WordPress is one of the most popular website hosts for small businesses due to its customizability and ease of use. In fact, the majority of Green Industry companies I speak with rely on this tool to manage the content of their website.

However, every website can use a bit of improving. Here, we’ll examine five WordPress add-ons that can take your website to the next level.

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast

A powerful search engine optimization (SEO) tool, Yoast guides you through the process of creating a fully optimized post, helping you create content that will be found by search engines. Yoast features some pretty cool tools, including the Snippet Preview Tool, which allows you to see a rendering of how your page will appear in search engine results and let you know if your meta-description is too long or short. This free tool is particularly nice for a SEO novice and provides the support for you to look like an expert. In addition, you can increase traffic to your website by upgrading to one of the paid extended versions (starting at $69 a year) that feature support with various SEO strategies, including video optimization, local optimization and Google News optimization.

2. Pippity

A very inexpensive add-on, Pippity is a pop-up window that encourages users to sign-up for additional content. Unlike most pop-up windows, Pippity has a bevy of useful timing and interactive elements, allowing you to customize when and where exactly your pop-up will appear on screen. At $30 a year, this highly affordable add-on works, allowing your site to gather interested readers’ contact information for future marketing initiatives. Packed with predesigned templates, the plugin will have you up and running in a matter of minutes.
3. CoSchedule

Efficiency is the key to success in our industry, and your time is important. However, with today’s state of marketing, you have to juggle multiple social media platforms, blogging tools and content management systems. CoSchedule is an inexpensive WordPress plugin that allows you to schedule when your content and social media posts are published, all from one easy place. Perhaps my favorite part of this tool is you see all your posts, blogs and tweets on a visual calendar, similar to your appointments on Microsoft Outlook. At only $10 a month, this tool will have you blogging more often and drive more traffic to your website.
4. Hello Bar

Sometimes it’s easy to forget to promote your most important call-to-action (CTA) on your webpages. Other times, you’re just looking for the right real estate on your site to show that important button to sign up for a free estimate. With Hello Bar, you’ll never have to worry about that valuable CTA being hidden again. Hello Bar is a great tool that puts a “floating” colored CTA bar at the top of your website, allowing it to remain at the top as your consumers scroll and navigate from page to page. At $5 a month, this powerful plugin will help increase your conversions and generate more leads.

5. Inbound Now

I’m a huge supporter of content and inbound marketing movements. However, inbound marketing software can get really expensive, essentially eliminating it from some small business’s budgets. Inbound Now is a solid WordPress plugin that allows you to use some basic content and inbound marketing tools with an easy-to-digest $150 per year price point. With this software, you can convert more leads with landing pages testing, CTA testing and collect consumer contact information to nurture them through your email provider (for additional cost through your email service).

These five tools represent a small number of great add-ons you can install to make your WordPress website a fine-tuned marketing and sales machine.

To learn more about other WordPress plugins, I encourage you to visit WordPress’s plugin directory or popular software review sites, such as PCMag.com.