Great Free Plugins and Widgets for WordPress

I’ve been using WordPress for around a year now and have had great success with it. When I began with WordPress I had the temptation to buy some great plugins. After further inspection I realised that a lot of these plugins have a free alternative that is just as good. After using these plugins for a year I can certain vouch for their quality. Here’s some of the fantastic plugins I’ve been using and I’m sure you will reap value your business also.

WordPress

ClickDesk live chat is a widget that lets users message the webmaster from the browser. Its essentially an IM client to the user. The webmaster logs into the WordPress dashboard and logs into the app. Once a user wishes to initiate a chat your terminal will ring like a cell phone. The feature I like about this is that the webmaster is aware which page the user is on during the chat and any changes are immediately shown. The free version enables you 30 free chats a month. For me this is enough as I don’t get huge traffic and I find I never exceed the 30 chats a month. I have got sales from this so I’d recommend it. Once my business grows I will consider getting the paid version.

Hello Bar is a fantastic free widget. This enables you to have a message across each page at the top in a bar. We see this a lot on various sites these days and its popularity is ever increasing. My sales went up soon as this was added. The text parameters are customisable and its fairly quick and simple to set up.

Go pricing is a plugin I use to display prices for my products in easy to read charts. The cool thing about this is that the menu will rise when you hover the mouse above it.  I was able to take an image and split it into three placing each segment into a different column which offered a great presentation of this easy to use pricing widget.

Im also using newsletter widget by Stefano Lissa. This has enabled me to build up my email database of uses coming to my site. It sits discreetly in the bottom left corner of my footer on each page and is an effective tool for future marketing activities.

Finally WordPress SEO by Yoast. This is a must have for SEO. It enables the user to add the relevant details to beef up the SEO elements of the page. Yoast will grade each page for its relevance to a keyword and tell the user what action is required to improve the performance of that specific page. For targeting certain keywords this really helps. Of course this is all free. I believe there is a premium upgrade available but the functionality of the free version really is sufficient enough.

There’s a few fantastic WordPress plugins that will surely help your business. Just remember before you rush out and pay hard earned money for plug-ins that there may well be a free alternative just around the corner.

Good luck!

 

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