A collection of great WordPress plugins for freelancers that will help you make the entire freelancing process simple and easy.
The Internet is a growing market especially for freelancers, developers, designers who want to reach out to their target audience faster and better.
With the emerging platforms and opportunities for freelancers around the world, the way they present their services and offerings has also improved.
To create and maintain an impactful online presence, more and more people nowadays prefer to have their own personal website which showcases their services and the projects that they have done in the past.
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Having a website is no longer a requirement only for huge businesses. Most freelancers take help of easy to use platforms like WordPress, Shopify, Magento, etc. to sell their products and services online.
According to an American Survey, around 40% of the working population will shift to freelancing work by 2020 hence increasing the demand for CMS Platforms such as WordPress.
But with great opportunities, come great responsibilities;
A Freelancer’s work responsibilities include a long list of work as they have to manage each and everything with respect to the client requirements. Making a website shouldn’t be a task for which a freelancer should be worried about.
And that’s where WordPress Plugins come in. In order to create and maintain an attractive and impactful website, freelancers can make use of the widely available WordPress plugins that are specifically designed keeping in mind the needs and requirements of freelancers.
As a freelancer, you will need the best of invoicing tools to make your business look trustworthy, here we have published an article about the best invoicing tools for small business owners, and here you have an artcile about the best invoice templates.
Here is a list of Plugins for freelancers that may prove to be a great tool in escalating the productivity of a freelance professional:
Important WordPress Plugins for Freelancers
WP Forms
As a freelancer, you will need different types of forms on your site. Starting from the contact us form to the service request forms, you will be able to create any kind of form with this plugin.
The WP Form plugin offers you easy to use drag-and-drop form builder option with multiple field types to choose from.
This plugin is highly flexible and you will never need any other form plugin or external tool to create a form on your site.
It comes with a number of ready to be used form templates that you can use on your site. You can also select a template and edit it according to your need.
UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration
UpdraftPlus is a simple backup and restoration plugin. It is one of the most popular plugins with more than a million current active users.
With UpdraftPlus, you can backup your files and database into the cloud and restore it with a single click.
Backups can be done directly to your cloud servers like Dropbox, Amazon S3 (or compatible), UpdraftVault, FTP, Google Drive, DreamObjects, OpenStack Swift, Rackspace Cloud and email.
The paid version of the plugin backups into Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, SFTP, SCP, and WebDAV.
Your entire investments are made on websites so having WordPress backups are worth it. When you are working as a freelancer, your data is one of the most important aspects of your profession and there may be situations when your entire site is down, or your website’s hosting company faces any crash down and at that time, having a reliable backup plugin that works constantly for WordPress deployments can be a huge asset.
Updraft Plus works fine for freelancers as well as companies alike and keeps your backups safe and secure.
WP Project Manager
WP Project Manager is a WordPress project management plugin. It helps to keep track on multiple projects with your client, team or contributors from the dashboard.
You can have internal communication with each other to plan projects, upload files for review and even assign tasks.
This highly user-friendly plugin lets you set permissions to allow or restrict access to members and helps you in displaying the tasks assigned in a visually attractive manner using a calendar.
WP Project Manager is a great tool for the freelancers who are working with a small team from remote locations.
You can keep the time limit for each task and help increase the productivity of your team by giving timer based deadlines. A great pick indeed!
Editorial Calendar
Editorial calendar is a WordPress plugin which is very useful for freelance writers who work in tight deadlines for submission of writing to their clients.
It is a plugin which allows managing and scheduling content on an hourly, weekly or monthly basis in advance.
Editorial calendar is a perfect tool for the freelancers who want to schedule their work in advance.
It comes with an easy drag and drop interface for easier management and also helps you in looking at your previous work details and upcoming work deadlines.
Yoast Seo
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular and widely used SEO WordPress plugins. It is a very helpful tool used in optimizing your WordPress website for search engines.
With the use of various essential elements of Search Engine Optimization, Yoast SEO makes your task of getting found on the internet easier.
The plugin not only adds meta tags but also optimizes your whole website using various suggestions such as speed optimization, sitemap creation, indexing etc.
It is a solid toolset for getting in the search results and is highly useful especially for emerging freelancers.
Yoast has many features to focus on, but here are some of highlighting ones:
- Technical Search Engine Optimization suggestions with page analysis tool.
- XML Sitemaps functionality
- RSS Optimizations
- Multi-site functionality
MailChimp
One of the most popular e-mail marketing software over the internet, MailChimp makes your task of managing subscribers, sending e-mails and tracking results a lot easier.
