Category: WordPress Plugins

One of the main benefits of choosing the WordPress website publishing software is that you can quickly and easily enhance your WP site’s functionality using plugins.

What Are Plugins?

Like most of us, you probably own a device like a mobile phone. What do you do when you would like to access something new on your device like a new game or productivity tool?

You download and install an app!

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

(Just as you can find social sharing apps for smart phones …)

A WordPress plugin is similar to an app. You download and install an application that provides new functionality to your website …

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

Almost always, adding new features to an already-built web site involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the feature or enhancement is, the cost can be significant, especially if web developers need to create new code or edit code or install programs to integrate into your existing set up.

This also applies when creating a new website or business blog. Organizations will often invest money in advance in extra bells and whistles they may simply not need.

For this reason, we suggest using a sustainable approach to developing your website and WordPress plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine if you could:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get a basic, professional-looking web presence up and running quickly, then …

2) As new features and functionality are needed, add new applications with a few mouse clicks directly from within your admin area, and give your website or blog an entirely new and expanded range of practical capabilities, and also …

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

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

Plugins – Benefits

Earlier, we compared WP plugins with apps. Just like some apps are free to download and some apps cost a little money, so do WP plugins.

In fact, loads of useful plugins can be downloaded to your site for free.

WordPress plugins that you purchase are referred to as Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the cost of hiring a professional web developer to get similar functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. ”paid”) plugins cost very little.

Also, since WordPress makes its source code available to everyone, anyone can create, modify and customize any part of the WordPress code. This has allowed many professional web developers to enhance the WPsoftware.

• WordPress plugins allow you to start off with a simple website and then expand when necessary.
• WP plugins allow you to add practically unlimited features to any website quickly and inexpensively.
• WP plugins give your site practically endless expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow anyone to own a website that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your site immediate capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins provide more extensive options and may require some initial configuring.

Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Often) Completely FREE!

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

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

As mentioned earlier, you can find plugins that will do just about anything you want done.

There are plugins for:

• User Administration
• Content Syndication
• Driving Site Traffic
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Sharing
• Media Utilities Automation
• Improving Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Analysis Tools
• WordPress Security

For example, you can expand your website with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Managing advertising banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single sales with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, discount codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change your website’s content from English to Italian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage integration
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell spots on your blog
• Set up client appointments and reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and send you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor what social media users are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Hide specific from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide post content
• Import data from different CMS applications
• Perform bulk content edits
• Prevent SPAM
• Customize visitor commenting (e.g. display Facebook comments)
• Inserting scripts and code elements into your pages
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced content formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add business location maps
• Post your content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and many others
• Display countdown timers (for expiring offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As you can clearly see, WordPress plugins give you virtually limitless business flexibility. If you plan to build a web site, or your existing web site wasn’t built using WordPress, then consider getting one in the future, or you could be missing out on some serious features.

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 website.

For example, if you need to publish private content, you can install plugins to make a section of your page inaccessible, or create a complete membership site with separate login details for each member …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to enhance your web site in so many different ways. From adding functionality that enhance your business, your site’s user experience and your ability to analyze website data …

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

You can also add sophisticated features to your site using relatively inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can install plugins that automate tasks on your website like user testimonial and event registration management …

And also run a custom-branded bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of hiring software developers to code custom functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that will enhance user engagement …

For example, your web visitors can:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site added exposure).
• Bookmark your content on social networks.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with other online users via online forums or even set up a private online social network on your own domain.
• Engage with members of your team via live chats
• Dial your business directly from their mobile phones when visiting your pages
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

You can also integrate sophisticated “back end” applications within a WordPress “front end”. This enables you to control the content that your visitors see on your site, while the third-party application handles the technical areas …

Plugins – Some Useful Things To Know

• There are so many amazing plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your server with too many plugins, as this will affect your website’s performance and site loading speed. It can also mean more maintenance issues for you as a consequence of potential conflicts.
• Only keep those plugins that you really need. Delete any plugins you don’t need from your site, as these utilize extra server resources.
• Many free plugins normally come with very little to no support from the plugin author. When considering paid WP plugins, we recommend that you check some reviews online and see what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of our plugin recommendations for additional information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two years), then think carefully before installing it. WordPress is updated often and older plugins that have not been updated can cause issues.
• Always upgrade your plugins to their latest version. Outdated plugin not only can cause errors, they could also have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WordPress plugins are an important component of WordPress and contribute to making it the most preferred digital content publishing solution in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand quickly without having to spend thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing on the subject of WordPress plugins:

Whatever feature you need for your website, you can be sure that a plugin currently exists that will do what you want, and that this plugin can either be downloaded at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the price will be reasonable.

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

And, if by chance such a WP plugin does not exist, then one can probably be created for your business at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of plugins – what plugins are and how they can to improve your web site. See our published posts to learn about more great plugins that we recommend using.

***

***