Category: WordPress Basics

One of the main benefits of WordPress is that you can quickly increase your WordPress website or blog’s functionality using plugins.

Understanding Plugins

No doubt, you probably use a device like a cell phone. What do you do when you want access to something new on your device like a new application, game or tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

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

(Just like you will find social sharing apps for smart phones …)

A plugin is like an app. You install and activate a software application that provides new functionality to your WordPress site …

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

Almost always, expanding the functionality of an already-built website involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the new features or enhancements are, things can get fairly expensive, particularly if it involves editing code.

This also applies when setting up a web site. Business owners will often spend money for additional bells and whistles they may simply not need.

To save money and keep your costs down, we suggest considering a modular strategy to developing a web site and WordPress plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As new features and functionality are required, install new software modules with only a couple of mouse clicks that integrate seamlessly with your current website and blog, and give your website or blog an entirely new and expanded range of useful capabilities, and also …

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

Well, this is precisely what a WP plugin lets you do!

Benefits & Advantages Of WP Plugins

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

In fact, loads of plugins can be downloaded to your site at no cost.

WordPress plugins that cost money are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when you compare these to the cost of hiring a professional web developer to get the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are typically very inexpensive.

Also, since WordPress is an Open Source application, anybody can create, rewrite and customize any part of the WP code. This has enabled thousands of professional software developers to create more new applications that integrate with the WordPress platform than you can possibly imagine.

• WordPress plugins allow you to get started with a simple yet professional online business presence and add new features and enhancements to your site if required.
• WordPress plugins allow you to add practically endless functionality to your web presence easily and very cheaply.
• WordPress plugins give your web site almost unlimited expansion capabilities.
• WP plugins allow business owners to own a digital presence that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website or blog immediate capabilities and enhancements.
• Some plugins offer more extensive options and may need some configuring.

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

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

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find WordPress plugins that can do just about everything you could possibly want your site to do.

WP plugin categories cover:

• Web Site Administration
• Content Management
• Increasing Site Visitors
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Engagement
• Media Management Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Analysis Applications
• Site SEO

For example, you can add features to your website with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Managing advertising banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single ordering with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring payments, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your pages from English to Spanish)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media integration
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events
• Business directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your blog
• Set up appointments and appointment reminders
• Manage reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and send you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor what social media users are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude certain from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your posts and pages
• Migrate content from non-WordPress platforms
• Search and replace data
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize guest discussions (e.g. display Facebook posts)
• Insert scripts and code elements into your posts and pages
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add a map
• Post your content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and others
• Display countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, WP plugins give you virtually limitless business scalability. If you are currently planning to build a web site, or your existing web site wasn’t built using WordPress, then consider getting one in the future, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let me show you some practical advantages of adding an inexpensive plugin to your web site.

For example, if you want content protection, you can install plugins to make an area of a page inaccessible, or create a complete membership site with personal login details for all users …

As mentioned previously, you can use free plugins to enhance your site in lots of ways. From installing new features that improve your business, your website visitors’ experience and your ability to analyze visitor metrics …

To increasing your business reach and visibility across multiple social media and search engines …

You can also add advanced features to your site using relatively inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can buy plugins that integrate and automate processes on your site like user feedback and event registrations management …

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

You can also take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that will make your site even more interactive …

For example, your visitors can:

• 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 are then shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site added exposure).
• Share your posts with other web users on various social sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online with your team members via online forums or even set up a private online community on your own site.
• Engage with members of your team through live video chats
• Dial your business from their laptops while browsing your website
• Get help via a user helpdesk
• And much more …

Finally you, can even integrate sophisticated enterprise applications within a WordPress “front end”. This lets you control your business sales and marketing, while the third-party application handles the technological areas …

Useful Information About Plugins

• There are many great plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your site with too many plugins, as this will eventually begin to affect your site’s resources and page loading times. It can also create more maintenance work for you as a consequence of potential errors.
• Install only those plugins that you really need. Delete any plugins from your site, as these utilize resources.
• Many free plugins typically come with little to no support from the plugin developer. When considering premium plugins, we recommend that you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check some of the plugin reviews we provide here for more information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two years), then think twice before using it on your website. The WordPress core software updates frequently and older plugins that have not been updated can cause problems.
• Make sure to always maintain all plugins upgraded to their latest software version. Older plugins not only can cause errors, they could also have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WP plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most powerful, flexible and scalable content management system 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 web development.

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 plugin already exists that will do just what you need it to do, and that this plugin will either be available for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that it will be surprisingly affordable.

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

And, if by any chance this plugin does not exist, then one can probably be developed for you for a very reasonable price.

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

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