Category: WordPress Plugins

One of the main advantages of using the WordPress web site publishing software is that you can easily enhance your WordPress website’s functionality using plugins.

What Are WP Plugins?

No doubt, you most likely own a smart phone. What do you do when you want to access something new on your phone like a new application, software or a business productivity tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a little software application that is really easy to install and adds new functionality to your mobile device.

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

A plugin is like an app. You install a little piece of software that provides new functionality to your web site …

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

Normally, if you decide to expand the functionality of an existing web site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the features or enhancements are, the cost can be significant, especially if web developers have to create new code or modify programs or develop scripts that integrate with your current set up.

This also applies to developing a new website or business blog. Businesses tend to spend money up-front on components they may simply not need.

For sound, strategic business planning reasons, we recommend a cost-effective strategy to developing your website and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could:

1) Start simply and with minimal expense involved. Get a basic, professional-looking web site up and running quickly, then …

2) As the need for new capabilities arises, add new applications with a few clicks of the mouse that integrate seamlessly with your web site, and give your site a completely new range of possibilities, and also …

3) Cost not one dollar more to add to your web site?

Well, this is exactly what WordPress plugins allow you to do!

Benefits Of Using Plugins

Earlier, we compared plugins with apps. Just like some apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little money, the same applies with plugins.

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

Plugins that you buy are called ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the cost of buying a Premium WordPress plugin to the cost of investing in professional web development services to get the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are priced quite cheaply.

Also, since WordPress distributes its software as an Open Source application, any web developer can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the code. This has allowed many professional software development professionals to create more plugins that work with the WordPress platform than you can possibly imagine.

• WP plugins allow you to get started with just a basic site and expand only as necessary.
• WordPress plugins let you add almost unlimited features to your website quickly, easily and quite inexpensively.
• WordPress plugins give you virtually endless expansion capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow ”non-techies” 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 new capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins can be slightly more complex and require some initial configuring.

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

Like WP themes, tens of thousands of great WordPress plugins are currently available to WordPress users … for FREE!

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find plugins that will do almost everything you want done.

There are plugins for:

• Web Site Administration
• Content Management
• Driving Site Traffic
• User Engagement
• Social Engagement
• Inserting Media Files – Videocasts, Images, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales & Advertising Automation
• Increasing Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Reporting
• WordPress Security

For example, you can expand your business online presence with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from managing single ordering with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce stores with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User feedback forms
• Instant language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your website from English to German)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage management
• Faster page loading
• Managing events
• Business directories
• Automatically sell and manage spots on your blog
• Set up appointments and reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and email you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude pages from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your posts and pages
• Migrate information from other publishing platforms
• Perform bulk content edits
• Fight SPAM
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook posts)
• Inserting code and script elements into your posts
• Add tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google local search
• Add a map of your business location
• Post your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and many others
• Show countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As you can clearly see, plugins give you endless business flexibility. If you plan to build a web site, or your existing website wasn’t built with WordPress, then consider using WordPress in the future.

In case you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using WordPress plugins, let me show you some practical uses of adding an inexpensive plugin to your site.

For example, if you need content protection, you can use plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on your page or post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a full membership site with personal login details for all users …

As mentioned before, free plugins can be used to improve your business site in lots of ways. From adding new features that can enhance your business, your web users’ experience and your ability to analyze site data …

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

You can also add sophisticated functionality to your site using inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that integrate and automate functions on your pages like customer feedback and event registrations management …

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

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

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with added exposure).
• Share your content with other web users on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with your support team via online forums or even set up a private online community on your own domain.
• Engage with members of your team through live web conferencing and chatroom facilities
• Call your business directly from their cellphones when browsing your pages
• Get support via a dedicated user help desk
• And much more …

Finally you, can also integrate sophisticated 3rd-party solutions with a WP “front end”. This lets you control the content that your visitors will see on your site, while the third-party application handles the technological side of things …

WordPress Plugins – Additional Tips

• There are loads of plugins to choose from. Be careful not to overload your site with too many plugins, as this can start to affect your website’s performance and site loading speed. It also means more maintenance issues for you as a result of potential conflicts and errors.
• Only keep those plugins you really need. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these use resources.
• Many free plugins often receive very little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing premium 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 our plugin reviews 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 installing it. The WordPress application is updated often and older plugins that have not been updated can create errors.
• Make sure to always keep your plugins updated. Older plugins not only can create errors, they could also contain vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an important component of WordPress and contribute to making it the most preferred CMS available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add new functionality to their web presence without having to spend thousands of dollars on outsourced web developers.

One last thing on the topic of plugins:

Whatever feature you want for your website, you can be sure that a someone has probably already developed one that will do just what you want, 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 very affordable.

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

And, if by chance this plugin is not available, then it can probably be created for your business at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of plugins – what plugins are and how they can enhance the functionality of your WP site. See our related posts section to learn about more useful WP plugins that we recommend using.

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