WordPress offers thousands of plugins to help your business flourish online, many of which are free. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of plugins available makes it difficult to pick and choose which are right for your business and which are better left for other projects.

This all leads to many plugins, that could be very useful to your business, getting lost in the shuffle.  Here are a few of our favorites that you may have missed but provide a lot of value for businesses running on WordPress.

RSVP Maker – Smart Event Management

Hosting a business event? RSVP Maker allows your invitees to RSVP directly on your website. This plugin lets you to keep an active guest list, collect contact information and even request online ticket payments. Paired with partner plugin Chimpblast, you can send out email invitations direct from your site. You can plan your event, send out invitations and collect RSVPs all from your own digital platform, without a 3rd party service like Evite or Paperless Post.

Paired with partner plugin Chimpblast, you can send out email invitations direct from your site.

Digg Digg – Fast Loading Social Share Buttons

A slow loading website will annoy your users and kill your conversion rate. Typically, web developers look to images as the culprit for a slow loading website, but did you know that having social sharing buttons can significantly slow down your wordpress site’s loading time as well?

Social share buttons are essential to getting your message shared online, but there has to be a way to get users sharing your blog posts without slowing down your site. Digg Digg solves the slow loading problem with what they call a lazy loading button. That means that the social share buttons (and it supports dozens of them) only load once a user moves their mouse over them. Seems like a small change, but even a minor decrease in load times could mean a significant boost in conversions.

BJ Lazy Load  – Load Images As You Need Them

If it is image load times that are killing your conversion rate, BJ Lazy Load will allow your image heavy website to flourish. BJ Lazy Load replaces images with a quick to load placeholder until the image is just about to come into view of the user. It then loads the image quickly and in high-def quality, bringing it into view of the user as if it had been there the whole time, without producing a massive slowdown when the user first hits the page.

The plugin works with a variety of image and gallery plugins, and is responsive to meet scaled down designs.

BJ Lazy Load replaces images with a quick to load placeholder until the image is just about to come into view of the user.

YOURLS – Branded Short URLs

While not technically a WordPress plug, this script will shorten your links without losing your branding. While most url shorteners shorten post urls into an indistinguishable mash of letters, YOURLS let’s you decide on your own shortened URLS, making it easy for you users and fans to share content in a limited number of characters while maintaining the branding of your website.

Instead of TinyURL, your shortened URL will show an acronym for your business name, a keyword you love, or any other bit of shortened content your heart desired. Luckily, there are a couple of plugins that help connect your WordPress site with YOURLS.

WP LiveChat Support – Instant Custom Support

Never lose another potential customer due to an unanswered question or bit of confusion on your site.

 

WP LiveChat Support allows you to chat directly with visitors to your site in a non-intrusive way as they browse your website. They can ask you questions and your can direct them towards the content that you want them to see the most. Never lose another potential customer due to an unanswered question or bit of confusion on your site. Keep users happy and use their instant feedback to grow. The best part of WP LiveChat Support is that it is offers comparable experience and usability to paid services – but won’t cost you a penny!

Have other super useful WordPress plugins that are often overlooked? Let us know in the comments below.