Category: WordPress 101

One of the main features of the WordPress web site management platform is the ability to quickly expand your WordPress website’s functionality using plugins.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

Like most of us, you probably use a mobile phone. What do you do when you want to access something new on your phone like a new software or a business productivity tool?

You download and install an app!

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

(Just like you can find social sharing apps …)

A WordPress plugin is similar to an app. You install and activate a software that adds new functionality to your website …

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

Generally, if you need to expand the functionality of an existing website, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new features or enhancements are, this can get fairly expensive, particularly if website developers have to add new code or edit programs or develop scripts that integrate into your current site.

This is also applicable when setting up a new website or business blog. Businesses sometimes fork out money for added bells and whistles they may not ever need.

To save money and keep costs low, we recommend a cost-effective strategy to growing a online presence presence and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply with minimal cost involved. Get a basic, professional web presence up and running quickly, then …

2) As you need more features, you can install new software modules with a couple of mouse clicks directly from your dashboard panel, to give your website or blog an entirely new range of possibilities, and …

3) Cost not one cent extra to download and install on your web site?

Well, that’s just what WordPress plugins allow you to do!

Benefits And Advantages Of Using WordPress Plugins

We started this blog post by comparing WP plugins with mobile apps. In the same way that some apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little bit of money, so do plugins.

In fact, many plugins can be installed on your websites.

WP plugins that you buy are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of paying for professional web development services to add the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are generally quite inexpensive.

Also, because WordPress makes its source code publicly available, anybody can create, modify and customize any part of the code. This has enabled many professional software development companies to enhance and contribute to the WPsoftware.

• Plugins let you start off with just a simple site and then add new features and enhancements to your site if required.
• WordPress plugins allow you to add practically endless functionality to any site quickly, easily and inexpensively.
• Plugins give you almost endless expansion capabilities.
• WP plugins allow non-technical website owners to have a web presence that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins normally work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to provide your site with instant new capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins can be a little more advanced and could require some initial configuring.

WP Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Many Of Them Are) 100% FREE!

Like themes, loads of plugins are available for WP users … often at no cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you can find WP plugins that can do just about anything you need done.

Plugin categories cover:

• Blog Administration
• Content Management
• Traffic
• User Interactivity
• Social Monitoring
• Media Management Automation
• Improving Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Reporting
• WP SEO

For example, you can enhance your business online presence with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Rotating ad banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonial forms
• Language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your site from English to German)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Cloud storage integration
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your site
• Set up client appointments and reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links on your pages and send you reports
• Redirect affiliate pages
• Monitor what social media users are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add a site map
• Hide specific from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect page content sections
• Migrate information from non-WordPress applications
• Search and replace data
• Prevent SPAM commenting
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. display Facebook posts)
• Inserting scripts and code elements into your blog’s header and footer
• Add tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add location maps
• Post your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and others
• Display countdown timers (for expiring offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As it’s clear to see, WP plugins give you virtually limitless business scalability. If you are planning to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing site isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider getting a WP site or blog built on your domain, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

In case you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using plugins, let me show you some practical uses of installing an inexpensive plugin on your website.

For example, if you need to publish content which is only accessible to some users, you can use plugins to make a section of a page inaccessible, or create a professional membership site with customized login details for users …

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

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

You can also add complex functionality to your site using inexpensive premium WP plugins. For example, you can set up plugins that automate features on your website such as customer testimonial and event bookings management …

And also set up a custom bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying programmers to create custom functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of built-in WordPress commenting features and plugins that can let you engage even more with visitors, customers and registered site users …

For example, your web visitors can:

• Leave comments on your site (which can grow into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site added exposure).
• Bookmark your content on various social sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with other users using online forums or even set up a private online social network on your own site.
• Engage with your support team via live chats
• Call your business directly from their laptops when browsing your pages
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

Finally you, can even integrate sophisticated enterprise-level solutions within a WP “front end”. This enables you to control your business marketing, while your third-party application handles the technological aspects …

Additional Information About WP Plugins

• There are so many WordPress plugins to choose from. Be careful not to overload your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will eventually start to affect your website’s performance and page loading speed. It can also mean more maintenance work for you resulting from potential errors.
• Install only those plugins you really need. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these use extra server resources.
• Many free plugins often come with very little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing premium plugins, make sure you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of the plugin reviews we provide here for more helpful information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two years), then think carefully before installing it. The WordPress application updates frequently and outdated plugins can create issues.
• Make sure to always update your plugins. Older plugin not only can cause errors, they could also have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

As you can see, plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most downloaded CMS available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add new features to their website without spending thousands of dollars on outsourced web development costs.

One last thing on the subject of plugins:

If there is a feature you need for your web site, you can be sure that a plugin already exists that will do exactly what you want, and that it can either be accessed for FREE, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the price will be minimal.

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

And, if by chance this plugin is not available, then one can certainly be written for you for a very reasonable price.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what they are and how they can significantly expand your web site. See our related posts to learn more about usingplugins.

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