Growth Hacking WordPress — 14+1 Plugins You Need Right Now
WordPress is used by 28.1 % of websites (source). Growth hacking is the rage right now. How come we talk so little about Growth Hacking WordPress?
While WordPress websites are really easy to start, it’s way harder to have success with them. By success I mean whatever goal you want to reach: it can be traffic, revenue or email subscribers. That’s why you need the right tools!
Because Growth Hacking and WordPress work perfectly together: WordPress is a very flexible platform which gives us a lot of freedom for experimenting and, effectively, growth hacking WordPress.
Even better, since it’s largely used, many plugins (+50’000) are available out there to help us hack growth without having to know how to code.
A Taste of What You’ll Get:
- 14+1 Plugins to supercharge your WordPress for Growth
- Free Plugins that will increase the shareability of your content
- How to build virality into your website
- Tools to become a ninja A/B tester & mad data-based marketer
What’s Growth Hacking Again?
To come back to the definition, a growth hacker is a marketer whose true north is growth.
He achieves growth through continuous experimentation, by looking at the data they produce and iterates.
Growth Hackers look at the whole marketing funnel (AARRR) from acquisition to revenue and optimize every step to its maximum. They sometimes even manage to include viral loops throughout the funnel that entices users to refer other users.
By definition, growth hacking focuses mainly on products, but more and more pirate have been applying its principles well outside only products. For instance, on this blog, I talk about blogging with a growth hacker mindset.
Growth Hacking Applied to Websites
But who said we couldn’t consider websites as products?
So if we look at growth hacking applied to a website, the same AARRR funnel applies! I’m talking acquisition, activation, retention, revenue & referral.
When talking about websites, the AARRR funnel will look something like that:
- Acquisition with SEO, social media
- Activation with email list building, A/B testing
- Retention with your email list & social media
- Referral with social media shares
- Revenue with sales
Plugins for Growth Hacking WordPress
As true cost-cutting growth hackers, we’ll focus on free to low-cost plugins!
To help you choose the best plugins for you, I’ll include those two icons next to each plugin’s name:
- 💾 for the number of downloads
- ⭐ for star ratings (on a scale of 5)
- As well as if the plugin is free or paid
Social Media
Social media is key to any website’s success in 2017. Make sure you make it easy for your readers to share & add some automation to make your life easier!
A personal favorite, revive old post allows you to automatically re-share past blog posts published on WordPress on your Facebook Page and Twitter Account.
You can set frequency, exclude specific posts and categories, create hashtags from categories and so much more!
- Monarch (4.5⭐ from review websites / 400.000+ 💾) — Paid
Monarch is the plugin I use to create my share buttons and display the number of times a blog post or page has been shared. It’s very customizable, separates desktop from mobile and very easy to implement. It also lets you manage if you want to exclude page or posts and gives you great insight about the number of shares from your articles.
Works like a charm!
Monarch is a plugin from Elegant Themes and comes with the same annual membership that gives you access to 87 themes including Divi (the one used on this website) and some more plugin like Bloom for email list building.
I also wanted to give you a free alternative and couldn’t leave out Sumo from the list of WordPress Growth Hacking plugins; I’m not that cruel!
I’ve used Sumo in the past to manage my share buttons and email opt-ins before I switched to Monarch & Bloom. Easy to setup and works well but I wasn’t ready to pay for it which meant I had to keep their logo and was limited in my options.
Still a great option when you’re starting out and it’s an all-in-one!
- NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster (4⭐ / 200.000+ 💾) — Free version
As a big fan of automation when it comes to blog posts promotion, I’ve discovered this cool little plugin that allows me to automate posting my blog posts to less mainstream social media like StumbleUpon or Google+.
Set it and forget it!
Additionnal reading:
How to Optimize your Content for Social Media Sharing
Emails List Building
We can’t only rely on SEO traffic and social media, that’d be crazy. A good way to keep a way to directly contact your audience is by building and growing your email list. For that, you’ll need tools to create opt-in forms and other popups.
- Bloom (4.5⭐ from review websites / 400.000+ 💾) — Paid
Bloom is the plugin I use for everything email list building. It’s what powers my website’s pop-ups, forms, pop-ups on click.
It’s crazy easy to set up, design and position your email opt-in incentives on your website. You can also go pretty far regarding settings and customizations, me likey!
Oh, and it seamlessly integrates with 16 email marketing services like MailChimp, AWeber, InfusionSoft.
