Day 4 – Optimization

What makes WordPress such a great platform, are the plugins offered to make a great website even better. Whether optimizing loading speed, image files, or conversion rates, there is a plugin for almost anything.

OptinMonster

This is the perfect plugin to gathering audience emails most effectively. Readers opt-in to providing their contact details through a lead capture form that can be setup to appear:

• In content
• As a pop-up after a certain amount of time on your website
• Or when it looks like readers are going to leave

The plugin also offers testing to see what forms under what conditions work best, making it highly effective.

The plugin can be integrated with Mail Chimp, AWeber, Constant Contact and other email marketing providers.

Yoast SEO

Want to rank higher in Google? You need SEO? Want to perform SEO well? Yoast SEO is one of your best options.

Keyword research will still be up to you, but placing those keywords into your content and making sure search engines notice… That’s where Yoast SEO comes in.

Yoast uses a checklist that can automatically optimize your post to be SEO friendly. It’s a no-brainer plugin to give your posts the best chances of ranking well in search result pages.

It offers other features too like:

• Reporting your website performance in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)
• Producing an XML Sitemap
• Providing Snippet Reviews
• And more

Social Warfare

Social Media can be a goldmine for website traffic. Installing a social sharing plugin is one of the best ways to get as much social media traffic as you can.

Invite your visitors to share your posts on their social media with attractive buttons.

Additionally, you can use Social Warfare to integrate with Google Analytics for nice traffic reporting without much hassle.

Some of social warfares great features are:

• Beautiful share buttons
• Easy setup
• Fast load times
• Control the platforms visitors can share too
• Control what content they share

WP Smush

Imagery is important for an attractive website, and attractive blog posts.

But images are big and can have a negative impact on your sites performs.

Increase your conversions not your load speed, by allowing WP Smush to effortlessly optimize your sites visual components.

Make your images their optimal size by installing the plugin and doing a “Bulk Smush”.

Make your site load as fast as you can in just one click.

W3 Total Cache

When it comes to page speed and loading times, an improvement of a single second can have a massive impact on your bounce rate and bottom line. According to Kissmetrics, a whopping 40% of your visitors will abandon ship if your sites takes just more than 3 seconds to load.

Whatever your goal is, I’m sure losing visitors when you can avoid it is not one of them.

You’ll also lose search rankings if your site isn’t loading fast enough.

W3 Total Cache is a plugin that optimizes your sites loading speed, by saving content that would otherwise need to be constantly loaded by your server.

WordPress will work more efficiently by creating a static version of content freeing up your server for other work and saving steps to get your website to your visitors.

W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular caching plugins around. It has over one million active installs and a rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars, which is well deserved.

It’s updated often to keep it compatible with every version of WordPress and is easy to setup once it’s installed.