11 Essential WordPress Plugins for Mortgage Brokers Who Want More Leads

Rank Math is a search engine optimisation (SEO) plugin that you can download for free. It helps you to take care of most SEO tasks and improves the optimisation of your website.

Rank Math lets you specify the keywords you want each page/post to rank for and then uses a scoring system to tell you how well optimised the page is for those keywords. It will also suggest things you can do to improve the optimisation, such as changing where the keywords are placed in the text.

Rank Math also helps you write good meta titles and meta descriptions, connects to Google Search Console, creates XML sitemaps, and more.

Many WordPress sites use Yoast SEO, but I think Rank Math is a better option because it offers all its services for free and has the same or better quality.

Internal linking is a powerful SEO strategy that can increase the rankings of your pages on search engines. Internal links are a quality factor for Google. Most authority websites that dominate the search engines have many internal links on each page.

Link Whisper is a premium tool that scans your site for opportunities to add internal links and can also give you suggestions for links while you write. So, you can add the maximum number of internal links on each page quickly and easily.

WP Rocket is a premium plugin that improves the speed of your website through a process that is called caching. It saves a static version of your website pages and loads this cached version when a user visits your site. This greatly reduces the page loading time.

Website speed is important because fast websites tend to rank better on Google and have lower bounce rates. I’ve tested several free and paid caching plugins and WP Rocket is the best because it offers a great set of tools to improve your site speed and is really easy to configure and use.

Most websites have plenty of images these days, and this is a good thing. They break the content into smaller pieces, add colour, improve the SEO performance, and can trigger emotions in the reader. However, images can slow down the speed of a website if they have file sizes that are too big.

Optimole is an image optimisation plugin with a free and paid version – you need the paid version once you hit a certain level of monthly web traffic. 

Optimole automatically resizes and compresses all of your images to speed up your website. I’ve tried out various image optimisation plugins and Optimole is the easiest to use and allows you to optimise a very generous number of images on the free plan.

It is important to protect your website from external attacks. Wordfence is a security plugin that keeps your site safe from hackers that want to break your site, either to get your data or just to be annoying. 

Wordfence works as a firewall and tracks your traffic in real-time for malicious IP addresses. It has a free and premium version, so you can install the plugin for free.

If you get spam comments appearing on your blog posts, or fake users registering accounts on your site, you’ll end up spending a lot of time checking and deleting them.

Stop Spammers is a plugin that does a good job of preventing this kind of spam on your website. It's a simple plugin to use and since I started using it, the amount of unwanted activity on my WordPress website has dropped significantly. 

You can start with the free version of Stop Spammers and, if you need more features, they offer a premium version as well.

This plugin lets you add a calculator to your website that can help your visitors to estimate their mortgage payments. They just enter the details of their mortgage – loan size, deposit, etc – and the calculator will tell them what the monthly payments will be.

Mortgage Calculator is very easy to install and configure, and it is free. By default it looks quite American – the currency is set to dollars and it talks about down payments rather than deposits. However, you can change all these labels easily within the settings of the plugin. You can also translate it into any language you want if your website is targeted at visitors who do not speak English.

10to8 is a website that allows your clients and prospects to book meetings with you. They can schedule, cancel, and reschedule appointments without having to contact you. And because 10to8 syncs with your Outlook/Google/Apple calendar, it’s smart enough not to offer appointments to people at times when you already have something else in the diary.

10to8 will save you a lot of time that you would otherwise spend managing your appointments. There are various pricing options, but you can start for free if you have a limited number of appointments per month. The free option is often enough for most mortgage brokers and other small businesses.

The 10to8 plugin for WordPress makes it easy to integrate the 10to8 booking system into your own website so as people don’t have to leave your site in order to set up a meeting with you.

Every website should be running Google Analytics and the free GA Google Analytics plugin provides an easy way to connect your Google Analytics account with your WordPress site.

GA Google Analytics is great for website owners who don't want to mess around with the theme editor and don't want to have to add the Analytics tracking code to the site manually.  

There are lots of plugins that will do the same job of adding the Google Analytics code to your site but I recommend this one because, like the Pixel Caffeine plugin mentioned above, it works with WP Rocket to optimise the Google Analytics code and improve its loading time.