More than 55,000 plugins exist for WordPress. Not all of those plugins offer marketing features, but let’s say even just 10% do. That’s still 5,500 plugins you have to choose from! It’s all-too easy to bog down your site with too many plugins when trying to find the best ones for you. Let’s help you cull down that list!
Following are our favorite plugins for managing and tracking digital marketing efforts for WordPress and WooCommerce websites.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO has been called "the granddaddy of all SEO plugins" by Michael David, author of the book WordPress Search Engine Optimization, which is considered the definitive guide on the subject.
Yoast makes it simple for SEO newbies and pros alike to easily manage a variety of technical and content related SEO items, without needing any deep technical or development knowledge. With Yoast SEO, you can easily add organization and social schema elements, integrate webmaster tools accounts, manage robots.txt file, create an XML sitemap, and you can add unique metadata for each page.
We’ve found the free version of Yoast to be sufficient for most websites, especially if you’re just getting familiar with SEO and want to cover the basics.
Yoast WooCommerce
Yoast WooCommerce improves the presentation of your product pages on search engines and social media channels. The plugin adds important structured data for product price, availability, image, GTIN/ISBN/MPN, brand, color and more. This structured data is easier for the search engines and social channels to “read,” and thus results in more richer snippets and social posts.
Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager (GTM) makes it extremely simple to add multiple marketing tags and analytics tracking codes to your website, without requiring help from a developer or slowing down your site. To install GTM, you just need to add a small line of code to your site, and then any of those marketing/analytics tags will be housed in that container.
But how do you install that GTM code if you don’t want to bother your developer (or don’t have a developer to bother!)? That’s where this plugin comes in handy. All you need to do is enter your GTM account ID, and the plugin adds it to the website.
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a simple, intuitive tool that allows you to create basically any kind of form you need on your website, from contact forms and file uploads to questionnaires and user surveys.
Gravity Forms has loads of ready-to-use form fields that you can choose from, and allows you to use conditional logic to configure your form based on user selections. If simple forms are a part of your WordPress site in any way, Gravity Forms is one of the best options.
Redirection
Cleaning up 404 errors pages is essential for maintaining your SEO authority and creating a better user experience. This is especially true for ecommerce websites, where changing product inventory can result in new 404s on a more frequent basis.
404 error pages can be fixed in a number of ways, but the most common way is by adding 301 redirects to relevant pages. This WordPress plugin helps you identify, add and manage redirects more efficiently. It also monitors when permalinks have been changed and can automatically redirect to the updated URL, saving you time and headaches.
WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration
If you’re using WooCommerce to sell products on your site and you want to use Google Analytics to track ecommerce performance, then you need this plugin. Unfortunately, I don’t mean that like “you’d be missing out on some great extra features but you can still track sales.” I mean that like “Google Analytics won’t track ecommerce sales or revenues without this plugin.”
Sigh, I know. Forced to purchase another plugin, but we really do think this one is worth it.
If you’ve already added Google Analytics through GTM, you need to remove it and instead install with this plugin. But once you do that, you’ll be able to track sales, revenue, AOV and other Advanced Ecommerce data in Google Analytics.
Insert Headers and Footers
Insert Headers and Footers is a simple-to-use plugin that allows you to insert code into your WordPress headers and footers. It's simple interface gives you a lot of mileage and allows you to avoid having to use multiple plugins to insert code.
If you’re already using Google Tag Manager, you won’t necessarily need this plugin. But if you’re unfamiliar with or cannot use GTM, or you need to add something specifically to the footer only, this is a super simple plugin.
Need digital marketing help for your WordPress site? Drop us a line. We look forward to connecting with you!