Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress – 2

This is part 2 of our series on growing a medical or health-related business online and provides a comprehensive list of WordPress plugins suitable for medical or healthcare-related businesses …

16+ WordPress Plugins That Can Help Grow Your Health WebsiteIn Part One of this comprehensive guide on ways to build your medical or health business online, we provided practical tips and suggestions on the following topics:

  • Challenges Professional Health And Medical Services Practitioners Face Online
  • Online Opportunities For Health And Medical Services Providers
  • Your Website Pages
  • How To Improve Your Web Content

In this section, we discuss more ways to grow your health or medical services online.

Topics covered include:

  • Ways To Improve Web Traffic Using WordPress
  • Generating Leads & Enquiries
  • WordPress Plugins That Can Improve SEO, Create Better User Engagement And Increase Traffic To Your Site Generation

Important Info

To learn more about WordPress plugins and themes, see the articles below:

Note: Plugins are covered in this section. Themes for medical businesses are listed in Part Three.

Ways To Improve Web Traffic

Web traffic is vital to your business growth. This section explores WordPress plugins that improve search engine optimization, improve user engagement and drive more visitors.

Optimizing Your Website For Search Engines

There are lots of ways WordPress can help to improve your medical-related website’s SEO:

  • Search Engine-Friendly URLs – configure the permalinks to create search engine-optimized URLS for your posts.
  • Tags – WordPress lets you choose the keywords that you want search engines to index your posts for.
  • Post Categories – Create categories for keeping your content organized and easy to find.
  • Post Excerpts – WordPress lets you compose the description for your posts that visitors will see in the search engine results.
  • Images – title your images with keywords for improved search engine results.
  • Internal Linking – WordPress provides a built-in feature that allows you to easily link your content to other posts and pages on your site
  • Pinging – WordPress can be set up to automatically notify (ping) other sites and directories immediately upon publishing a new post on your site.

Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Improve User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation Using Plugins

In addition to the built-in features of WordPress, the WordPress community makes available quite a number of plugins that will improve your medical website’s SEO, increase user engagement and drive more traffic to your website.

Here are some plugins you can use to improve your website’s SEO:

A plugin like Yoast SEO can improve your website's SEO

(Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your website’s SEO)

Other WordPress plugins you can add to improve SEO, increase engagement and drive more visitors to your site are to add a forum, newsletters, comments, and social sharing features. Here are some more WordPress plugins that can help (many of the plugins listed below can be downloaded at no cost):

  • BuddyPress – Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage your own social networking community on WordPress.
  • bbPress – This free WordPress plugin helps you run your own forum on your site.
  • E-Newsletter – Use E-Newsletter to send email newsletters, track results and manage subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
  • Disqus – use this plugin to power discussions and increases user engagement on your website or blog.
  • Floating Social – Easily add social buttons and features that allow visitors to share your content online on your pages and posts.

WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins

(WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website with WordPress plugins)

Generate New Leads & Enquiries Using WordPress-Based Applications

Let’s now discuss ways to improve sales and generate more leads and enquiries online.

Add An Email Newsletter

Adding a newsletter is an excellent way to grow and retain your readership. It provides many benefits and advantages, like:

  • Sends targeted traffic
  • Keeps readers from forgetting about you
  • Provides practical tips and advice
  • Provides you with a highly targeted marketing channel
  • It’s a way to offer special services or products to a select audience
  • Increases user interaction
  • Provides you with additional opportunities for your content to be shared around with others

An effective way to entice your visitors to subscribe is to provide high value content and offer users free gifts or bonus items in exchange for their details. This can be a guide, checklists for improving health, fitness and nutrition, access to health apps, discount vouchers, membership access to videos, contests, etc.

Contact Forms

A contact form provides an easy and simple way for prospective customers to get in touch. A contact form also allows readers to raise problems, contact specific departments, request quotes, and more.

Contact forms provide many benefits and advantages including:

  • Reduces spam
  • Automated response
  • Giving you control over what is sent to you
  • Allows you to keep your email address private
  • They can be added to any page or post
  • Improves the professional look of your website
  • Convenience for visitors

A very popular WordPress contact form plugin is Contact Form 7.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress

(Contact Form 7 Plugin For WordPress)

This free contact form plugin lets you insert and manage multiple contact forms into any post or page, customize the forms and the email contents, add fields, and more.

The plugin supports international languages, Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, spam filtering and so on.

Something else to consider if you want to set up a website for a medical practice is to add sections to your contact form so prospective clients can choose which practitioner they want to contact. This ensures that contact form requests reach the correct recipient.

