Category: WordPress Plugins

One of the most powerful benefits of using the WordPress software is the ability to quickly increase your WordPress website’s functionality using plugins.

Understanding WordPress Plugins

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

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software application that is very easy to install and integrates new features and functionality into a smart phone.

(Just like there are social sharing apps …)

A plugin is similar to an app. You install an application that adds new functionality to your website or blog …

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

Almost always, adding new features to an existing web site involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the new features or enhancements are, this could become fairly expensive, particularly if website developers need to add new code or edit templates or develop scripts that integrate into your existing set up.

This also applies to developing a new web site. Companies will often pay for additional components they probably will never need.

For this reason, we suggest considering a cost-effective strategy to growing your website and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply with minimal expense involved. Get a professional-looking website up and running fast, then …

2) As more features become necessary, just install new software modules with a couple of clicks of the mouse directly from your dashboard panel, and give your website an entirely new range of practical features and capabilities, and also …

3) Cost not one cent more to add to your website?

Well, that’s just what plugins let you do!

WP Plugins – Benefits

I began this post by comparing WP plugins with ’apps’. Just like many apps are free to download and some apps cost a little money, so do WordPress plugins.

In fact, loads of plugins are freely available for users.

Plugins that you have to buy are referred to as “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the cost of paying for professional web development services to add similar functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are generally quite inexpensive.

Also, since WordPress makes its code publicly available, anyone can create, modify and customize any portion of the WordPress code. This has allowed many third-party software developers to create more plugins that enhance the WordPress platform than you can imagine.

• Plugins allow you to start off with only a simple online business presence and then expand only if required.
• Plugins let you add practically unlimited features to any web presence quickly and cheaply.
• Plugins give you almost unlimited expanding capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow anyone to have a web presence that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins will work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your site new capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins provide more extensive options and may require some initial configuring.

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

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

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

As mentioned earlier, you can find plugins that will do just about everything you need your website to do.

WordPress plugin categories cover:

• Website Management
• Content Distribution
• Driving Web Visitors
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Media
• Uploading Media – Video, Graphics & Images, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales & Marketing Automation
• Improving Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Reporting Applications
• Optimizing Your

For example, you can enhance a WordPress site with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• User Surveys
• Rotating banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, discount codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• List-building opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer feedback forms
• Language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to Italian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Cloud storage management
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell and manage spots on your website
• Set up appointments and appointment reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and email you reports
• Redirect website links
• Monitor social signals
• 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 page content
• Import data from non-WP applications
• Perform bulk data replacements
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor discussions (e.g. displaying Facebook posts)
• Inserting scripts and script elements into your website’s header and footer
• Add formatted tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced font display formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add a map
• Publish your posts automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and others
• Show countdown timers (for expiring offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As it’s clear to see, WP plugins give you limitless possibilities. If you are currently planning to build a website for your business, or your existing website isn’t built with WordPress, then consider choosing it in the future.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WordPress plugins are, let’s take a look at how you can benefit instantly by adding a plugin to your website.

For example, if you need to protect your content, you can use plugins to make a section of your post inaccessible, or create a full membership site with customized login details for each user …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to improve your website in lots of different ways. From adding features that will improve your business, your website visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is happening on your site …

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

You can also add complex functionality to your site using inexpensive paid WP plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that integrate and automate processes on your website such as displaying customer testimonials and event bookings …

And even run a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of paying programmers to create custom 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 visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can grow into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with increased exposure).
• Share your content with other online users on social media.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with your team through forums or even set up an online community on your domain.
• Engage with your support team via live web conferencing and chatrooms
• Call your business directly from their cellphones while browsing your site
• Get support via a user helpdesk
• And so much more …

You can even integrate sophisticated 3rd-party applications with a WordPress “front end”. This lets you control the content that your visitors will see on your website, while your third-party application handles the technological aspects …

WordPress Plugins – Some Useful Information

• There are many amazing plugins available. Be careful not to overload your server with too many plugins, as this will start to affect your site’s resources and page loading times. It can also create more maintenance issues for you as a consequence of potential conflicts.
• Only keep the plugins you really need. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these utilize server resources.
• Many free plugins normally receive little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing paid WP plugins, we recommend that you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of the plugin reviews we publish on this site 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 using it. WordPress changes regularly and older plugins can cause errors.
• Always keep your plugins updated. Outdated plugins not only can cause issues, they may also contain security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

As you can see, plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most preferred content management system available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to add instant functionality to their web presence without spending thousands of dollars on web development.

One last thing about plugins:

If there is any functionality you need for your website, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already authored one that will do just what you want it to do, and that it can either be accessed for FREE, or if it’s a paid plugin, that it will be reasonably inexpensive.

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

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

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of WP plugins – what plugins are and how they can improve your blog. See our related posts to learn more about usingplugins.

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