Category: WordPress Basics

One of the most powerful benefits of choosing the WordPress website management software is that you can quickly and easily expand your WordPress website’s functionality using applications called plugins.

About Plugins

Like most people, you most likely own a device like a smart phone. What do you do when you would like access to something new on your device like a new application, game or a tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a little software application that is simple and easy to install and adds new functionality to any smart phone.

(Just like you can find social sharing apps …)

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

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

Normally, if you decide to expand the functionality of your site, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the features or enhancement, this cost can be significant, especially if it involves website development.

This is also applicable to developing a website or business blog. Organizations tend to invest money in additional bells and whistles they probably will never need.

To keep your expenses low, we recommend considering a sustainable approach to growing your presence online presence and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine if you could:

1) Start simply and with minimal expense involved. Get a web presence up and running fast, then …

2) As the need for new features or functionality becomes evident, just add new software modules with a few clicks of the mouse directly from within your WordPress dashboard panel, to give your website a whole new range of features and functionality, and …

3) Cost not one cent more to install on your site?

Well, that’s exactly what WordPress plugins let you do!

WordPress Plugins – Benefits

Earlier, we compared WordPress plugins with ’apps’. In a similar way that many apps are free to download and some may cost a little bit of money, so do WordPress plugins.

In fact, thousands of plugins can be downloaded and installed on your websites.

WordPress 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 get the same functionality on your site, most Premium plugins cost very little.

Also, as WordPress makes its code publicly available, any person can create, modify and customize any part of the code. This has enabled many third-party software development professionals to enhance the core software application.

• Plugins let you start off with only a simple yet professional website and expand only when necessary.
• WP plugins let you add practically unlimited functionality to any web presence quickly and cheaply.
• Plugins give your digital business presence practically endless expansion capabilities.
• WP plugins allow business owners to own a web presence that they can manage.
• Most plugins will normally work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your website with immediate capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins offer more extensive options and may require some configuration.

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

Like themes, thousands of great plugins are available to WP users … often at $0 cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you will find plugins that will do almost everything you need a web site to do.

There are plugins for:

• User Management
• Content Management
• Traffic
• User Engagement
• Social Engagement
• Adding Media – Video, Images, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Biz And Online Sales Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Reporting
• Securing Your

You can add features to your website with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• User Surveys
• Managing ad banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single ordering with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Membership sites
• List-building opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonials
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your site from English to Italian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage integration
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your website
• Set client appointments and appointment reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and send you reports
• Redirect affiliate pages
• Monitor social conversations
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add a site map
• Exclude pages from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide post content
• Migrate data from different publishing applications
• Search and replace data
• Prevent SPAM
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Insert HTML and script elements into your website’s header and footer
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add a map
• Post your posts automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and others
• Display countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

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

If 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 web site.

For example, if you want content protection, you can use plugins to make an area of your page or post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a professional paid membership site with separate login details for users …

As mentioned before, you can use free plugins to enhance your business site in lots of different ways. From adding new features that enhance your business, your visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is happening on your site …

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

You can also add advanced functionality to your site using relatively inexpensive premium WordPress plugins. For example, you can download plugins that integrate and automate functionality on your pages such as customer feedback and event registration management …

And also run a custom-branded bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of paying web developers to design these functionality for you …

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

For example, your web visitors can:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with increased exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with other members via online forums or even set up a private online social network on your site.
• Engage with your staff via live webcam conferencing and chatroom facilities
• Call your business directly from their devices when browsing your site
• Open a support ticket
• And much more …

Finally you, can also integrate complex enterprise-level applications within a WP “front end”. This enables you to manage the content that your visitors see on your site, while your 3rd-party application handles the technological areas …

Plugins – Useful Information

• There are loads of good plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can inevitably affect your website’s resources and page loading times. It also creates more maintenance issues for you resulting from potential conflicts.
• Only keep those plugins that you really plan to use. Delete any plugins you don’t use from your site, as these utilize resources.
• Many free plugins normally receive very little to no support from the plugin author. When considering premium WP plugins, ensure that you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of our WP plugin reviews for additional information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two or more years), then think carefully before installing it. The WordPress application is updated often and outdated plugins can create issues.
• Always maintain all plugins up-to-date. Outdated plugins not only can create errors, they may also contain security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

As you can see, plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most downloaded online publishing platform in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to add new features to their web presence without having to spend thousands of dollars on outsourced web development costs.

One last thing on the subject of WP plugins:

If there is a functionality you need for your web site, you can be sure that a someone has probably already created one that will do exactly what you want it to do, and that this plugin can either be downloaded at no cost, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the price will be reasonable.

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

And, if by chance such a plugin has not been created yet, then it can probably be written for you at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what plugins are and how they can help to improve your web site. See our published posts to learn more about using WordPress plugins.

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