Maps

Adding maps helps your visitors and clients find you.

Maps are a useful tool for several reasons:

  • A map helps to increase local SEO
  • Clients can better plan their visits and appointments
  • Display location of events

Maps help your visitors and customers find you

(Adding maps to your site helps your visitors and clients find you)

Popular map plugins for WordPress include:

How To Improve SEO, Increase User Engagement And Increase Web Traffic Generation With WordPress Plugins & Themes

WordPress Medical And Health Plugins

WordPress makes available a number of plugins you can add to your website that will immediately add a range of functional tools for your site visitors. Here are just some of these:

Booking Calendar

Booking Calendar - WordPress Plugin

(Booking Calendar Plugin)

Booking Calendar lets you add appointment booking services to your site. This plugin is well supported, provides an intuitive interface with flexible functionality. It is highly suitable for a wide range medical, health, fitness & sports-related uses, such as dental practices, surgical centers, massage therapists, booking patient appointments, etc.

Booking Calendar - Overview

(Booking Calendar WP Plugin – Overview)

This booking reservations plugin works right out of the box. Your website visitors can check availability of services you offer and book appointments quickly and easily. Administrators and visitors receive email notifications. Booking Calendar is also widget-ready, and supports multiple languages. The developers of this plugin also provide a premium version with a ton of extra features.

For more details, go here}:

Event Espresso

Manage Event Registrations Via The Web Using Event Espresso WP Plugin

(Manage Event Registrations Online Using Event Espresso WordPress Plugin)

If your business involves running medical events, then you need a plugin like Event Espresso.

The Event Espresso online event registration plugin enables you to easily set up multiple events and begin receiving online bookings literally in minutes

Event Espresso

(Event Espresso – Event Registration & Ticketing Management)

Event Espresso is a flexible and feature-packed application that gives you complete control over the event registration management process.

We have written a detailed article on Event Espresso. Go here to learn more about this:

Calculator Pro Calculators

Calculator Pro Calculators

(Calculator Pro Calculators – WordPress Plugin)

This is a free collection of 400+ calculators. You can embed these into your posts, pages, or sidebars using shortcodes. Internationalization is supported.

Most of the calculators aren’t designed for health or medical usage, but there are many you can include in your site, including:

  • Body Statistics – e.g. Blood Alcohol Calculator, Frame Size Calculator, Katch-Mcardle BMR Calculator, Metric BMR Calculator, VO2 Max Calculator, etc.
  • Calorie – e.g. Alcohol Calorie Calculator, kJ to Calorie Calculator, Calories Burned Running Calculator, etc.
  • Fitness Tests – e.g. Astrand Test Calculator, Rockport Walk Test Calculator, etc.
  • Miscellaneous – e.g. Beats and Breaths Calculator, Blood Sugar Converter Calculator, Ovulation Calculator, Target Heart Rate Calculator, etc.
  • Nutrition – e.g. BMR Calorie Calculator, Protein Calculator, etc.
  • Weight – e.g. BMI Calculator, Weight Loss Calculator, etc.

For more details, go here}:

Calculated Fields Form

Calculated Fields Form WordPress Plugin

(Calculated Fields Form)

This plugin is useful for creating dynamically calculated field forms, including:

  • Health & Fitness Calculators
  • Ideal Weight Calculator
  • Pregnancy Calculator
  • Calorie Calculators
  • And lots more

A premium version of this plugin with additional features is also available.

For more details, go here}:

Weight Loss Tracker

Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress

(Weight Loss Tracker WordPress Plugin)

This plugin lets users record their weight periodically. The results are then displayed in a graph and table.

Weight Loss Tracker Plugin For WordPress - Graph

(Weight Loss Tracker – WordPress Plugin – Graph)

The plugin allows users to insert target weights and supports the following weight formats: Metric (Kg), Imperial – Stones & Pounds, Imperial – Pounds only.

For more details, go here}:

Simple Body Mass Index Calculator Widget

Simple BMI Calculator Plugin

(Simple BMI Calculator – WordPress Plugin)

Simple BMI Calculator lets you add a widget to your sidebar that can be configured and customized to match your theme.

As well as Simple Body Mass Index Calculator, there are other WordPress plugins you can look at to perform similar functions:

  • BMI BMR Calculator  A Body Mass Index and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) calculator that saves calculation data for logged-in users and gives an overview to the administrator.
  • BMI / IMC Calculator  A simple calculator that displays BMI
  • Calotor Calorie Counter – Lets visitors figure out their basal metabolic rate, by inputting their age, sex and weight.
  • And lots more

For more details, go here}:

Drug Interaction Data Plugin

Drug Interaction Data

(Drug Interaction Data Plugin)

This plugin can be used to display information about drugs, including what the drugs are used for and what other medications the drugs are known to interact with.

