily manage affiliate links while making it easy make your affiliate links short and memorable for sharing.

It is the perfect tool for affiliate marketers, podcasters, business owners, and others who want to easily create short URLs in WordPress.

Alternative: ThirstyAffiliates is an excellent alternative with lots of powerful features.

19. Shared Counts

Shared Counts is the best WordPress social media plugin that allows you to easily add beautiful social sharing buttons on your website.

It also shows share counts, which helps you add social proof to your website.

While there are many paid solutions available, this free plugin beats them all in code quality and performance.

We use SharedCount on a lot of our website because it offers an easy out of the box solution for both beginners and developers.

20. WP Mail SMTP

By default, WordPress uses the PHP mail function to send emails. The problem is that either WordPress hosting companies don’t have this feature setup properly, or they block it to prevent abuse.

This basically means that you and your users may not receive important email notifications from your WordPress site.

WP Mail SMTP solves this problem by sending WordPress emails using a proper SMTP mail server. To learn more, see our article on how to fix WordPress not sending email issue.

Pro tip: The paid version called WP Mail SMTP Pro comes with white glove setup and more features. Basically, their support staff will set it up and connect it to use your SMTP service provider.

21. Insert Headers and Footers

While managing your WordPress site, you may sometimes need to add code snippets to your WordPress header or footer for verification, inserting ad retargeting scripts, etc.

Insert Headers and Footer allows you to easily add code snippets to your WordPress site without editing your theme files. Take a look at our tutorial on how to add header and footer code in WordPress.

This free plugin is extremely handy for business owners.

22. WPML

By default, WordPress does not allow you to easily create a multilingual website. This is a challenge for businesses that cater to a multilingual customer base in different geographic locations.

This is where you’ll need WPML. It is a WordPress multilingual plugin that allows you to easily create multi-lingual websites with WordPress.

It is very easy to use, SEO friendly, and helps you easily create content in different languages.

Alternative: TranslatePress is an excellent alternative that’s growing fast.

23. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress used by over 4 million websites.

It comes with all the powerful features that you need to create an online store.

Over the last few years, WooCommerce has established itself as the most dominant eCommerce plugin for WordPress. There’s even a WooCommerce ecosystem now with dedicated WooCommerce hosting, WooCommerce themes, and WooCommerce plugins available.

Companion plugin: TrustPulse helps you instantly win customer trust with social proof and FOMO.

Alternative: BigCommerce is a fully-hosted headless eCommerce platform for WordPress. It offers high scalability and low maintenance for serious store owners.

24. Nextiva

Nextiva is the best business phone service in terms of features and ease of use. They allow you to get a business phone number for your website which comes with advanced call routing, unlimited free domestic calling, voicemail to email or text, online faxing, and more.

The best part is that you can receive calls from your business phone number straight to your cell phone which is excellent for small businesses. You can also set business hours, so you are not getting disturbed during holidays or non-work hours.

Their platform also offers CRM, live chat, online surveys, and other communication features. You can manage it all in a simple web-based admin panel which makes it easy for small business owners to easily manage everything like a pro.

We use Nextiva VOIP for our business because it’s one of the most affordable and most reliable business phone service that grows with your business.

Alternative: RingCentral is another highly recommended phone service and business voip provider.

Bonus Tools

Aside from the top 24 WordPress plugins and tools that we mentioned above, we also use and recommend the following tools to better manage our WordPress sites:

• Grammarly – excellent grammar checking tool that comes with plagiarism detector, vocabulary enhancement, and more.
• PublishPress – this plugin makes it easy for us to manage our editorial workflow in WordPress.
• Antispam Bee – An excellent plugin to improve comments section with reduced spam on your website. It works particularly well when used alongside with Akismet.
• Adobe Photoshop – this makes it easy for us to create blog thumbnails and other images for our articles.
• MaxCDN – this helps us speed up our website by geographically spreading our content to multiple servers (see: what is a CDN)
• Envira Gallery – we use this plugin to help us create better galleries with albums.
• Codeable – a platform that helps you work with vetted WordPress developers to troubleshoot problems and make customizations.

This concludes our list of the best WordPress plugins for business websites.

Depending on your business, you may not need to use all the WordPress plugins and tools mentioned in our list, but it’s pretty common for our readers to end up using at least 15 to 18 solutions that we have mentioned.

Now that you have the best WordPress plugins, you may also want to see our article on how to increase your website traffic (27 proven tips).

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 24 Must Have WordPress Plugins for Business Websites in 2020 appeared first on WPBeginner.

February 07, 2020 at 05:00PM