- Sumo — Free Tools to Automate Your Site Growth (4.5⭐ / 100.000+ 💾) — Paid
The sumo plugin also helps you gather emails BUT doesn’t connect with MailChimp or else in its free plan and has the Sumo branding all over.
Additionnal reading:
10 Proven Ways to Collect Email Addresses to Grow an Email List (even with no traffic)
Analytics
Growth Hacking relies heavily upon data, same goes for Growth Hacking WordPress. Make sure you collect the data you need and it the right way with those plugins.
- Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights (4⭐ / 1M+ 💾) — Free
It’s the easiest way to add the Google Analytics tracking code to your WordPress website, point.
More than that, it allows you to access basic Google Analytics reports from your WordPress admin!
- Pretty Link Lite (4.5⭐ / 200.000+ 💾) — Free version
A favorite of affiliate marketers, Pretty Link makes it easy to create short links with your domain.
For instance, if I want to give my readers a free month of Evernote Premium, I’d rather link them to https://ambroisedebret.com/Evernote than put my long and ugly Evernote referral link.
The best thing about it is that it allows you to track clicks on each link created with it, a bit like bit.ly!
Plus it sits right in your WordPress dashboard.
When it comes to looking at your website’s analytics, they tell you where users come from, go to and how long they stay but they don’t give you a sense of where your users click. That’s why pirates need heatmaps!
This free plugin is easy to install and generate heat maps for the pages you want to track.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is one of our not-so-secret tool to leverage data from real users to take real decisions. That’s one of the main components of a solid WordPress growth hacking strategy!
Ok, so this one is not really a plugin but a theme. It’s the theme I use on this website that allows me to A/B test every section of the pages I build with the excellent Divi Builder.
Just click what you want to test, create your variables and start the test!
- Bloom (4.5⭐ from review websites / 400.000+ 💾) — Paid
Like mentioned before in this article, Bloom is the tool I use to gather emails.
It also includes cool A/B/X testing abilities for all your opt-in forms, pop-ups, etc.twitter! It’s as easy as with Divi 😉
- Title Experiments Free (4.5⭐ / 1.000+ 💾) — Free
A simple plugin that does exactly what it says.
Additionnal reading:
SEO
While WordPress is SEO-friendly out of the box, it doesn’t need you don’t have to work for it! Here are plugins that do it all for you, from your site’s structure to keeping light and even optimize it for mobile users.
- Yoast SEO (5⭐ / 3M+ 💾) — Free
Your go-to SEO plugin for WordPress, everybody uses it because it’s the best!
If we look at the features: it gives you feedback on every page/post, generates XML sitemaps, genTwitter developpercards, takes care of snippets and much more!
- W3 Total Cache (4.5⭐ / 1M+ 💾) — Free
Site speed is also a very important factor for SEO and caching your site increases it significantldeveloper but it saves parts of your website so that your browser doesn’t have to download them for every page.
- AMP (3.5⭐ / 200.000+ 💾) — Free
Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) have made an entrance in the mobile web world about a year ago. It’s all about speed again. It’s a way to build lightweight pages that are very mobile-friendly and load instantly.
You’ll see the little gray lightning in the Google results.
This plugin is created by Automattic (the company behind WordPress) and does the first part of the job (you’ll need the plugin below).
- AMP for WordPress — Accelerated Mobile Pages (4.5⭐ / 40.000+ 💾) — Free
This second plugin allows you to make AMP work on your website as well as customize it easily with no coding!
Virality
This list of best WordPress Growth Hacking plugins wouldn’t be complete without a true referral plugin, and I found one!
- Viral Sign Ups (5⭐ / 800+ 💾) — Free plan
This plugin allows you to create a very simple referral program.
“When someone signs up on your website, they will be prompted to get say 5 friends to sign up as well in exchange for something cool, like immediate access to your service or a free product.”
Additionnal reading:
Ready to Hack WordPress Growth?
With the right CMS (WordPress) and the right plugin, you have everything you need to succeed and achieve your growth hacking goals. Ready to be Growth Hacking WordPress?
Best of all, you’ll have noticed that when you will have installed the plugins above, most of the setup will be done, and you will benefit from social media shares, automated promotion, and free traffic!
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- Leave a comment below and let me know what plugins you use for you WordPress Growth Hacking.
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Originally published at ambroisedebret.com on June 1, 2017.