Drug Interaction Data WordPress Plugin - Data Results

(Drug Interaction Data – WordPress Plugin – Results)

Information about drugs can be displayed on your site. The plugin loads the drug and pharmaceutical data from the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the U.S. National Institutes of Health and drug names are converted to the standardized RxNorm name as defined by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

For more details, go here}:

PubMed Posts

PubMed Posts WP Plugin

(PubMed Posts WP Plugin)

This plugin adds a dashboard widget that creates posts from PubMed articles, as well as a search function that finds posts with specific data. It also includes an editor that changes the layout of your post content data.

PubMed includes over 25 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.

For more details, go here}:

MJM Clinic

MJM Clinic

(MJM Clinic Plugin For WordPress)

This plugin was designed to add functionality to medical and health care related websites, such as inserting service pages with booking forms, organising your services into hierarchical categories, locations, feedback entries and more.

For more details, go here}:

Treato WordPress Plugin

Treato

(Treato Plugin)

Treato WordPress plugin lets you add a sidebar widget that allows your site visitors to search drugs and see what patients are saying about different drugs.

Treato gathers and analyzes patient experiences from medical forums and blog posts, then aggregates the posts to generate useful insights about users’ medications, diseases and symptoms. Users can access insight about side effects, drug comparisons, which drugs people feel work, and more from over 2.2 billion collected posts.

For more details, go here}:

HealthTap Concierge

HealthTap

(HealthTap WP Plugin)

HealthTap Concierge allows visitors to locate and book a virtual consult with real doctors, clinical psychologists, etc. via text chat or HD video from any mobile device, computer, or smartwatch.

With the plugin installed, your visitors can type in a health question and receive a list of doctors in their geographic area who specialize in that particular topic. They can then select a doctor, chat over video or text, or send the doctor their question and get answers using the service, which has a database of over 73,000 doctors.

For more details, go here}:

TrendMD

TrendMD Plugin For WordPress

(TrendMD – WordPress Plugin)

The TrendMD plugin will add the TrendMD recommendations widget to your website. The TrendMD recommendations widget is used by scholarly publishers to grow their readership and revenue by allowing people to discover, read or cite scholarly content from your journals or websites through personalized recommendations.

For more details, go here}:

WP Nutrition Facts

WP Nutrition Facts

(WP Nutrition Facts – WordPress Plugin)

WP Nutrition Facts lets you add a nutrition facts table into your posts and pages, allowing your visitors to make better food choices towards healthy eating goals.

WP Nutrition Facts Plugin For WordPress - Create Custom Post Type Labels

(WP Nutrition Facts Plugin – Creating Labels)

This plugin uses the Canadian Food Inspection (CFIA) nutrition labeling regulations.

For more details, go here}:

WP Ultimate Recipe

WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin For WordPress

(WP Ultimate Recipe)

If you run a health or fitness website that provides diet or healthy eating recommendations, a great source of content that will engage your readers is to publish healthy recipes.

A plugin like WP Ultimate Recipe lets you publish delicious and healthy on your site.

Other recipe plugins for WordPress include:

  • Recipe Card – Create beautiful recipes that your readers can print, save and review.
  • EasyRecipe – EasyRecipe lets you easily add recipes to your site with features like cut and paste, auto conversion of your plain text recipe posts, Google Recipe View formatting, automatic ratings and conversion from other recipe plugins.
  • ZipList Recipes – Lets you easily format recipe text and add images. Additional features like Google Recipe View formatting and SEO are included.
  • And many more.

For more details, go here}:

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

Awesome Fitness Testimonials

(Awesome Fitness Testimonials WP Plugin)

The Awesome Fitness Testimonials plugin lets you add fitness and wellness testimonials, case studies and reviews to your fitness-related site.

For more details, go here}:

Exercise Images

Exercise Images

(Exercise Images Plugin)

The Exercise Images plugin lets you display exercise images in your posts and pages.

Exercise Images Plugin - Database

(Exercise Images by Everkinetic – WordPress Plugin – Image Catalog)

For more details, go here}:

In part 3 of this detailed guide, we discuss themes that are suitable for medical businesses.

A Complete Guide On How To Build And Grow A Medical-Related Web Presence

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This is the end of section 2.

Click here to read Part 3:

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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum

Originally published as Grow Your Medical Or Healthcare Business Online With WordPress – 2.