Understanding WordPress Plugins
Let’s begin with the basics. What exactly is WordPress, and what is a “plugin”? WordPress stands out as the most potent platform for blogging globally, offering free access to establish a blog or website for your law firm.
Straight out of the box, WordPress excels in writing and publishing blog posts. However, it lacks several crucial features, particularly when utilized for a law firm website. These include social media sharing, contact forms, and SEO optimization. Fortunately, WordPress permits other developers to create these additional features as “plugins.”
In essence, a plugin serves as a small add-on to enhance your WordPress website or add specific functionality. There are countless plugins available, offering various features, some of which can even transform your WordPress site into a comprehensive e-commerce store.
Given the multitude of plugins, how can you determine which ones to utilize? To assist you in getting started, we have compiled a list of the top 8 WordPress plugins for law firm websites.
Top 8 Best WordPress Plugins for Your Law Firm Website
To elevate your WordPress website into a potent marketing tool for your firm, there are essential features you’ll want to incorporate. Your main objectives will include boosting traffic, enhancing interactions with visitors, improving search engine visibility, building credibility and trust with your audience, and ultimately, attracting more clients!
These eight plugins offer distinct benefits to kickstart your law firm’s WordPress website. Moreover, many of them rank among the top-rated WordPress plugins overall. If you utilize WordPress for blogging, consider exploring our blogging guide for law firms for additional insights on enhancing your blogging skills.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
Why: SEO plays a critical role in attracting more visitors to your site, and WordPress SEO stands out as the premier search engine optimization plugin. Explore this post for invaluable SEO tips tailored for law firms.
Functionality: WordPress SEO offers features such as content optimization for keywords, sitemap generation to facilitate search engine navigation, URL and link optimization, and much more. Nearly every successful WordPress site incorporates this plugin, and yours should too.
Cost: FREE – with the option for additional SEO audits and consulting services at an extra cost
Disqus Comments
Why: While not essential for a law firm’s main website, Disqus is a valuable addition to a law blog. A well-maintained blog fosters reader engagement and creates a sense of community. This is particularly beneficial for a law blog, as your readers are likely to seek legal advice and desire interaction.
Functionality: Disqus effectively reduces spam and mandates commenters to use a social media profile such as Facebook or Twitter. This ensures that comments are more likely to be authentic, with genuine queries from potential clients, and reduces the likelihood of spam comments promoting products like Viagra.
Cost: FREE
OptinMonster
Why: For WordPress blogs, focusing on building an email list is essential. A robust email list is paramount for effective online marketing. It’s crucial to collect emails from your blog visitors and send out regular newsletters featuring updates from your law firm.
Functionality: OptinMonster provides a popup email collection box. While these popups can sometimes be intrusive, they are highly effective, with potential to increase blog sign-ups by up to 600%. OptinMonster offers extensive customization options, allowing you to adjust settings to make your popups less obtrusive.
Cost: $49-$349, depending on the desired features
Shareaholic
Why: Sharing articles on social media is a valuable strategy for increasing visitors to your law firm website. It enables you to engage with your target audience across various social media platforms and enhances your SEO. It’s crucial to actively share and encourage sharing of all your content.
Functionality: Shareaholic enables you to add share links to all your posts and pages, facilitating easy sharing to nearly every social network. It offers extensive customization options and includes a “related content” feature to encourage readers to explore more than just the page they initially landed on.
Cost: FREE
Google Analytics
Why: Knowledge is key! To increase traffic and client inquiries from your blog, understanding your visitors’ origins and interactions with your content is essential. This information allows you to optimize your strategies effectively. Refer to this post for further insights on Google Analytics.
Functionality: Google Analytics stands out as one of the most potent analytics tools available. It enables you to track various information about each visitor to your website, including their traffic source (e.g., search engine, Facebook, external link, email newsletter), viewed pages, clicked links, and more. This data empowers you to enhance your website by creating more engaging content and optimizing page structures and links to increase clicks and client inquiries.
Cost: FREE
Booking Calendar
Why: In addition to a contact form, providing an effortless way for website visitors to book consultations can significantly increase client inquiries.
Functionality: Booking Calendar is a straightforward yet powerful tool with a plethora of features to facilitate booking consultations with prospective clients. It allows you to accept or decline each request and offers payment processing options in its premium plans.
Cost: FREE – $999 (the higher-priced plans cater to multi-user functionality and additional features that may be excessive for a small firm)
WP Customer Reviews
Why: Establishing credibility with website visitors is crucial, and customer reviews play a pivotal role in this. With an increasing number of people turning to online reviews before hiring legal services, having customer reviews on your website can significantly impact decision-making.
Functionality: WP Customer Reviews simplifies the process of collecting and displaying client reviews on your law firm website. It also offers moderation features, allowing you to filter incoming reviews to ensure they meet your standards.
Cost: FREE
Akismet Anti-Spam
Why: Maintaining a professional and spam-free website is essential for establishing credibility with your audience. Akismet Anti-Spam is particularly valuable in this regard, protecting your site from spam comments and form submissions.
Functionality: Akismet Anti-Spam provides robust protection against spam, ensuring that your website remains clean and professional. It automatically filters out spam comments and form submissions, allowing you to focus on engaging with genuine interactions.
Cost: FREE
These are the top eight WordPress plugins for law firm websites. However, there are certainly other exceptional plugins available. WOB Digital will build your law firm or legal professional website so you can make use of these plugins that ensure enhanced functionality, improved user engagement, and a professional online presence.
