There are well over 50,000 WordPress plugins available at the time of writing. Many of them will not help financial advisers in their marketing at all. Some, however, are absolute gems that no WordPress website should really be doing without.
Plugins allow you to greatly improve the online visibility and functionality of your financial website and marketing. The tools they provide include useful analytics integrations, as well as SEO benefits (search engine optimisation) so your website appears more prominently in front of your target audience.
Below, our financial marketing team here at MarketingAdviser has listed 10 of their favourite plugins for improving the websites of our financial adviser clients:
#1 Header & Footer Scripts
If you’ve been running a financial adviser website for any period of time, then you’ll likely know by now that you need to put all sorts of code on the website periodically. Examples include the Google Tag Manager code, Facebook’s pixel and the Google Ads remarketing tracking code.
Inserting this code into a website manually is difficult, even for seasoned financial marketers and website designers. Luckily, there are some great plugins which allow you to insert codes such as the above without any coding knowledge. Header and Footer scripts is one of our favourites here at MarketingAdviser, and we recommend it to you!
#2 All-In-One SEO Pack
This plugin is fantastic for financial advisers who are looking to get some foundational, on-site SEO done on their website. Simply install it, and navigate to the plugin on the left-hand navigation on your WordPress dashboard. Within the plugin interface, you’ll find really useful SEO tools such as:
- Meta tag generation
- Custom canonical URLs
- Support for Custom Post Types
- Google AMP
- Image XML sitemap
#3 DuracellTomi’s Google Tag Manager for WordPress
Putting Google Analytics, on its own, onto a financial adviser’s website is relatively straightforward. You simply need to find your tracking code, and then insert it into the header of your pages using the Header and Footer Scripts plugin above. However, installing Google tag Manager is a bit more complicated because part of the code is supposed to go into the <body> tag of your website pages.
There isn’t an easy way to this with Header and Footer Scripts, but the DuracellTomi’s Google Tag Manager for WordPress lets you do it really easily. Simply install the plugin, and then place your GTM container code from your GTM account into the relevant field. Then save the settings.
#4 Jet Pack
#5 Google XML Sitemaps
Jet Pack is a really useful plugin for bringing your website security and financial marketing activities more under one roof. Some of the benefits we use it for include:
- Daily backups of your website, so you do not lose everything if it goes down.
- Downtime monitoring.
- Spam filtering and brute force protection.
- Records of activity on your website (e.g. if someone updates an important setting in the back-end).
- Two-factor authentication to allow more secure login to the website.
#6 W3 Total Cache
Few things are more frustrating in digital marketing than a website which refuses to load quickly, right? Financial advisers can help avoid this problem through a plugin like W3 Total Cache, which can dramatically reduce load times on your website through content delivery network (CDN) integration.
The plugin also uses functionality such as minify and HTML compression to save bandwidth, giving your website an even smoother performance. The end result is a more enjoyable user experience for your website visitors, more dwell time, and ultimately more enquiries.
#7 Contact Form 7
Most financial advisers do not simply want their target audience to arrive at their website, and just look at it (although those are important). Most want their website visitors to take action by downloading a report, subscribing to their newsletter, or even filling out a contact form to make an enquiry.
Contact Form 7 is one of our favourite plugins for achieving the latter functionality. This one is a bit more complicated to set up sometimes, due to its integration with your email service provider. However, once you’ve joined everything up and tested it, you can be confident that any leads from your website will come straight through into your inbox.
#8 Duplicate Page
Sometimes you simply need to copy a page on your website onto another one. Whilst you should always avoid littering identical pages across your website, it can be useful to take the overall structure of a page and copy it across – with the intention of changing the content and imagery.
This plugin lets you do that easily within the WordPress content management system. This can dramatically decrease the time it takes for you to create new landing pages, in order to target specific keywords which your target audience are using to find you.
#9 Captcha by BestWebSoft
One of the biggest threats to a financial adviser’s website is the spam attack. In particular, IFAs should be wary of spam entries on your online forms. This captcha login is a great way to stop malicious users and software from spamming your contact forms, WordPress login form, and registration forms.
#10 Akismet Anti-Spam
Whilst the above security plugins are useful in specific areas of website protection, the Akismet plugin is still regarded as one of the industry-standard plugins needed to protect your blog comments from getting spammed. It regularly screens blog posts, comments and content on your website for spam content, referencing its global database of known threats and annoyances. It then automatically removes them, so that neither you nor your legitimate website users need to look at them anymore.
