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While there are numerous open-source website development platforms available today, WordPress continues to dominate the industry in terms of customizability, efficiency, and scalability, along with being budget-friendly. Although there are platforms specific to ecommerce, WordPress supports several powerful plugins that allow users to turn their existing website into a fully functional online store, making it the perfect way to monetize your business online without compromising on visual identity. Here are five WordPress tools essential to building a successful online business.

WP Engine

WP Engine is undoubtedly the most efficient managed WordPress hosting platform. According to this WP-engine review, it offers three plans, with varying functionalities with respect to traffic capacity, installations, and storage. For high-traffic websites, they also offer Premium and Enterprise plans that allow the user to customize supported features and their functionality. Users looking to migrate websites to WP Engine from another hosting platform can do so using the WP Engine Automated Migration plugin, making the migration process hassle-free.

WP Forms

Users can build interactive forms without having to write codes, using the drag-and-drop feature, or using a premade template. These forms are responsive on mobiles, tablets and desktops, and also notify the user instantly when a form is submitted. It also supports a variety of fields and features, including options to collect payments to ensure maximum functionality. The templates can also be easily customized to include section dividers, custom CSS and HTML blocks.

Sucuri Security

Business owners have to prioritize the safety of their site above all else, since this also directly affects search engine ranking and user experience, in addition to keeping critical data secure. The free version of the Sucuri security plugin scans a site and provides users with all the tools they need to manually remove threats and ensure the seamless functioning of their site. Sucuri's premium version also offers real-time DDoS protection, aided removal, and better assistance for those that require a comprehensive security solution, such as bigger sites and ecommerce shops.

SEMRush

SEMRush is a one-stop solution to optimize websites for search engines. It provides users with data that can be used to identify which topics are currently being talked about, create content that is more likely to be identified, identify solid opportunities for link-building, and optimize the technical components of a site to achieve a higher ranking in search results. It can also suggest keywords and identify how difficult it would be to rank a webpage for a particular search keyword. Users can also perform SEO audits for an entire website using SEMRush.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is undoubtedly the most popular ecommerce plugin for Wordpress sites, with over 28% of all ecommerce sites using it. It allows users to sell both physical and digital goods, in addition to offering multiple variants of the same product. It also allows users to upsell and cross-sell seamlessly. Users can also tag and categorize products, add captions for product images, and choose to enable or disable reviews for certain products.

Wordpress will likely continue to dominate the website development space for the foreseeable future, providing users with the opportunity to create flourishing online businesses with ease. Using the right tools and plugins can help take both your website and your business to new heights.