Whether you’re the owner of a brick-and-mortar chocolate factory in Bushwick or a perfumery in the cloud, your business success depends on two foundational goals: optimizing the operational efficiency of your business and promoting its growth.
When you increase your business’ operational efficiency, you save time and, by extension, money. When you promote your business’ growth, you increase its revenue. Pair those two objectives, and you tackle most entrepreneurs’ number one business goal: improve profitability.
Of course, as your success grows, your time diminishes. That means that those two critical objectives – efficiency and growth – are often pushed to the bottom of the to-do list in favor of more of-the-moment concerns. But letting these goals languish can quickly derail even the most profitable enterprise.
Entrepreneurs who build their websites on WordPress have access to hundreds of plugins that have been developed to address this particular problem. However, we’ve selected one example that helps to automate and maintain each of the time-consuming tasks that promote business growth and improve efficiency.
WordPress plugins that help promote business growth
To improve discoverability, look into an SEO plugin to optimize your website’s content. Yoast, one of the most popular SEO plugins, helps business owners develop Page and Post content that focuses on specific keywords. It gives you hints to improve snippet previews and optimal post length. It reminds you of the little details that we commonly forget in our rush to post. It even automatically creates sitemaps and notifies Bing and Google of sitemap updates.
To increase social reach, try a plugin like Monarch, which allows users to add customized sharing buttons in a variety of layouts. Beyond the standard static share options, Monarch allows website owners to create automatic pop-ups and fly-ins, which can be triggered by specific user actions such as commenting, reaching the end of a post, or making a purchase. Monarch also provides a dashboard for managing and monitoring social shares from within your WordPress website.
To assess web traffic and build email lists, look into SumoMe. This particular plugin has a wide range of free tools to help site owners maximize their website’s potential. Heat Maps allows you to identify the most and least effective content, and an integrated Google Analytics dashboard lets you see website stats without leaving your site. Monarch also offers List Builder, a light-box pop-up that increases email subscriptions.
Optimize operational efficiency with these WordPress plugins
To backup data and review potential threats to your site’s data, look into a security plugin like Vaultpress. Security features often go unaddressed until the worst case scenario happens, leaving staff to wrangle a solution on the fly, wasting time and money. Using an automated security service like Vaultpress eliminates the stress that comes with a hacked website or a crashed server without adding another task to your to-do list.
To automate shipping, sales, and payments, check out WooCommerce. While there are other eCommerce options, WooCommerce is the most widely used by online stores, and for good reason. It integrates easily with WordPress and offers hundreds of extensions that help users automate the sales process. With just a little work up front, sales, shipping, payments, taxes, and even bookings and memberships can be fully automated. You can’t get much more efficient than that.
To automate data collection, use a dynamic online form plugin like Formidable. Learning more about your ideal customers takes time, but allowing your website to do the heavy lifting for you means that you can direct your focus to leads that are primed to purchase. In addition to collecting data, Formidable and several other form plugins allow you to display and use data from within your website.
Use your WordPress site to reach your business goals
With the right plugins in place, it’s possible for business owners – both virtual and brick-and-mortar – to promote business growth while optimizing efficiency. More importantly, these tools allow you to maintain those efforts over the long haul.
How do you use your WordPress site to grow your business?