WordPress Plugins for Better User Experience, Engagement, and Conversion

Creating a website that will generate leads and conversions can be a tough task. But it’s necessary for gaining customers. After you have set up some of your essential plugins and the framework for your site, you should consider additional plugins to benefit your business.

When considering what plugins or widgets to use, have a goal in mind: What do you want your users to do on your website? You should have a number of different leads or conversions you’re hoping for, and you should prioritize them. Whatever that conversion or lead is—emails, phone numbers, subscribers, social followers, product purchases, scheduled appointments, etc.—remember that you need to be giving your customer value in return. They should be carefully planned, tested, and analyzed using tools like Google Analytics and other analytics software your site may have.

Take a look at the list below of recommended WordPress plugins for improved lead and conversion generation.

Social Buttons

Branding on social media is becoming increasingly more important, especially with younger crowds. Keep users engaged and allow them to spread your content or products seamlessly. This earned media and exposure is extremely valuable because your users are almost always going to considered more trustworthy than your brand on social platforms.

Many themes and widgets will include social buttons, but you might want to consider a dedicated plugin for better presentation and functionality.

AddToAny

This plugin gives you all the social buttons and platforms you would ever need. You can plugin in your Google Analytics to track statistics on these buttons and ‘floating’ share buttons that stay in place as you scroll. It has tons of other customization features and is completely free.

Shared Counts is another free option that will give you much of the features AddToAny gives. It’s differentiating point is that is doesn’t rely on storing cookies or other website user data.

Website Abandonment

Often, users will visit a website and bounce without engaging with your website much. You should consider ways to grab information before and while that’s happening because it definitely won’t happen after.

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is a super useful tool that will help you capture user info. It’s tools include popup forms, scroll-triggered boxes, sidebar forms, footer bars, and exiting messaging to capture the fleeting visitor. The forms are fairly easy to make and will be essential for capturing email lists, subscribers, or other user information. It can’t be overstated how important that information is. It’s basic features are free and premium plans start at $108 a year.

Privy is another tool similar to OptinMonster that has tons of integration options. It will help you use targeting and triggers to give users unique forms, reduce cart abandonment with popups including discounts to entice buyers, and send users abandoned cart emails, coupon notifications, and other tactics to get users back on your site.

Forms

Like said above, getting user information is crucial to successful marketing. OptinMonster will provide you with forms for doing so, but if you have more specific needs, you might consider the following.

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is a highly used form plugin that has tons of integration options such as with MailChimp—a widely used and powerful email marketing tool. It’ll cost you $59 a year and give you both simple and complex form options.

WP Forms and WP Forms Lite are other beginner-friendly plugins that might meet your needs.

Live Chat Support

Having a live chat support function can help you keep customers by allowing you, an employee, a bot, or 3rd-party company to answer user questions and inquiries.

LiveChat

LiveChat and similar service will help you stay connected with users at all times. You can connect the plugin to paid support management companies or AI bots through their paid premium. For free, it will allow you to personally connect to customers and they have an app so you can do so on mobile and on-the-go.

Event and Appointment Management

Depending on your business model, the following plugins could be very useful. Use them for event planning or securing an appointment.

Easy Appointments

This plugin will allow you to create a schedule with time slots which users can book. Bookings can include multiple locations, services, or workers. This can be really useful for salons, trainers, tutors, doctors, advisers, and many other occupations. At $39/year, you can use premium features like integrating with Google Calendar or iCalendar.

Bookly is another very popular, highly rated plugin sold on CodeCanyon. It’ll cost you an Envato subscription or a one-time fee of $89. It also integrates easily into Google Calendar and payment systems.

Event Espresso

Using a plugin such as Event Espresso will allow you to secure customers like the above appointment plugins, except they’ll help you secure groups of customers. Event Espresso will allow you to create various events, different types of tickets for them, collect payments easily, and provide discounts along with many other valuable features. Event Espresso 4 Decaf will give you many of those features for free, and premium plans start at $79.95/year.

Link Management

When considering link management, plan to track link statistics, monitor broken links, redirect old URLs, and create short links for better sharing.

Pretty Links

Make it easier to follow link statistics with Pretty Links. Their toolset will also allow you to create short links for better affiliate links. Short links can be easier for an audience to remember and you can designate them to different landing pages depending on where your affiliate link is placed—whether on the web, an email, a podcast, a YouTube ad, or any other media vehicle. Many of their useful features can be found on their free version, Shortlinks.

Redirection can be especially useful if you’ve made changes to your site that has resulted in 404 errors for the user. It will help you track down and troubleshoot those errors to help you fix them and redirect the user to the page they were hoping for (or another one you plan to send them to). It’s also 100% free.

Maintenance Pages

Maintenance pages can be useful for a few reasons. They can be used to generate traffic and leads for future products or services, build your email list, inform and excite users about a future product or service, and share your website before its finished.

SeedProd

SeedProd makes it easy to make a maintenance or “Coming Soon” page and can block users from advancing to other pages. It’s also affordable at just $29.60/year.