As part of the Niche Recommended WordPress Plugin series, Coupon sites are really popular because people love a good bargain. It could be for web hosting, a service, a digital product, or some tangible product.
To be clear, when I mean coupons, I don’t mean an e-commerce website that you can offer promo codes or coupons. I mean the websites where you offer coupons from other places, kind of like the idea of Groupon. It may be using affiliate links, but essentially, you’re giving people a way to search your website for deals to whatever services or products that they’re interested. To show an example, here’s an image below (you can click on it to view as a bigger image):
Please note that the plugins covered in this article are 100% GPL. Some may be commercial, and some may be free. I’m not just recommending plugins specific to that website, but plugins to get you started or in the direction you need, especially if you are wanting to start a coupon website without doing a ton of your own programming.
There are different ways you can put a coupon website together, but this article is here to give a list of plugins that make it easier for you. 🙂
Niche Recommended WordPress Plugin Series: Coupons
Newsletter
The plugin makes it easier to integrate with MailChimp and insert a newsletter optin form as a widget.
As like the MailChimp plugin, this one does something similar for Aweber users.
MailPoet allows you to run your own in-house newsletter campaigns.
Optinmonster is a premium plugin that allows you to integrate most newsletter services like Aweber, MailChimp, and much more. However, it goes further by allowing you to have various methods of implementing optins like widgets, exit intent popups, regular popups, slide-ins, and much more.
Spam
Growmap anti-Spam Plugin (G.A.S.P)
Growmap Anti-Sam plugin seems like a simple plugin that basically puts in an extra field for commentators to verify that they are not a spammer. Of course, there’s a little more magic to the plugin, but that’s pretty much it.
Akismet – (This comes with WordPress installations, “right out of the box.”)
Akismet helps deter spam from your blog. It’s not a 100% guarantee, but it does a pretty good job helping you moderate the riffraff when you don’t have the time to do it.
Security
WordFence Security
Both Wordfence and iThemes offer a pretty robust way to help scan your website for malware and even offer some type of hardening. I recommend these in my How to Secure Your WordPress Blog article.
Of course, I also do recommend Sucuri, and they have their own plugin. Please look at each and find which one will work for you the best.
Site Speed
W3 Total Cache
I love W3 Total Cache and use it. It has a lot of great options, and may be a little difficult to configure, but it’s worth it. There are other cache plugins out there that you can simply do a search. This is my recommendation. If it doesn’t work for you, feel free to suggest one that worked for you down below in the comment area. 🙂
Social Sharing
Digg Digg
Digg Digg has been around for a long time and offers quite a few ways to implement social sharing buttons into your website.
Flare is not too much different from Digg Digg, except for the fact that it does have different design options to choose from in regards to the button design.
The Floating Social Bar is simple and just allows you a fixed bar that will scroll with the reader as they read a post or page.
Forms
Gravity Forms
Both Gravity Forms and Ninja forms offer a drag and drop solution in order to easily create a form. Gravity forms is a premium plugin that costs. Ninja forms is free, but some extensions for it may cost.
SEO
WordPress SEO by Yoast is a great tool to help your website’s content be seen more favorably on the search engines. It’s got an option for generating an XML sitemap and more. In fact, there is a premium version of this plugin that has a redirection feature.
In some of my previous posts, I’ve made an XML sitemap and a redirection plugin suggestion, but WordPress SEO by Yoast is really a good choice, and investing in it’s premium version is an even better choice to allow the team behind it to continue developing it in order to stay on top of Google.
Coupons
This is the part you’re here for.
If you’re building a resource to allow people to find promotion codes or discounts for other services, then this is the method you want to use. I’ve seen a lot of different coupons out there, but this is 100% GPL. Others that I reached out to, or tried to reach out to, either delayed in responding, or have a broken contact form. If other options become available in the future, I’ll be happy to share those.
Magic WP Coupons – Lite can help with giving you a simple solution for being able to offer an entire website with deals for people to pick up. They’ve got a pro version as well.
As said earlier, there are some coupon generator plugins that do work. Some are actively developed and sold on CodeCanyon, but most aren’t GPL, so I can’t list them on my website because I like to comply with the same license that WordPress carries.
However, you are welcome to list any plugins that you’ve used and liked in case you’ve built a promo code site in an easy way that others can follow.
You have recommended great resources for coupons, I like the Magic WP Coupons – Lite. Looks easy to install and to use. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Siphosith! I wanted to share more options, but like I said in my article, the plugins weren’t 100% GPL. However, I recommend going out and searching because some of them are excellent solutions.
What great resources for plug-ins and coupons. I’ve never thought of having coupons on my site, but it definitely could be worthwhile. Does the Magic WordPress Coupons Lite work for any industry?
I think the MailChimp for WordPress plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/mailchimp-for-wp/) is superior to the MailChimp plugin listed; great support team too!
Any thoughts on Hello Bar?