Pet stores boast unique offerings, but there are some things they have in common with all other small businesses. A well-rounded online presence can be crucial for a pet store’s success.
That’s why knowing the best WordPress plugins for small businesses is key to standing out above the crowd. Choosing the right set of plugins could mean the difference between eating steak or just the bone.
With that in mind, you’ll want to know these three crucial WordPress plugins that can help you elevate your pet store’s online presence and help your visitors find the best goods for their furry friends.
1. Search engine optimization: Yoast SEO
Being found on search engines is as important as having a website in the first place. If you make sure your website and its content are search engine optimized, you stand a much greater chance of standing out from your competition. With a WordPress.com plugin-enabled plan, the Yoast SEO plugin can help you do just that.
Yoast is the original SEO plugin since 2008. Using it, you get a solid tool set that helps you aim for that number-one spot in search engine results.
2. Online store: WooCommerce
If you’re building a website for your pet store, it only makes sense to include an online store. The American Pet Products Association notes that Americans spent an estimated $72.13 billion on their pets in 2018, and there’s a good chance pet owners did a lot of that spending online; Disruptive Advertising estimates eCommerce in the US is growing by 15 percent each year.
If you don’t know how to set up an online store, WooCommerce can get you started if you have an plugin-enabled plan. This plugin offers endless flexibility through hundreds of free and premium extensions.
3. Site optimization: Jetpack
According to Neil Patel, 40 percent of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load — so you should do as much as you can to improve your page load speed.
Available right out of the box with any WordPress.com website, Jetpack has a built-in image CDN feature, which offloads your images to Jetpack’s servers to make them load faster, as well as image lazy-loading, which only loads pictures when users scroll to them. This can have a dramatic effect on your page load speeds and allow you to decorate your site with adorable animal images without slowing it down.
The great thing about using Jetpack is it provides many other critical tools for small business owners, like contact forms, site stats, and security features — all already baked into your WordPress.com website.
There are many other WordPress plugins for small business that you can take advantage of, but if you start with these three on your pet store website, you can’t go wrong.
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