The plugin is used by a majority of businesses and freelancers around the world owing to its smooth functionality and highly result in oriented features.
Creating a strong online presence requires you to stay in constant contact with your customers and potential customers and MailChimp helps you in doing exactly that.
The plugin comes in both free and premium version and helps you in collecting emails through its attractive subscription forms and then facilitates your marketing efforts by helps you send targeted emails.
As a freelancer, MailChimp can prove to be a treasure for you as it helps in reminding your customers of your presence.
This highly user-friendly plugin can be easily integrated with tools on your websites such as contact form, comment or checkout form. A worth for your freelancing business!
Business Deal Countdown
Create great looking sales pages on your site with our without countdown timer. With this plugin, you will be able to create an exclusive offer.
If you are a freelancer and offering a custom service with any discount or any additional benefit for a specific amount of time, this plugin will be highly effective to make that simple and easier for you.
Sprout Invoices
Invoices are one of the most important parts of freelancing business. If you are a regular freelancer, you are probably aware of the importance of invoices in your business.
Once you are done with the job you have to send an invoice to your client so that they can make a payment and keep a track of the business at your end similarly you can keep a track of all your business at your end with help of all the invoices you have sent.
This is a plugin that will make your invoicing process very professional and easy for you. Sprout Invoices integrates Perfectly with all the leading payment gateways such as PayPal (free), Stripe, Authorize.net, Square, 2Checkout And more.
Canva
Canva is a designing plugin and is a great tool for graphic designers. It is a surprisingly simple tool and helps you in creating beautiful designs by bringing together a drag and drop design tool with a library of quite more than 1 million stock pictures, graphic elements, and fonts.
Canva can help you in making the task of adding images and graphics to your posts extraordinarily straightforward job with its wonderful stock of pictures, graphics parts, and fonts.
With Canva, a freelance can make everything right from basic images to complex graphics within the blink of an eye. Just seamlessly integrate it with WordPress and beautify your online presence.
Share Button by AddThis
No matter how attractive your content may be, you should also persuade your audience to share it. Thanks to Share Button, the best share buttons on the internet are now available on your WordPress site.
You can make the content of your website reach the masses easily by sharing to over 200 of the most popular social networking and bookmarking sites (like Facebook Like, Facebook Share, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and more).
Customizable, Clean and simple, share buttons are quick to load, unobtrusive and recognized all over the web.
You can easily share your content on social platforms using this plugin and increase your chances of being found by a prospective client.
With this plugin, you can not only add to your follower’s list but also know about your site and content which can draw the huge number of traffic from social sites. This plugin is very handy and absolutely easy to use.
We have also created a huge list of best social media WordPress plugins that will help you to make the best use of social media sites.
SVG Case Study
SVG Case Study is a WordPress plugin that provides the solutions to showcase case studies for your business.
This plugin is developed by August Infotech and is a highly useful tool for freelancers. You can include multiple images for each case study and also define problems and solution to them using additional fields provided.
Features:
- SVG Supported
- Easy to install.
- Easy to create a portfolio of business.
- Giving better-picturized view of products.
Trello
WP Trello is a WordPress plugin developed by Iain Poulson. This plugin is a very important asset for freelancers with respect to time management.
This is an amazing collaboration tool which displays organizations, board, lists, and cards in a single dashboard and helps you in organizing your work.
You can simply represent the work schedules that you and your team need to follow using shortcodes or widgets.
Trello boards help each and every member in understanding which work each member is involved in without calling or emailing them personally.
The plugin comes in free and premium versions and will help you in setting up a smooth workflow for your freelancing business.
Contact Form 7
To make your credibility as a freelancer in the market, you should make it easier for the clients to get in touch with you. And that’s where tools like Contact form 7 come into place.
The Plugin is one of the most popular contact form plugins over the internet and is extremely user-friendly. You can add new fields, buttons, drop-down menus and other useful options to your contact form with the help of prebuilt shortcodes.
Ease of working is one of the most important aspects of Contact Form 7.
Features, such as captcha, quizzes, file uploads, and custom notification messages are available in Contact Form 7 and it is indeed a wonderful tool for people who are new to online business and want to create a genuine customer database.
Final Words
All good things require hard work and commitment, so does freelancing. Along with the innumerable perks of being your own boss and working as per your comfort, working as a freelancer requires you to face some challenges too such as creating a strong online presence.
But with the help of platforms like WordPress and tools like the plugins mentioned above, the task of managing and organizing out your daily set of work becomes easier.
