Published on August 9, 2018
A beautiful, well-functioning website is a necessity for any business in today’s world – but it is especially crucial for digital agencies. After all, if the service you are selling your customers is related to their online image (i.e. branding, marketing, website design, etc.) you need to demonstrate that you are capable of presenting yourself well through the web.
Fortunately, building an impressive website is easier than ever before, thanks in large part to the abundance of WordPress plugins and custom WordPress plugin developers. In this article, we will discuss a few ways that WordPress plugins can help agencies succeed.
Is your site committing any cardinal sins that could interfere with user experience, harm your authority, or turn potential customers away? Content Audit is a great way of finding and fixing any web content that is redundant, outdated, or poorly formatted. Sucuri security can help protect your site from most major WordPress security threats, while also identifying any outstanding security issues. And the Broken Link Checker plugin is fantastic at doing exactly what the name implies it does.
Last but not least, the Plugin Auditor keeps track of every plugin you’ve installed on a given site, while providing information on why each particular plugin was installed, and by whom. This makes Plugin Auditor especially useful for agencies managing client pages, as it enables teams to collaborate more seamlessly.
Integrating your payment processors with other workflow tools offers benefits that go beyond an uptick in productivity. Through WooCommerce, you can connect to nearly any payment gateway / merchant account, but some interesting agency-specific options have arisen recently as well. Features such as payment scheduling, custom estimations, and personalized notifications make Sprout Invoices a great option for agencies. An added bonus? Sprout also integrates with hundreds of productivity apps and virtually every major payment processor out there.
Visual Form Builder is one of our favorite data collection options. Drag-and-drop building, automatic confirmation emails, easy CSV integration, and over a dozen reactive field types are just a few of the features that make this form builder extremely user-friendly. Visual Form Builder is also a great plugin to have in the back of your pocket if you need to create a data collector for your clients. However, keep in mind that the WordPress.org enhancement plugin, Jackpot, also offers a pretty robust form builder, as well.
Convincing other businesses to trust you with their online image isn’t easy; however, building authority through web content is one important tool at your disposal. Unfortunately, planning to create great content and actually getting around to that task are two very different things. Moreover, even if you do have some blogs, videos, or images at the ready, rolling that content out can be a challenge in its own right.
Editorial Calendar won’t create and publish content for you, but it does give you about as much help as any tool in 2018 can be expected to. Easily drag and drop posts you with to publish throughout a visually intuitive calendar. Make quick edits to titles, content, and publish times. View the status of every post you’ve made using the plugin, and manage posts from multiple authors.
This last feature makes Editorial Calendar similar to Plugin Auditor in the sense that it fosters easier collaboration for teams. If your agency publishes content for your clients, Editorial Calendar is a must-have.
Speaking of blogs, the comment section of any successful online publication is certain to pose challenges while simultaneously presenting opportunities. The benefits should be pretty apparent: online engagement is fantastic for brand awareness, authority, and relationship building. The downside, of course, is that online comment sections can quickly become a cesspool of spammers, bots, hate speech, and general insanity.
The native WordPress commenting system does its job adequately; however, if you want to upgrade your blog or the blog of a client, utilizing a comment system such as Disqus is an obvious step in the right direction. Nested comments, social media login, user notifications, easy moderation, and an all-around better-looking layout are just a few reasons why commenting plugins are exceedingly popular.
The Sunny Landing Pages plugin by WordPress boasts a plethora of 5 star reviews, thanks to useful and intuitive features such as email collector integration, conversion-friendly design, and fast-loading pages. We have not found a “perfect” landing page option, but this pretty darn cool.
However, in our (inherently biased) opinion, no page-builder can compete with a custom-designed site build by a talented WordPress developer. Visit Reliable PSD online to learn more about our WordPress development services such as Sketch to WordPress and plugin development – we create beautiful and functional pages, exact .
This post was last updated on June 22, 2020
