Best Free 2019 Marketing WordPress Plugins That Every Website Should Install

Every new year it seems like every agency compiles the same list of the same free tools and WordPress plugins that everyone has been using for the last 5 years. Their goal is nothing more to reach the high ranks of SEO terms while not putting any work or effort into these posts.

To counter that, we challenged the team to use tools they have never used themselves. These are tools that may, to some, be familiar but most are completely unique and all untested by our team until this post.

How we came up with the list of the best free 2019 marketing WordPress Plugins

Testing over 55 plugins in 2018, we’ve narrowed our favorites down to a list of 5 that we believe will be the most effective for your WordPress website moving into 2019.

We measured each tool by…

Ease of use
Abilities of their free model
Settings and headaches
What problem they solve

Instead of listing each app by name, we’ve made the decision to break down each tool into what problem they solve.

Catch People About to Leave Your Site (Poptin)

The problem isn’t getting visitors to your site – It is about getting them to stick around. If content or the information they are shown on a particular page isn’t up to par, you are in danger of losing them as a visitor.

Your last chance, ditch effort is to grab their attention one last time. That is why we recommend an exit intent pop-up.

These pop-ups are able to detect when users are moving their cursor and moving towards that dreaded “x” on your tab and serve your users one last promotional offer.

This could be a discount, a special offer if they provide their email, or just a notification leading them to a more conversion friendly page. There are a thousand ways you can do it!

But out of the hundreds of different options online we discovered that Poptin was our favorite tool. Their editor was simple and we had no problem placing our pop-up on any page we liked. With premade templates and layouts, there is no reason you could have this setup by the end of your work day!

Download Plugin Here

Automate Your Lead Generation (Hubspot)

Hubspot has become somewhat of a household name in marketing over the last 10 years. With volumes of marketing courses online, they are really the best place to get all your free education and knowledge.

Beyond this knowledge, Hubspot over the past few years has been working on developing a free version of their marketing platform to all users. This has lead to their free lead generation software.

With the Hubspot WordPress tool you are easily able to do many things Poptin does but a little more strategically.

Hubspot can add a slide up from the bottom or top of the page or a new pop-up entirely gathering your visitors email. Hubspot also automatically connects with the forms on your website and gathers all your leads into one convenient dashboard.

After you have gathered your lead, you can easily watch how your user interacts with your website – What pages they visit, forms they fill out, external links they may click. Each moment teaching you a little more about the client before you reach out.

Download Plugin Here

Learn Why Your Customers Are Getting Confused or Lost On Your Site (Hotjar)

You may have a A+ website design but that doesn’t mean that all users in all industries act the same. Even the smallest little of an aspect of your website can confuse your user can make you lose them. That is why it is SO important to install Hotjar on your website.

Hotjar does a few different things when it comes to your website. It can…

Setup heatmaps on your most important page and show you directly where your visitors are clicking, how far down the page they are scrolling, and what areas of the page they are scrolling over
Record cursor recordings anonymously of all your users showing you second-by-second what users do on your site and where they might fall off
Form fall-off tracking. This shows you exactly where people STOPPED filling out your form (Example: They may have filled out their first name, last name, but left out their email address)

As you review these areas make sure to take notes and send them to your web developer. You may not know the answers but an open conversation with your developer can unearth some opportunities you may not have seen in the past!

Download Plugin Here

Keep Your Website SEO Friendly in 2019! (Schema & Smush Image Compression and Optimization)

Two of the biggest areas Google is focusing on for websites to reach the top of Google is site speed and structure.

Site speed, with the mobile age upon us, demands that websites load as fast as possible for the best ease of use for our visitors. Google reports that a website that loads in about 15 seconds have the potential to lose as much as 30% of traffic visiting that site.

Being that slow speed brings a higher bounce rate, Google has began pushing slow-loading sites near the bottom of search engine results. While this might be the case for all terms, we will see more of this as 2019.

The solution is the Schema app on WordPress. Schema is the digital pattern of thought and behavior that organizes our website categories of information and relationship amongst them throughout our website.

But that is a bunch of technical jargon you don’t need to know – Basically, it is a set of information about your business that is directly transmitted to Google. This could be your address, business hours, average price, etc.

The second tool that will help increase your site speed is Smush Image Compression and Optimization). What this tool does, without sacrificing quality of your images, compresses the size of each image to keep extra large images from bringing down your site speed.

In the age of 4k photography and video, this is becoming more and more important. While the size and the quality of the image is important, being able to load our site in seconds is even more important.

Possibly the smallest amount of work out of all the tools, this image “smusher” will find your largest images and compress them to a more manageable size and cutting seconds off your site load speed!

Download Plugin Here

Live Sale Social Proof (Live Sales Notification)

Ever visited a website and see a little notification like “Kevin just bought 2 items 12 minutes ago!” This is an example of a live sales notification.

While it may not seem like it makes a huge impact, these notifications give some high social proof to others online that your service or your product is going viral. While these are typically used for eCommerce stores, there is no reason to share that someone recently downloaded your eBook, submitted an RFP, purchased a service, or more!

Download Plugin Here