According to Forbes, WordPress is the single most popular blog hosting site and creation service on the web, powering nearly 73 million blogs. While a huge number of those belong to private individuals just looking for a place to write down their thoughts, as Sacramento Business Journal writes, businesses increasingly see the potential of using a WordPress site to fuel their web marketing aspirations.
One of the biggest complaints businesses used to have when turning to WordPress sites is that the service was limited in both its functionality and design potential. However, as any professional WordPress developer can tell you, those limitations are things of the past. With WordPress widgets and smart web design, WordPress may be the most customizable and useful website tool on the web for businesses of all sizes.
The Top Three WordPress Widgets for Improving Business Websites
- WP-Optimize
- The Testimonials Widget
- Content Aware Sidebars
WP-Optimize is one of the most important WordPress widgets because, as the name implies, it allows you to optimize your WordPress site. Through this widget, you can clean out unwanted and unused tags, optimize your URL for SEO, and automatically schedule many of the mundane, yet essential tasks that go with being a web master. One of the most useful features of WP-Optimize is the ability to clean up SPAM comments. While comments on your blog posts are important for increasing your web ranking, SPAM comments, as IT World suggests, can have a negative impact on your PageRank status.
Did you know, according to Google, that businesses that use testimonials in their marketing material, whether it’s a website or pamphlet, have a 12.5% higher lead conversion rate than those that do not? That’s why the Testimonials widget is one of the most important WordPress widgets for businesses looking to improve their website. By setting up testimonials using tags, this widget can change up your testimonials, allowing the same user to see different testimonials each time they visit your page.
Content Aware Sidebars is well known among WordPress widgets because it makes navigating specific content so much easier for consumers. Imagine that you run a florist company. When your customers visit your pages about roses, do you want your sidebars to display other content to do with roses, the product they’re looking for, or do you want your sidebars to display content they clearly aren’t looking for? As Forbes writes, this ability to tailor sidebars to specific content makes Content Aware Sidebars one of the best WordPress widgets out there for businesses.
Clearly, putting time into WordPress development can be one of the most beneficial things for any business, big or small, that is trying to optimize their web marketing. Whether you turn to WordPress developers outside of your company or those in-house, professional web design is the single best way to take advantage of all WordPress has to offer.