Category: WordPress 101

One of the most unique benefits of using WordPress is the ability to easily enhance your WP web site’s functionality using plugins.

What Are WP Plugins?

No doubt, you most likely have a smart phone. What happens when you would like access to something new on your device like a new application, software or productivity tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software that is easy to install and instantly integrates new functionality into your smart phone.

(Just as there are social sharing apps for mobile devices …)

A WP plugin is very much like an app. You simply install and activate an application that provides new functionality to your WordPress web site …

(… there are also social sharing plugins for WordPress sites!)

Typically, adding a new feature to an already-built site involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the features or enhancement, this cost can be fairly significant, especially if it involves modifying code.

This also applies to starting a new website or business blog. Organizations often invest money up-front in features or options they probably will never need.

To keep your expenses to a minimum, we suggest using a cost-effective approach when growing a web presence and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get your business web presence up and running fast, then …

2) As new features are required, you can install new applications with only a few clicks of the mouse that integrate seamlessly with your existing website, and give your site an entirely new and expanded range of possibilities, and …

3) Cost not one dollar more to add to your website?

Well, that’s precisely what WP plugins allow you to do!

Plugins – Benefits

We started this post by comparing WP plugins with smartphone apps. Just like many apps are free to download and some cost a little bit of money, so do WordPress plugins.

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

Plugins that you purchase are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of hiring a professional web developer to get the same functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are generally very inexpensive.

Also, since WordPress distributes its software as an Open Source application, anybody can create, rewrite and customize any part of the code. This has enabled many third-party web developers to create more applications that plug seamlessly into the WordPress engine than you can possibly imagine.

• Plugins let you start off simply with a basic web site and expand as necessary.
• Plugins allow you to add practically endless features to any web site easily and cheaply.
• WordPress plugins give you virtually endless expanding capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow ”non-techies” to own a website that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to provide your website or blog with instant new enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins provide more extensive features and require some configuration.

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

Just like themes, thousands of WP plugins are made available to WordPress users … and many of these great plugins are 100% FREE!

You can access thousands of plugins from the Free WordPress Plugin Repository …

As previously mentioned, you can find plugins that can do just about anything you could possibly need a site to do.

There are WP plugins for:

• Blog Administration
• Content Management
• Online Traffic Generation
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Connectivity
• Media Management Automation
• Improving Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Monitoring & Reporting Applications
• Optimizing Your WordPress Web Site

For example, you can expand a WordPress site with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Social contests
• Managing banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single sales with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring payments, discount codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your website from English to French)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Cloud storage integration
• Faster page loading
• Managing events & bookings
• Business directories
• Automatically sell spots on your website
• Set client appointments and appointment reminders
• Manage reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links on your pages and email you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor what social media users are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude specific from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your pages and posts
• Import information from different CMS applications
• Search and replace content
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Inserting scripts and code elements into your pages
• Add formatted tables
• Display animated graphic elements and advanced font display formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map of your business location
• Distribute your posts automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and others
• Display countdown timers (for special offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As you can clearly see, plugins give you virtually limitless business flexibility. If you plan to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing site was not built with WordPress, then consider getting a WP site or blog in the future, or you will be missing out on some serious functionality.

In case you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let’s take a look at some practical advantages of installing a plugin on your web site.

For example, if you need content protection, you can install plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on a post or page inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a full membership site with separate login details for users …

As mentioned before, you can use free plugins to enhance your website in so many ways. From installing functionality that enhance your business, your visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is taking place on your site …

To extending your business reach and visibility across many social media and search engines …

You can also add complex functionality to your site using relatively inexpensive paid WP plugins. For example, you can download plugins that integrate and automate features on your website such as customer feedback and event registrations management …

And also run a custom-branded bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring software developers to create the same applications for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that will enhance your site’s interactivity …

For example, your visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your blog posts (which can grow into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site additional exposure).
• Share your content with other web visitors on various social sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with other customers via forums or even set up a private online community on your domain.
• Engage with your staff via live video chats
• Call your business directly from their cellphones while visiting your site
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

Finally you, can even integrate complex enterprise-level solutions using a WP “front end”. This enables you to manage the content that your visitors will see on your web site, while the third-party application handles the technological areas …

Plugins – Additional Things You Should Know

• There are many plugins available. Be careful not to overload your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will invariably affect your site’s resources and page loading speed. It also means more maintenance work for you resulting from potential errors.
• Install only those plugins that you really use. Delete any plugins you don’t use from your site, as these use additional resources.
• Many free plugins often come with little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing paid WordPress plugins, make sure you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of our plugin recommendations for additional information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two or more years), then think twice before installing it on your website. WordPress updates often and older plugins can cause problems.
• Ensure to always update your plugins. Older plugin not only can cause errors, they may also have security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

As you can see, WP plugins are an important aspect of WordPress and contribute to making it the most popular online management software in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to expand quickly without having to spend thousands of dollars on outsourced web development costs.

One last thing about WordPress plugins:

If there is a feature or functionality you need for your web presence, you can be sure that a someone has probably already developed one that will do what you want it to do, and that it can either be downloaded for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that it will be fairly inexpensive.

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

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

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of plugins – what they are and how they can help expand your WordPress web site. See our related posts section to learn about more great plugins that we recommend using.

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