Category: WordPress Plugins

One of the main features of the WordPress software is the ability to quickly and easily expand your WordPress website or blog’s functionality using plugins.

What Are WP Plugins?

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

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a little piece of software that is very easy to install and adds new features to your mobile device.

(Just like there are social sharing apps for mobile phones …)

A WP plugin is similar to an app. You simply install and activate a software application that provides new functionality to your web site …

(… there are also social sharing plugins for WP!)

Typically, if you want to add new features to an existing website, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the feature or enhancements, the cost can be quite significant, particularly if it involves website development.

This also applies to starting a website. Business owners sometimes invest in extra components they probably will never need.

To minimize costs, we suggest considering a cost-effective approach when developing your web site and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could:

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

2) As new features or functionality are required, you can add new applications with a couple of clicks of the mouse that integrate with your current site, and give your site an entirely new and expanded range of practical features and capabilities, and also …

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

Well, that’s exactly what a WordPress plugin enables you to do!

Benefits & Advantages Of Plugins

I started this post by comparing plugins with mobile apps. Just like many apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little money, the same applies to plugins.

In fact, thousands of plugins can be downloaded to your website for free.

WordPress plugins that you buy are referred to as Premium plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the price of buying a Premium WordPress plugin to the price of paying for web development services to get similar functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are priced quite low.

Also, as WordPress is an Open Source application, anyone can create, rewrite and customize any part of the code. This has allowed thousands of professional web development companies to create more plugins that “plug into” the WordPress engine than you can possibly imagine.

• WP plugins let you start off with just a simple web presence and expand if necessary.
• Plugins let you add practically endless features to your website quickly, easily and cheaply.
• Plugins give you almost endless expanding capabilities.
• WP plugins allow non-technical website owners to own a website that they can fully manage.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website or blog instant new capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins can be a little more advanced and may need some configuration.

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

Like themes, thousands of WP plugins are made available to WP users … for FREE!

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

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

Plugin categories cover:

• Site Management
• Content Distribution
• Increasing Site Visitors
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Sharing
• Media Management Automation
• Improving Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Reporting Applications
• Optimizing Your

For example, you can enhance your website with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Managing advertising banners
• E-commerce (from managing single ordering with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupons, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonial forms
• Automatic language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to Norwegian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage integration
• Faster page loading
• Managing events & bookings
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell and manage spots on your website
• Set client appointments and appointment reminders
• Manage reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and send you reports
• Redirect visitors from certain pages to other pages on your site or other sites
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add a site map
• Hide specific from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide post content
• Migrate data from different CMS applications
• Perform bulk data replacements
• Fight SPAM commenting
• Customize guest discussions (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Inserting HTML and script elements into your posts and pages
• Add tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search listings
• Add a map
• Post your posts automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and many others
• Show countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As you can clearly see, WP plugins give you practically endless possibilities. If you plan to build a web site, or your existing web site wasn’t built using WordPress, then consider choosing WordPress in the future.

If you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using plugins, let me show you how you can benefit instantly by simply installing a plugin on your website.

For example, if you want to publish content which is only accessible to some but not all users, you can use plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on a page or post inaccessible, or create a full paid membership site with customized login details for every member …

As mentioned previously, you can use free plugins to improve your web presence in so many different ways. From adding functionality that can improve your business, your web users’ experience and your ability to analyze site metrics …

To increasing your site’s visibility across a number of social sites and search engines …

You can also add complex functionality to your website using relatively inexpensive premium WP plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that integrate and automate functionality on your site like managing customer testimonials and booking events …

And even run a custom bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to code similar applications for you …

You can also take advantage of built-in WordPress commenting features and plugins that will make your site even more interactive …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site increased exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online directly with other online users through forums or even set up a private online social network on your own site.
• Engage with members of your team using live video chats
• Call your business from their laptops while visiting your site
• Get help via a dedicated customer helpdesk
• And so much more …

Finally you, can even integrate complex enterprise solutions using a WordPress “front end”. This allows you to control the content that your visitors see on your website, while the 3rd-party application handles the technological side of things …

Plugins – Additional Tips

• There are many plugins to choose from. Be careful not to overload your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can start to affect your site’s performance and page loading times. It also means more maintenance work for you resulting from potential conflicts.
• Only keep the plugins that you really need to use. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these also utilize server resources.
• Many free plugins often come with very little to no support from the plugin author. When considering paid plugins, make sure you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check our WP plugin recommendations for more useful information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two or more years), then think carefully before installing it on your website. The WordPress software is updated on a regular basis and out-of-date plugins can cause errors.
• Always keep your plugins updated. Outdated plugin not only can cause conflicts, they may also have security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

As you can see, WP plugins are an important part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most downloaded web management application in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand without having to spend thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing regarding plugins:

If there is a feature or functionality you need for your web presence, you can be sure that a WordPress plugin probably exists that will do just what you need, and that it will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that it will be reasonably affordable.

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

And, if by chance this WordPress plugin is not available, then a custom plugin that does precisely what you need it to do can certainly be developed for your business at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of plugins – what they are and how they can help enhance the functionality of your blog. See our published posts to learn about more popular WP plugins that we recommend using.

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