A Digital Marketer’s job role will usually involve responsibility for ensuring your company website is easy to use for visitors and increasing the number of enquiries through the website. We have created a Digital Marketer’s guide to free, useful plugins for every WordPress website. This includes checking for broken links across your website, backing up your website, GDPR cookie compliance, SEO and more.
UPSKILL WITH OUR DIGITAL MARKETER APPRENTICESHIP
Broken Link Checker by ManageWP
Broken Link Checker is an extremely useful tool by ManageWP – especially if you have a lot of pages on your website. The tool will check your website frequently for any errors in your links and notify you by email, so you won’t need to worry about your users having navigation issues.
Key Features:
- Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
- Detects links that don’t work, missing images and redirects.
- Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email.
- Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
- Prevents search engines from following broken links (optional).
GDPR Cookie Compliance
As we all know, GDPR is big in the EU. A website doesn’t get away with this and you need to make sure your website is compliant. One issue that may arise for you when making a website is cookies. Users need to be able to give consent to be tracked with cookies and this plugin will handle that for you.
Key Features:
- Give your users full control over cookies stored on their computer, including the ability for users to revoke their consent
- Simple, beautiful & intuitive user interface
- Choose from two unique layouts
- Fully customisable – upload your own logo, colours, fonts
- Fully editable – you can change all text
- Set the position of the Cookie Banner: at the top or bottom of your pages
Yoast SEO
Yoast is an extremely popular and easy to use WordPress plugin that focuses on optimising your pages and posts for SEO.
- The most advanced XML Sitemaps functionality at the push of a button.
- Full control over site breadcrumbs: add a piece of code and you’re good to go.
- Set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content. Never have to worry about Google penalties again.
- Title and meta description templating for better branding and consistent snippets in the search results.
Elementor
Elementor is a page builder that allows you to drag and drop features on to a page. It’s compatible with many popular WordPress themes and includes useful features such as its own drag and drop live form builder and includes 300+ pre-designed blocks.
Key Features:
- Edit your website pages live on the front-end and see instantly how your page will look
- Great for those who want to focus on a unique design: Box Shadows, Background Overlays, Hover Effects, Headline Effects, Animations, Shape Dividers, Gradient Backgrounds and much more
- Customise pages to how you want them to look on different devices: mobile, tablet and desktop
- Undo, redo and revision history
- Built-in maintenance mode & under construction
- Global widgets – the ability to edit sections across the website if saved as a global widget
WP Job Manager
If you have jobs you need to recruit for either externally or internally, WP Job Manager is a simple tool that has job-board like functionality. It also works well with showing up on Google Jobs!
Key Features:
- Add, manage, and categorise job listings using the familiar WordPress UI.
- Searchable & filterable Ajax powered job listings added to your pages via shortcodes.
- Frontend forms for guests and registered users to submit & manage job listings.
- Allow job listers to preview their listing before it goes live. The preview matches the appearance of a live job listing.
- Each listing can be tied to an email or website address so that job seekers can apply to the jobs.
- Allow logged in employers to view, edit, mark filled, or delete their active job listings.
UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore
This plugin will allow you to backup your website so that if anything happens, you will have the ability to restore it to a previous state.
Key Features:
- Restores, as well as backing up
- Backs up to more cloud options than any others
- Allows you to set up automatic backup schedules, for the ultimate in convenience
- Is faster, using up fewer server resources
Smush
Smush allows you to resize, compress and optimise your imagery to improve the speed of your website.
Key Features:
- Lossless Compression – Strip unused data without affecting image quality
- Lazy Loader – Defer offscreen images with the flip of a switch
- Bulk Smush – Optimize up to 50 images with one click
- Image Resizing – Set a max width and height and large images will scale down as they are being compressed
- Incorrect Size Image Detection – Quickly locate images that are slowing down your site
- Directory Smush – Optimize images even if they are not located in the media library
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP)
With this plugin, you will be able to see your Google Analytics data right from your WordPress Dashboard.
Key Features:
- Real-time number of visitors
- Real-time acquisition channels
- Real-time traffic sources details
- Sessions, organic searches, page views, bounce rate analytics stats
- Locations, pages, referrers, keywords, 404 error analytics stats
- Traffic channels, social networks, traffic mediums, search engine analytics stats
- Device categories, browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, mobile brands, analytics stats
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP by ExactMetrics (formerly GADWP)
Schema App Structured Data
Schema App automatically creates Schema markup for all of your page, post, author and category content. This will help search engines understand your content better and give you an advantage.
Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple customisable forms on your website. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Key Features
- Customisable forms
- Can be inputted anywhere on your website using a shortcode
- Works with Contact Form DB to track submissions on your website
- Can use CAPTCHA to avoid spam
Advanced Contact Form 7 DB
You will be able to save all submissions to your contact forms to a database and view them all in one place through your WordPress dashboard.
Digital Marketer Level 3 Apprenticeship
Want to know more about building your website in-house? Our Digital Marketer Level 3 Apprenticeship includes the unit site development associate, which covers essential webpage development skills using HTML5 and CSS.
