Top 13 Plugins for Every Business Websites

Building a business website is no rocket science today. Particularly, you can do it easily and quickly with WordPress themes and plugins, which build your website design and extra features. Depending on your kind of business sites and the number of products, a website will need different features such as landing pages, eCommerce pages, product pages, … Therefore, I made a review of the top best plugins for business websites to add these features. Take a look and choose the most suitable one for you!

Kinds of Plugin for a Business Website

You can find that there’re many plugins for business websites so it’s not easy to choose the right types. To help you narrow down your list, we sort plugins into 4 types based on their characteristics and uses:

1. Page builder plugin
2. Website optimization plugin
3. Lead generation and conversion-boosting plugin
4. eCommerce plugin

Plugins in this article are chosen depending on the following criteria: easy to use, effective, and suitable for business websites. Now let’s find out what they are!

Page builder Plugins - Elementor

Page builder plugins have a simple drag and drop interface so it helps you build your website’s layout easily and quickly without code. Among page builder plugins, the most popular one is probably Elementor.

Elementor is the most popular plugins now with more than 5+ million active installations on wordpress.org. It allows you to customize all sections of your website such as header, footer, searching page, 404 pages, … with the Theme Builder feature. Meanwhile, the WooCommerce Builder will help you freely customize your product pages so that it’s more eye-catching and attractive.

Highlight features

• Lightweight and SEO optimization
• Support 300+ available templates and 90+ widget
• Theme Builder
• WooCommerce Builder
• Popup Builder - Create all kinds of popup

Alternative options: You can refer to this article to choose other page builder plugins.

Website Optimization Plugins

These are plugins for optimizing your business website on different aspects. They can be sorted into different types as follows:

Optimize Website Speed - WP-Rocket

Speed is always an important factor that website owners care about. A fast and lightweight website can improve not only user experience but also SEO score. And a good SEO optimized website can be ranked higher on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

To improve website speed, using plugins is one of the best choices.

Speed optimization plugins often support these features: cache, Lazy Loaded image, CSS/JS files optimization, database optimization, defer to load JS files, … If you want a professional plugin with all the above features, WP-Rocket will be a suitable choice. It is a popular premium plugin to speed up websites.

There’re quite a few plugins in this field, including completely free ones. However, I still recommend WP-Rocket because this is an all-in-one plugin. It supports all the necessary features to make your site run faster. Moreover, all features are good and worth your money.

The notable features are Cache, GZIP compression, adding LazyLoad to images... In addition, this plugin is very easy to install and use. Therefore, it is suitable for even those who are new to WordPress. You can get more details on how to install and use WP-Rocket here.

Highlight features

• Cache preload
• Sitemap preload
• Page caching
• Browser caching
• Add LazyLoad to image
• Database and Google font optimization
• GZIP compression
• Defer to load JS files

Alternative options: You can refer to this article to choose other speed optimization plugins.

Optimize SEO - Slim SEO

SEO plugins will optimize your website’s components so that they become more “search engine friendly”. Therefore, you can get more organic traffic as well as have a better ranking for your website. And if you’re looking for an effective, easy-to-use, and newbie-friendly, Slim SEO would be a perfect choice.

Slim SEO is a powerful, easy-to-use, and completely free plugin to optimize SEO for your website automatically. In spite of being released recently, it’s loved by many people because of its simplicity and effectiveness.

The advantage of Slim SEO (compared to other SEO plugins) is that users don’t have to configure anything. Just install, activate Slim SEO and it’ll do the rest. In particular, Slim SEO supports features that some of competitors don’t have such as adding alt text automatically to images, displaying shortcode content for meta description tags, and adding code to headers / footers. Additionally, take a look at this article about how to use Slim SEO.

Highlight features

• Lightweight
• Optimized code
• Easy to use, no need to configure
• Add Schema automatically
• Add alt text to image automatically
• Add XML sitemap
• Optimize meta tags

Alternative options: You can refer to this article of the top best SEO plugins to choose the most suitable one for your business website.

Optimize Image - WP Smush

Using images in posts is an effective way to illustrate the content / products and attract readers. However, images often take up a lot of space and make your website run slowly. Thus, you should use an image optimization plugin to compress them to smaller sizes. This will help reduce the load and make your website run smoothly. Among image optimization plugins, the most popular one is WP-Smush.

WP-Smush is an extremely popular plugin for optimizing images in WordPress. It is highly appreciated by the community with 1 million active installations and 4000+ five-star reviews on wordpress.org (highest among image optimization plugins). It's not difficult to say that this is the most popular plugin in this field. With many useful features such as lossless compression or bulk image compression (50 images at a time), WP-Smush will be a good choice for your business website.

