Supercharge Your Website: WPBeginner’s Best WordPress Plugins, Tools and Tips

Feb 28, 2015 2 min readBufferchat
Photo of Nicole Miller
Nicole Miller

Director of People @ Buffer

Syed Balkhi, founder of WPBeginner, dropped by #bufferchat recently to share tons of recommendations for supercharging your website!

Read on for the highlights, or check out the full recap of this chat!

#bufferchat (5)

What advice do you have for someone just starting out with their website?

From Syed:

More great advice:

  • “Keep your audience in mind for all copy—what do they want? How will you provide value? Benefits over features. ^Hayley” @unbounce
  • “Make sure it looks appealing and professional and be consistent with your content” @TeriMKojetin
  • “Don’t expect immediate results. Keep posting great , stay diligent, share it wisely & results will follow.” @CraigWilliamsPR

How do you balance flattering design and usability?

pablo (4)

From Syed:

  • Design with usability first approach. Usability trumps beauty.

More great advice:

  • “Usability definitely outweighs design. Think about what your users want. Sometimes, the best designs are simple.” @samdunsiger
  • “Design around your target market, what I think is usable and stylish might not keep my clients’ attention” @sitoub
  • “Intuition. Does not matter how cool a site’s design is or how good it looks if not easy to figure out.” @CraigWilliamsPR
  • “Simplicity is beauty… K.I.S.(S) Keep It Simple (Sweetie) (that’s the kind version of K.I.S.S)” @Plumlytics

Best tools for creating web content and blog posts:

(Editor’s Note: We recently launched a quick and easy tool for creating images and we’d love for you to check it out. Meet Pablo!)

Most essential WordPress plugins:

From Syed:

Other great tools:

Best tools for lead generation and email collection:

From Syed:

  • I haven’t found anything better than OptInMonster for WordPress lead generation/list building. (Full disclaimer, I’m the co-founder of @optinmonster so I’m a bit biased)
  • Lead generation is not the only thing. You have to nurture the lead and engage consistently.
  • Pro tip: if you want to boost your email engagement, then start segmenting your list based on user interest.
  • I use @mailchimp and then customer.io for a lot marketing automation

More great tools:

Thank you so much for everyone who joined in on this great chat!Catch #bufferchat each Wednesday at 9 am Pacific/noon Eastern and join our Google+ community for the latest news.

Do you have any comments or answers to these questions? Leave your thoughts in the comments! We’d love to hear from you!

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