These plugins make life easier. There are other critical plugins for SEO and performance that I’ve left off this list because they’re boring. That doesn’t mean you don’t need them. Just that I don’t care to write about them today š
- Thrive Visual Editor. Even a “design idiot” like me can make pretty landing pages with this thing. You just pick a template and edit. It even comes with nifty things like lead forms and complete webinar registration funnels. I always feel like a marketing idiot, except when I’m using Thrive.
- Gravity Forms. From simple contact forms to complete survey funnels, this is my weapon of choice when it comes to asking people to fill out a form. It’s easy to use for the simple stuff but still powerful enough for the advanced stuff. And if you can program a little or you know a programmer (like me, hint hint) then you can do some bat-shit crazy-cool stuff with it. For example, you can show just 1 question at a time and make it so that clicking one of the multiple-choiceĀ options in your survey makesĀ it go to the next question automagically which means a lower abandonment rate.
- Pretty Links Lite. I use this for all my affiliate links so that they’re short and, well, “pretty”. It’s super-easy to use but it’s also pretty damn powerful. For example you can turn on URL parameter forwarding and your single affiliate link can now be used with a bunch of subids for advanced tracking without the mess. Much cleaner than creating a billion different redirect links – one for each subid.
- Custom Page Labels. If you create funnels or do split-testing of any kind, you need this plugin. It lets you give each page or post a “Custom Label” which is different than the title. So if you’re split-testing 5 pages and they all have the same title, you can still tell them apart.
- Disqus Comments Plugin. This is just a great way to increase your chances of getting comments because folks don’t have to fill in their name and email with each comment. They can just reply and hit “Save”. Done.
Maybe, if you ask real nice, I’ll tell you all about the “critical but boring” plugins you should be using.