Highlight features

• Lossless compression
• Change image size
• Add LazyLoad to image
• Bulk compress 50 images at once
• Directory Smush - Optimize images (include images that aren’t in the library)
• Process PNG, JPEG, GIF files

Alternative options: You can refer to this article to choose a suitable image optimization plugin for your business website.

Optimize Security - WordFence

Security is an important issue for websites in general and business websites in particular. You don’t want to lose the customers’ trust because of security problems and information leaks, right? Security plugins will provide features for protecting your websites such as adding more password layers, scanning to detect dangers, and warning users, ... If you’re looking for a powerful plugin to do it, WordFence is a perfect choice.

WordFence is the most popular security plugin that is trusted and used by more than 3 million customers. This powerful plugin supports many useful features such as audit loggin, two-factor authentication, and checking whether your website is in Google blacklist or not, …

Highlight features

• Warning users through email when detecting dangers
• Two-factor authentication
• Block the attackers’ ID
• Scan and detect malware automatically
• Checking if your website is blacklisted

Alternative options: You can refer to this article for more alternative plugins for WordFence.

Create a Backup - Updraftplus

Backup data is a useful technique in WordPress. It helps you restore data in case something goes wrong or when you want to move data to another server (It likes ghosting Windows for a computer). To create a backup for your website, you can use dedicated plugins such as Updraftplus.

Updraftplus is the most popular WordPress backup plugin at the moment. It’s even considered as the best backup plugin by many people. It supports you to migrate / clone site to site directly, backup to OneDrive, Google Cloud, BackBlaze, and restore backups from other plugins. To get more details about how to backup your website with Updraftplus, read this article!

Highlight features

• Migrate / clone site to site directly
• Backup / Restore with unlimited size
• Backup / Restore a certain file
• Backup to OneDrive, FTP, Google Drive, BackBlaze, …
• Restore backups from other plugins

Alternative options: You can refer to this article of best backup plugins comparison and choose a desired one.

Clean Up Website - WP-Sweep

While operating websites, there are many unused data such as unused revisions of posts, spam comments, … They take up space and make your server bloat. Thus, you should use plugins to clean up them automatically. There’re a lot of plugins in this field. In this article, I recommend using WP-Sweep because it’s easy to use and dedicated to cleaning up websites.

WP-Sweep is a free plugin that can clean up almost everything from revision, comment to the database. It’s stable, fast, and easy to use. All options lie on one page only. Besides, you just need one click to clean up everything. Easy peasy, right?

Highlight features

• Clean up revisions
• Clean up comment data (delete, spam, unapproved ones, ...)
• Clean up orphaned meta (post meta, user meta, term meta, …)
• Optimize database tables

Alternative options: You can refer to this article of top best plugins to clean up your WordPress website.

Lead Generation and Conversion-Boosting Plugins

These plugins are used to add functions to collect information about potential customers (lead generation) such as create forms, live chat; or boost conversion rate such as create call-to-action buttons. They’ll be especially useful for marketing campaigns that sell products, make promotions, or allow customers to contact web-owners / business owners directly for support, service advice, and sale.

Create Forms - WPForms

Form plugins help you create contact forms for customers to enter information such as membership registration, payment information, newsletter subscription, … If you’re looking for a powerful plugin to do it, WPForms will be a good choice.

Powerful, easy to use, and used by more than 3 million customers - that’s WPForms. This plugin is a perfect choice to design forms for your business website simply and professionally. Using WPForms, you can create forms for registration, payment, … easily and quickly with just a few intuitive drag-and-drop actions. Besides, you can use available pre-built templates to save time and effort. Dig in the review about WPForms here.

Highlight features

• 100+ available template
• Forms are responsive and mobile-friendly
• Anti-spam with Honeypots
• Users can write in forms even when the Internet is disconnected
• Create forms quickly without code

Alternative options: You can refer to this article to choose other form plugins.

Add Live Chat - Tawk.To Live Chat

With live chat plugins, website visitors can chat directly with your staff. Among live chat plugins, the most popular one is Tawk. To Live Chat

Tawk.To Live Chat is the most popular live chat plugin with more than 200.000+ active installations on wordpress.org (an impressive number with a live chat plugins). Tawk.To Live Chat is totally free and very easy to use. It helps you add the live chat feature to your site easily and simply.

Tawk.To Live Chat has a lot of useful features such as video and voice chat, sending files in the chat box, supplying more than 1880+ Emoji to make every conversation closer and more vivid. This is a powerful tool to connect website owners with their customers. It makes sure all needs are met and all questions are answered!

Highlight features

• Add-on support video and voice chat
• Support more than 1880+ Emoji
• Monitor customer interaction and opinions
• Support sending files in chatbox
• Filter message
• Unlimited message history

Alternative options: You can refer to this article for more live chat plugins.

