Best WordPress Plugins to Boost Your Conversion Rate
When it comes to websites, looks matter a whole lot. The modern workhorses owe at least a part of their effectiveness to various design features that make them not only more appealing visually, but also easier to use. But we shouldn’t forget that, no matter how sophisticated and interesting our websites can look, they still have a purpose to fulfill. Often enough, that purpose can be summed up with one word — conversion.
Business and marketing websites are great examples. Their builders will use WordPress store themes to create places that are conducive to making purchases. They will create landing pages that gently nudge people to sign up for a service. They will gear pages and whole websites towards making the conversion. And they’ll routinely use conversion rate WordPress plugins to maximize the rate at which visitors perform the purpose of the website — the rate at which they convert.
In this article, we’ll talk about conversion rate plugins you can use with your WordPress websites. We’ll mention:
The Challenges of Increasing Your Conversion Rate
To achieve a perfect conversion rate, you’d have to convert every single person that lands on your website. That might be an impossible goal, but it doesn’t prevent marketers, website administrators, and conversion rates optimization consultants from trying to edge closer to it a fraction of a percent at a time. That’s what conversion rate optimization is all about — finding new ways to increase the conversion rate or finding ways to achieve the same results while spending fewer resources.
Conversion rate boosting becomes tricky when you start considering just how many different influences can determine whether a visitor will convert. Some of them might be wholly subjective and out of your grasp — you can simply catch people on a bad day. But your website’s loading speed is something you can influence. So is the form length you’re using on the site, or the CTA design, or the exact moment when a pop up pops up.
There’s just an incredible variety of things you can adjust, tweak, overhaul, or replace while you’re trying to increase the conversion rate of your landing page or your website. The biggest challenge might be knowing what exactly to optimize and what’s not worth the effort. With that in mind, here are some of the WordPress plugins that can help you achieve specific goals that should improve your website’s conversion rates.
Is this Google Analytics on a list of WordPress plugins? It is, kind of, even though it’s not a plugin. But you can hardly imagine an analytics tool that works better and provides more essential insights than Google Analytics. Simply put, if you want to know how people are finding your website and what’s their behavior while they’re there, Google Analytics is the tool to use.
You can use several different plugins to connect and manage Google’s services on your website. Google’s Site Kit is the company’s official WordPress plugin, and it will give you a limited scope of information right from your website’s dashboard. Other popular plugins include MonsterInsights, ExactMetrics, and Analytify.
Need something to boost your website’s speed? You might, even though you don’t know it, because people aren’t that enthusiastic about waiting for your website to load if it takes too long. And guess what a plugin with the word “rocket” in its name does best?
WP Rocket has a couple of different ways it can speed up your website. It can cache pages to make them quicker to load. It can compress static elements and deliver images only when it’s time to display them, reducing the loading time of your website or a specific page. And because speed often translates to a reduction in bounce rates, WP Rocket will give your site more time to convert visitors.
There’s no way to address the conversion rates of a website or a landing page without checking out how well it’s optimized for search engines. Because search engines are how some people find your website, you always want to make sure that the site appears in results only when it’s relevant. And it’s relevant when it’s a query it can answer.
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that can help your conversion rate optimization efforts by helping you optimize your content for select keywords. Better yet, it gives search engines a hand when it comes to figuring out your website, ensuring that you get more than a fair shake when it comes to appearing in search engine results.
Images on your website or a landing page are like a double-edged sword. Sure, they will make your site more visually appealing and attractive. But if you don’t optimize those images well, they will slow your website’s loading speeds down to a crawl, making for a very unsatisfactory user experience.
If you have an image-heavy website, you’ll want to use a WordPress plugin to help with image optimization. Smush is a reliable choice because it lets you use lossless compression, lazy loading, automated optimization, as well as smushing in bulk and smushing whole directories.
Popups are some of the most versatile conversion-boosting tools you can use, especially the ones that activate based on the viewers’ intent. Those can, for example, act as a last-ditch effort to convert a visitor just as they’re about to leave your website.
Ninja Popups is arguably one of the best-known WordPress popup plugins. It lets you build your popup with a drag-and-drop builder, choose animation effects for it, select where you want it to appear and on which pages, set up a trigger — exit intent, time on site, or a part of a page that’s loaded, and the function of the popup. You’ll get full control over the popups on your website, using them to stun, convert, or simply hide content behind a wall.
People will not spend an equal amount of time looking at every part of your website or landing page. Knowing the areas that will naturally draw their interest is of vital importance because those are the places for your most persuasive copy, your best images, and your best calls to action.
To figure out which parts of a page are particularly interesting, you can use a tool like CrazyEgg. It allows you to take snapshots and recordings of user sessions, as well as heatmaps that show you the most exciting areas of your website. That’s not all CrazyEgg does, as it will also let you perform some testing to see which versions of your pages perform better and make quick changes to your pages on the go.
Features get tested for their conversion-boosting effectiveness with an A/B test. The logic behind these tests is simple — create versions of a page with the only difference being the thing you want to test out. You can test the CTA button copy, for example, or the button’s placement. Next, have each version of the page appear in front of equal numbers of visitors, and see which performed better.
A/B testing is a common feature of many plugins. But if you want to split test websites with all their features enabled, using a separate tool might be called for, and you just might use Split Hero for it. It allows you to set up and track conversions on up to four different versions of a page, and it’s compatible with the most popular page builders, including Beaver Builder and Elementor.
Forms are to lead capturing what websites are to modern business — a rock upon which the way we do things today is built. Creating a good form is part science, part art, and it’s essential to use a plugin that will help you create suitable forms that aren’t a drag to fill out.
WPForms is a WordPress drag & drop form building tool. You can use it to create anything from contact to registration forms, and you can set up the plugin to notify you of every new lead you catch using it. Best of all, you can use an addon to turn WPForms into a form landing page builder.
One of the ways you can boost your conversion rate is by increasing traffic to your website. A way to do that would be to increase your content’s presence on social networks. But did you ever think that, instead of placing the “like” and “share” buttons near your content, you could instead use social interaction as a form of a paywall guarding the content?
That’s the logic behind Social Locker. It lets you put the content behind a wall that’s only lifted when the visitor performs a predetermined social interaction. It’s a much easier method to get something from your content than putting up a real paywall, and people just might be more likely to pay for access with a social share than hard cash.
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Let’s Wrap It Up!
Conversion optimization is a necessary part of every website’s lifecycle. As someone who owns or administers a website, you would do well to adopt relatively frequent conversion optimization audits. Usually, however, it’s best to think of it as an ongoing process that ends when your website ends.
The good news is that a bonanza of conversion-boosting tools is just waiting for you to use it to increase your website’s conversion rates. Keep in mind, however, that there is such a thing as having too many plugins and that you’ll have to build your optimization suite well. And when you do, you’ll be able to sit back and watch the results start rolling in.
