Category: WordPress Plugins

One of the main benefits of building a digital presence with the WordPress platform is that you can quickly and easily increase your WP web site’s functionality using plugins.

About Plugins

Like most people, you probably have a device like a mobile phone. What happens 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 piece of software that is easy to install and immediately adds new features and functionality to your smart device.

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

A plugin is really similar to an app. You simply install and activate a little software application that provides new functionality to your website or blog …

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

Generally, expanding the functionality of your web site involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the feature or enhancements, things could become quite expensive, particularly if it requires editing code.

This also applies when creating a website or business blog. Companies sometimes fork out money up-front for bells and whistles they probably will never need.

For sound, strategic business planning reasons, we suggest a modular approach to growing a web presence presence and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get a web site up and running quickly, then …

2) As you need more features or functionality, just add new applications with only a couple of mouse clicks directly from your dashboard section, to give your web site a completely new range of practical features and capabilities, and also …

3) Cost not a single cent more to add to your web site?

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

Benefits Of Using Plugins

Earlier, we compared WP plugins with apps. In a similar way that many apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little bit of money, the same is true for plugins.

In fact, loads of plugins can be installed and activated on your websites.

Plugins that you purchase are called “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the price of a Premium WP plugin to the cost of paying for web development services to get similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are typically quite inexpensive.

Also, as WordPress is an Open Source application, anybody can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the code. This has allowed thousands of professional software developers to build more plugins that add new features to the WordPress platform than you can imagine.

• WP plugins allow you to start off with just a simple yet professional site and add new features and enhancements to your site only as required.
• WordPress plugins let you add almost endless functionality to your website quickly and quite cheaply.
• WP plugins give your site practically endless expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow anyone to own a site that they can manage.
• Most plugins will normally work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website or blog immediate capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins offer more advanced options and may need some configuration.

WP Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Often) 100% FREE!

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

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

As previously mentioned, you can find plugins that will do just about everything you can think of.

There are WP plugins for:

• Site Administration
• Content Distribution
• Web Traffic Generation
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Sharing
• Media Management Automation
• Increasing Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Analysis
• Optimizing Your WP Web Site

You can expand a website with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Rotating banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer feedback forms
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your pages from English to Italian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage integration
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Business directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your website
• Set up client appointments and appointment reminders
• Manage reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and send you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add a site map
• Exclude specific from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect post content
• Migrate content from different publishing platforms
• Perform bulk data edits
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. display Facebook discussions)
• Insert scripts and script elements into your posts, pages and sidebars
• 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 content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and others
• Display countdown timers (for special offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As you can clearly see, plugins give you limitless business flexibility. If you are currently planning to build a website, or your existing web site isn’t built with WordPress, then consider using it in the future.

If you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using WP plugins, let’s take a look at how you can benefit instantly by simply installing a plugin on your web site.

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

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to improve your web site in so many ways. From adding functionality that enhance your business, your visitors’ experience and your ability to analyze site metrics …

To extending your site’s reach and visibility across social sites and search engines …

You can also add sophisticated functionality to your website using relatively inexpensive premium WP plugins. For example, you can buy plugins that automate processes on your website like customer feedback and event bookings management …

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

Additionally, you can take advantage of built-in WP commenting features and plugins that will make your site even more interactive …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the native WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site increased exposure).
• Share your content with other online users on various social sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with other members via online forums or even set up a private social network on your domain.
• Engage with members of your team through live chats
• Call your business directly from their devices when browsing your site
• Open a support ticket
• And much more …

You can even integrate complex 3rd-party solutions using a WordPress “front end”. This lets you manage the content that your visitors see on your website, while your 3rd-party application handles the technical functions …

Some Useful Things You Should Know About Plugins

• There are lots of great WordPress plugins available. Be careful of overloading your site with too many plugins, as this will invariably affect your site’s performance and site loading speed. It can also create more maintenance work for you resulting from possible conflicts and errors.
• Only keep those plugins that you really need to use. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these use server resources.
• Many free plugins normally come with very little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing premium WordPress plugins, we recommend that you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, updates, new features, etc. Be sure to check our plugin reviews for additional useful information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two or more years), then think carefully before installing it. WordPress is updated frequently and older plugins that have not been updated can cause errors.
• Ensure to always update your plugins. Older plugin not only can cause problems, they could also have security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

As you can see, plugins are an important aspect of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress 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 regarding plugins:

If there is any feature you want for your web presence, you can be sure that a someone has probably already developed one that will do exactly what you need, and that it will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the price to purchase it will be reasonable.

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

And, if by any chance such a plugin is not available, then one can certainly be developed for your business at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what plugins are and how they can improve your website. See our published posts to learn about more popular plugins that we recommend using.

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