Top 25 WordPress Plugins For Nigerian Business Websites

I am yet to see any Nigerian business owner that discovered WordPress and then hate to use it.

I love the simplicity of using this content management software to convert my blog into:

• a full-fledged eCommerce site like Konga.com,
• a news website like CNN or,
• a company website.

Thanks to these top 25 WordPress plugins that powers my website all year round. Best of all, they are FREE! I believe you’re using some of them already. Keep reading.

SPEED:

Website speed is essential to your online business if you want Google and your site visitors to love you. So here are the plugins I used to speed up my website:

1. W3 Total Cache – this plugin dramatically improves the speed and user experience of your site.
2. Imagify Image Optimizer – I use this plugin to reduce image file sizes, thereby making my website load faster.

SEO:

What’s the point of having a website if your target audience can’t find you online? To be at the top of search engines, I used the following plugins for optimizing my blog posts, pages, and images:

3. All in One SEO – helps you have a fully optimized WordPress site.

SOCIAL

4. Sumome Social Sharing Tool – If you want to encourage your blog visitors to share your content with their network of friends, then you need an attractive social bookmark button. Heartfelt thanks to email guru, Noah Kagan for this useful plugin that makes it easy for my blog readers to share my blog posts.

LIST BUILDING:

So you’ve been able to attract visitors to read your beautifully crafted blog posts. Great! Now, do you let them walk out the door forever or get them to join your newsletter for future engagement? I chose the latter. Here are the plugins that enable me to build my mailing list all year round:

5. PopupAlly –  I use this exit intent pop-up plugin to get my blog readers and buyers to join my newsletter or get a discount code, just when they are about to leave my landing page for other sites. Cool eh?

6. MailChimp for WordPress – I turned my contact page form into a permission-based list building machine using the checkbox feature.

COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT:

These plugins help me keep an eye on irrelevant comments on my blog.

7. Akismet – the best way to protect your blog from bad comments and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep.

8. Disqus Comment System – this sophisticated comment system replaces your default WordPress comment system.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT:

As an online business owner, I need to make it easy for my web visitors and prospects to communicate with me. These plugins made that job of keeping the conversation flowing.

9. Ninja Forms – Without this form, my contact page is useless. Another form I recommend using is Contact Form 7.

10. Drift Live Chat – I can’t count how many customers I’ve gotten through this live chat plugin.

11. HubSpot – Free Marketing Plugin for WordPress – this easy-to-use lead tracking plugin helps you better understand your website visitors. From monitoring where my leads came from, up to the point of filling a form on my site, this plugin tells me everything I need to know about my prospective buyers.

SECURITY:

As you know, WordPress sites are prone to attacks by hackers. Wait a minute! Which content management software (i.e. Joomla or Drupal) isn’t prone to vicious attacks by hackers? Anyways, these top three plugins help to secure my website:

12. Limit Login Attempts – After 2 failed login attempts, it blocks the IP address of the hacker for as long as you want.

13. WP-DBManager – It does what it says. Schedules backup, optimize and repair your website’s database on autopilot.

14. Really Simple SSL – Lightweight plugin without any setup to make your site ssl proof. All you need is an SSL certificate confirmation from your web hosting company. This plugin does the rest.

ANALYTICS:

Like management consulting guru – Peter Drucker said: “What gets measured gets improved.” Therefore measuring my online marketing efforts is vital. These plugins help me monitor website traffic and track events.

15. Google Analytics For WordPress by MonsterInsights – this popular plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog.

16. WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration – This plugin passes sales revenue from Woocommerce to Google Analytics. You can link a referral to a purchase and add transaction information to your Google Analytics data.

17. Jetpack by WordPress.com Stats – enables you to monitor your WordPress Site Stats via the dashboard and on your android smartphone.

18. Hotjar Connecticator – if you want to track how and where people navigate, scroll to or click on your website, this heat map recording tool is your go-to plugin. To get started, create a free account on Hotjar.com.

ADVERTISING & REMARKETING

This plugin helps me retarget online visitors on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and mobile apps.

19. Tracking Code Manager – this plugin enables you to add Facebook Conversion, Google AdWords Global Tag, Twitter Site Tag, LinkedIn Conversion and AdRoll Pixels to your blog Posts, Pages, or any other custom post types.

E-COMMERCE & PRICING

I never knew that a day will come when I will be able to convert a section of my website into a full-fledged eCommerce site like Jumia, Konga and Amazon. These Woocommerce plugins helped me achieve that.

20. Woocommerce – this popular e-commerce toolkit helps you convert your site into an online store like Konga.com and sell stuff like clothes, fashion, food, or downloadable products. Beautifully!

21. VoguePay Woocommerce Payment Gateway – Many thanks to Tunbosun Ayinla for creating this plugin. Now you can accept online Naira payments such as Interswitch, Etranzact, Mastercard and Visa cards on your website. Setting it up for my digital marketing shop and my clients was a breeze. Move over Interswitch! I don’t have to cough out a whooping N150,000 just to use your platform.

22. Woocommerce Checkout Manager –  Since I sell virtual downloadable products (e-books) for now, this plugin trims unnecessary billing form fields on my checkout page, such as physical address, country, last name, etc. If you don’t want to scare your buyers away with long forms, trim the fat with this plugin.
23. Easy Pricing Tables Lite by Fatcat Apps – allows you to create a Beautiful, Responsive and Highly Converting Pricing Table in Less Than 5 Minutes. No Coding Required. You can link to your Woocommerce shopping cart.
24. Ghostmonitor – It’s called Automated Cart Abandonment Campaign Plugin for WooCommerce with Pre-built Emails. Have you noticed that people add products to their shopping cart and never complete their purchase? Well, Recart will help you send automated emails to these cart abandoners and bring them back to complete the checkout. GhostMonitor usually provides 15% revenue growth on autopilot.

There you have it. What other plugins do you use to power your website? Share with using the comments below.