Add Call-to-action Buttons - Thrive Ultimatum

Plugins in this group help you create call-to-action (CTA) buttons. There’re a lot of types of CTA such as calling to subscribe, click links, buy products, … If you have a business website selling products, you may want to use Thrive Ultimatum.

Thrive Ultimatum is a premium plugin that is based on scarcity marketing principles. It helps you add a CTA button with a countdown timer to create a flash sale. This makes customers buy your products with a stronger sense of urgency.

Thrive Ultimatum will work well on business sites that usually run flash sale campaigns. In addition, this plugin supports creating multiple CTA buttons on one page and running multiple campaigns at the same time. Thus, it’ll be suitable even if you want to run flash sales for multiple products at once.

Highlight features

• Add multiple CTA buttons on one page
• Run many campaigns at once
• Responsive design on mobile devices
• Add countdown timer
• Intuitive drag and drop visual editor

Alternative options: If you don’t want to create CTA button as Thrive Ultimatum does, refer to other plugins such as Simple Side Tab (Create CTA on the side of the page), Bloom Email Optin Plugin (Create CTA calling to subscribe), Hello Bar (call to click on links) ...

eCommerce Plugin - WooCommerce

eCommerce plugins support features for selling products on the website such as creating a shopping cart, adding product information (price, inventory, colors, size, …), tax and total bill calculation, ... In this field, WooCommerce is the best choice.

WooCommerce’s dominating the eCommerce field with more than 5 million customers from all over the world. This plugin supports all features you need to sell products. It’s safe, secure, and convenient with many online payment methods. In addition, it provides a huge template store with many interfaces and extensions that allow you to turn your business website into a professional online store.

Highlight features

• Tax calculation
• Shipping cost calculation
• Total bill calculation
• Filter by ratings
• Compatible with many plugins and themes

Alternative options: Hmm… I think WooCommerce is a giant in this field. Therefore, it’s difficult to find other options to replace it. However, you can still try MemberPress, Easy Digital Downloads or Shopify (an e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems).

Other Plugins

In addition to the plugins that support the essential needs above, business websites may need the following plugins:

Multilingual Plugin - Polylang

Multilingual plugins allow users to write multiple languages on a website such as adding different language versions to posts. They’ll be a powerful tool if you want to build a business website that supports multiple languages. Among multilingual plugins, Polylang is one of the most easy-to-use plugins.

Polylang is a popular freemium plugin used to create multilingual websites. The free version is suitable for those who want to try it before buying the pro version or don’t need advanced features. Meanwhile, the pro version is powerful with all the features you need in a multilingual plugin. So whether your needs are basic or advanced, Polylang can fit them all!

Polylang helps you translate all sections of your website (posts, pages, custom taxonomies, and RSS feeds, …). In particular, it’s compatible with most of the WordPress themes so don’t worry about conflict. In addition, if you want the auto-translating feature, install a supporting plugin called Lingotek Translation (free).

Highlight features

• Translate post, page, media, category, post tag, menu, widget, …
• Support translating custom post type, custom taxonomy, RSS feed, ...
• Support RTL language
• Compatible with almost WordPress themes
• SEO friendly

Alternative options: You can refer to this article for more other multilingual plugins.

Add Custom Fields for Website Objects - Meta Box

Plugins in this group help you add additional and special information for websites by the Custom Fields feature of WordPress. For example, you can add information about price, color, inventory, … with these plugins. One of the best plugins in this field is Meta Box.

Meta Box is a powerful freemium plugin that helps you create custom fields and custom meta boxes quickly and easily with an intuitive drag and drop interface. It supports more than 40+ custom fields and lots of useful features such as creating custom taxonomies, custom post types, views, ... Notably, features are divided into many extensions. Therefore, you can buy them individually to save money and avoid installing too many unnecessary features to slow down your website.

Meta Box has many applications such as creating dynamic landing pages, creating and displaying user profiles on the frontend, creating FAQs pages, dynamic favicon, a series of posts, ... To learn about how to use Meta Box, read this article.

Highlight features

• Fast and lightweight
• Compatible with Gutenberg and almost all WordPress plugins and themes
• Support 40+ field’s type to meet all requirements
• Support creating custom fields, custom taxonomies, custom post types yourself easily
• Intuitive drag and drop UI

Alternative options: You can refer to other plugins such as Advanced Custom Fields, CMB2, Toolset, Pods, Carbon Fields, …

Last Words

Hopefully, after reading this article, you’ve selected the best plugins for your business website. In addition to powerful plugins, you’ll need a suitable theme to build a successful business website. You can look for the best premium business themes here.

Good luck and remember to follow our upcoming articles to get more useful WordPress techniques!

In addition, you may like our article on the best plugins for WordPress blogs.