6 Features That You Can Add to Your WordPress

Rosh wrote about 7 things you can do to help your business, and it got me thinking. “Can I offer some value for business people to help enhance their websites?”  So that’s what I’m doing.

The website for your business needs to attract visitors, appeal to visitors and then offer some sort of conversion. The conversion might be a social action, a sale or signing up for an email list.

So below you will see a list of 6 features that you can add to your WordPress website using plugins or by browsing business WordPress themes that may have the features included within them.

1) Google Plus integration:  Google Authorship is extremely important not just for branding and click throughs from search engines, but for SEO now that Author Rank is going to become a part of Google’s algorithms.  My favorite plugin for integration is WordPress SEO by Yoast, but many themes including Genesis now have Google Plus integration built-in.

2) Selling products: You might have an eBook to sell, or maybe another type of product that you have created.  Some business themes do have eCommerce built-in, but the more common method is to use an eCommerce plugin, like WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads.

3) Social sharing: It has been proven that the most effective way to get people to share your articles is to add a floating social bar on the left and a horizontal bar after the content.  To add this functionality to your website, I recommend either the DiggDigg or Flare WordPress plugins.  Both will do a beautiful job.  Don’t forget to track your social media progress with a dashboard like the one  mentioned here.

4) Feature the best: Most likely your business’s home page is not just a list of recent blog articles.  Most likely you are trying to show off products or services.  One of the best ways to do that is to use an elegant slider feature.  Many business themes have these built in, but if yours does not then I recommend checking out SlideDeck or if you are using the Genesis theme then the free Genesis Responsive Slider.  You can then choose a specific category to feature, and have it automatically update when new posts in that category are published.

5) Social proof: One of the best way to sell a product these days is social proof.  This is an expansion to testimonials, where you share a photo of the person you’re quoting and a link to their social profile.  This personalizes your business a lot and will convert more visitors to customers.  Like others I’ve mentioned, many themes have this built in, but there are also many plugins to handle testimonials.

6) Call to action: Somewhere on your home page and somewhere on sub pages, you need a place to add a call to action.  These are typically large, contrasting color buttons or signup forms meant for a person to click or utilize with a purpose.  For example, in the sidebar of your blog might be a signup form for your email list.  Above the email form might be a short blurb about the list and why the person should sign up.  You can use a plugin for this task or the widget feature in WordPress.

Bonus Tip:  Using a responsive theme will reduce bounce rate, increase engagement and help the SEO of your business.

As you can see there are many things you can implement to enhance your business website.  I’ve only listed 6, but could easily keep going.

So get started, take a screenshot before and after and then comment with a link for every to see how you’ve enhanced your business’s website.

Thanks for reading,

Scott

Scott Wyden Kivowitz is a NJ photographer and the Community & Blog Wrangler at Photocrati Media, developer of WordPress themes for photographers.

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