Design your way

It’s possible to expand a website’s capabilities in almost any way you want. You can do that through coding or with the help of a developer. However, WordPress plugins give you a far easier, and quicker way. They generally provide a more effective path to achieve your objective.

There are literally thousands of WordPress plugins on the market. All you have to do is find those that are the best fit for your website type or niche. That’s all and good if you don’t mind looking for a plugin in a haystack.

Having a few “must-have” plugins on hand is always a good idea. Many of these “must-haves” are provided when you select a particular WordPress theme. Others are specialty plugins like those listed here. With these, you would have to do some searching to find ones that would serve you best.

Amelia

Some plugins automate processes to make things easier for web designers or their clients. Others provide significant savings and an almost immediate ROI. Amelia does both. This WordPress plugin was designed for businesses that cater to large clienteles and rely heavily on scheduling bookings and appointments.

Amelia automates the booking and appointment process, and in doing so enables business owners and employers to devote more time to their core tasks and responsibilities. Businesses like gyms, consulting firms, health and fitness centers, and beauty parlors will benefit from this system which takes bookings 24/7, fits appointments to employee availability, manages the appointments, and features an online payment process.

Amelia eliminates phone tag issues, customers are never placed on hold, it can reschedule or cancel appointments when necessary, and it will even send appointment reminders to customers.

This flawless booking specialist will keep your customers happy and save you time and money in the process.

wpDataTables

It’s not an easy task to summarize the multiplicity of table- and chart-building tools the wpDataTables plugin offers. Suffice it to say, it is an all-in-one solution for working with large amounts of data, neatly summarizing the results, and presenting to website visitors in responsive, interactive, and easily editable tables and charts.

Even though wpDataTables is capable of creating tables and charts from huge amounts of complex data, and do so relatively quickly, this WordPress plugin is remarkably easy to work with. It accepts data in any of the common formats, including Excel, Google Sheets, MySQL, MS SQL, and SQL database information.

Table-building features include front-end editing, the ability to customize table designs, and conditional formatting which allows you to highlight key data by cell, row, or column. The wpDataTables plugin integrates nicely with most of the popular form builder plugins such as Formidable Forms and Gravity Forms.

Its community of more than 20,000 delighted users has given wpDataTables a 4.7 star average rating.

NextGEN Gallery & NextGEN Pro

NextGEN Gallery is a free WordPress gallery plugin that makes it easy to build simple photo galleries, yet is powerful enough to create galleries that will satisfy the most demanding imaging professionals, visual artists, photographers, and other creative types.

This popular plugin has been the industry’s standard WordPress gallery plugin for 12 years running, and it shows no sign of relinquishing that distinction. It enables you to manage huge amounts of images with ease, present them in a variety of gallery types and styles, and allow clients to download or purchase prints of their favorites.

The premium version, NextGEN Pro, offers a wide range of additional options and extensions including eCommerce capabilities. NextGEN Gallery users can either upgrade to NextGEN Pro or purchase NextGEN Pro extension bundles for a fee.

MapSVG WordPress map plugin

MapSVG could well be the last WordPress mapping plugin you’ll ever need. It has everything. You can work with Google maps, image maps, customized interactive vector maps, and add markers and other useful information.

You can upload SVG files and overlay SVG on user maps or create your own image maps from JPEG or PNG files. Search and filter features are there as well; everything to provide users with “perfect” maps.

Logic Hop – Personalized Marketing for WordPress

Ready to have your mind blown? Imagine your website could automatically change for each visitor – Headlines, calls-to-action, images, even the CSS. Welcome to the future: Content personalization.

If you’re familiar with it, you know it’s helping sites increase conversions by 200%. Sound difficult? Logic Hop for WordPress makes it easy with ready-made recipes and tons of powerful features. They’ll even help you get up and running. Working with clients? Check out their awesome affiliate program.

Rank Math SEO

Rank Math SEO is nothing less than a veritable Swiss Army Knife of SEO tools for WordPress and WordPress sites. This handy plugin loads fast, it’s extremely easy to use, it features a variety of different SEO tools, and it features a built-in Content Analysis function to help you write SEO-friendly content.

Web design just became that much easier.

WordLift

WordLift is a WordPress plugin to help you master the SEO challenges you face. This is the first WordPress plugin to use artificial intelligence for search engine optimization with a strong focus on structured data automation. WordLift also partners with WooRank to measure your content’s search engine friendliness along with other factors that influence and contribute to organic traffic.

Is being ahead of the SEO one of your goal for 2019? Then consider giving AI and WordLift a try, you won’t regret it.

Heroic FAQs

Building an FAQ page might seem like a no-brainer, but doing it right, and building a professional-looking one usually requires some help – and that’s precisely what the Heroic FAQs WordPress plugin provides.

Heroic FAQs will assist you in creating questions and answers, and grouping or reordering them and adding images or videos using drag and drop. Since most questions are repetitive, this plugin will save you and your users a ton of time and eliminate lots of frustration.

Heroic Knowledge Base

Having an online knowledge base can help a business grow by providing a self-service customer service capability. Creating a knowledge base with the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin is not any more difficult that creating a WordPress page or post.

This plugin’s many features include allowing you to collect article feedback, a lightning-fast search capability for your users, drag and drop category ordering, and more.

Blog2Social – Smart social media automation for WordPress

Blog2Social is an all-purpose social media automation solution for small business owners, agencies, marketers, and teams that lets them share social media on up to 16 social media networks, e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr.

Blog2Social is available as an integrated WordPress application or as an independent web app. With help of its drag and drop social media calendar, scheduling and cross-promoting content, including profiles, pages, and groups has never been easier.

Conclusion

Finding at least one plugin or tool among our selection that will reap immediate benefits is a given. With luck, you might find 2 or 3 that will save you a ton of time. They will relieve the stress that goes with most DIY approaches, and make users happy in the process.

Plugins aren’t simply software extensions, although they’re often advertised as such. They extend your capabilities and that of your business as well.

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