Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the main advantages of building a website using WordPress is the ability to easily enhance your WordPress website or blog’s functionality using inexpensive called plugins.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

No doubt, you most likely own a device like a cell phone. What do you do when you want access to something new on your device like a new game or a business productivity tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a little software application that is easy to install and immediately integrates new functionality into a mobile device.

(Just like you can find social sharing apps for mobile phones …)

A plugin is like an app. You install a software application that provides new functionality to your website or blog …

(… you can also find social sharing plugins for WordPress sites!)

Generally, if you want to add new features to an existing website, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the features or enhancements, this cost can be fairly significant, particularly if web developers have to create new code or edit code or install programs that integrate into your current set up.

This is also applicable when developing a new web site. Many businesses often fork out money in advance for bells and whistles they probably will never need.

For sound, strategic business planning reasons, we suggest a cost-effective approach to setting up your web presence and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get a professional business website up and running quickly, then …

2) As the need for new capabilities and functionality arises, just install new software modules with only a couple of mouse clicks directly from within your dashboard panel, giving your web site an entirely new and expanded range of practical functionality, and also …

3) Cost not a single dollar extra to install on your web site?

Well, this is precisely what WordPress plugins let you do!

WP Plugins – Benefits And Advantages

We started this article by comparing WordPress plugins with ’apps’. In the same way that some apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little money, the same applies with plugins.

In fact, thousands of powerful plugins are freely available for WP users.

Plugins that you buy are referred to as Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of hiring a professional web developer to add similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are typically quite inexpensive.

Also, as WordPress is an Open Source application, anyone can create, edit and customize any portion of the WP code. This has allowed many professional software developers to create more plugins that work with the WordPress software than you can imagine.

• WP plugins let you get started simply with a basic web presence and then expand as required.
• Plugins let you add practically unlimited features to any online business presence quickly and cheaply.
• Plugins give your website practically unlimited expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow non-technical users to own a web presence that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website or blog immediate capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins offer more extensive options and require some configuration.

WP Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Many Of Them Are) Completely FREE!

Just like WP themes, thousands of plugins are currently available to WordPress users … often at $0 cost!

You can view and download thousands of plugins from the Free WordPress Plugin Repository …

As mentioned earlier, you can find WP plugins that will do almost anything you need your website to do.

There are plugins for:

• Website Management
• Content Management
• Increasing Site Traffic
• User Engagement
• Social Sharing
• Media Utilities Automation
• Increasing Sales & Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Monitoring & Reporting
• Securing Your

For example, you can enhance your WordPress site with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce stores with online shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, coupons, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Membership sites
• List-building opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile integration
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your website from English to German)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media integration
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Business directories
• Automatically sell and manage spots on your website
• Set up appointments and appointment reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and send you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add a site map
• Exclude certain from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide page content sections
• Import content from non-WP applications
• Perform bulk data edits
• Block SPAM
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Inserting scripts and code elements into your pages
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map of your business location
• Post your content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and many others
• Display countdown timers (for special offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As you can clearly see, plugins give you practically endless business scalability. If you are planning to build a website or blog, or your existing web site was not built using WordPress, then consider using WordPress in the future.

If you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using WP plugins, let’s take a look at how you can benefit by installing a plugin on your web site.

For example, if you need content protection, you can install plugins to make an area of a page or post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a complete membership site with personal login details for all users …

As mentioned previously, you can use free plugins to improve your site in lots of ways. From adding functionality that can enhance your business, your site’s user experience and your ability to review visitor metrics …

To increasing your site’s reach and visibility across multiple social networks and search engines …

You can also add sophisticated functionality to your site using relatively inexpensive premium WordPress plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that integrate and automate functionality on your pages such as displaying customer testimonials and booking events …

And also run a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of hiring software developers to build the same functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that can enhance visitor engagement …

For example, your visitors can:

• Leave comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then displayed throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with increased exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with other members through forums or even set up an online social network on your site.
• Engage with your team via live video chats
• Dial your business directly from their laptops while visiting your site
• Get support via a customer help desk
• And much more …

Finally you, can even integrate sophisticated “back end” solutions with a WordPress “front end”. This lets you manage your business sales and marketing, while your 3rd-party application handles the technical areas …

Plugins – Useful Tips

• There are many plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can eventually start to affect your website’s performance and page loading speed. It can also create more maintenance issues for you resulting from potential conflicts.
• Only keep those plugins that you really use. Delete any plugins you don’t use from your site, as these also consume server resources.
• Many free plugins typically receive very little to no support from the plugin author. When considering premium plugins, make sure you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we provide on this site for more information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two years), then think twice before using it. The WordPress application changes frequently and older plugins can create errors.
• Ensure to always maintain all plugins updated. Outdated plugin not only can cause issues, they may also contain security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

As you can see, plugins are an important part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most preferred web open source platform in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand quickly without spending thousands of dollars on web developers.

One last thing on the subject of WordPress plugins:

If there is a functionality you want for your web presence, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already developed one that will do what you need, and that this plugin can either be downloaded for FREE, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the price to purchase it will be minimal.

(Whatever you need done, there’s a WordPress plugin for that!)

And, if by chance this WP plugin has not been created yet, then one can probably be developed for you at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of plugins – what they are and how they can significantly to improve your business blog. See our related posts section to learn more about using WordPress plugins.

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