Category: WordPress Plugins

One of the most useful advantages of building a website using the WordPress content publishing platform is that you can easily enhance your WP web site’s functionality using plugins.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

No doubt, you most likely use a device like a mobile phone. What happens when you would like access to something new on your phone like a new application, software or a new productivity tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a piece of software that is easy to install and instantly integrates new functionality into a smart device.

(Just as you will find social sharing apps …)

A plugin is like an app. You install and activate an application that provides new functionality to your site …

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

Typically, if you need to expand the functionality of your web site, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the feature or enhancement, things can become quite expensive, especially if web developers have to create new code or edit templates or develop scripts that integrate into your current set up.

This is also applicable when creating a website. Companies often invest money up front in added features they probably will never need.

For sound, strategic business planning reasons, we recommend using a cost-effective approach when developing your web presence and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As the need arises, simply install new applications with a few clicks of the mouse directly from your admin area, to give your web site a completely new and expanded range of possibilities, and …

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

Well, this is precisely what plugins let you do!

Plugins – Benefits And Advantages

Earlier, we compared WordPress plugins with ’apps’. In the same way that some apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little money, the same is true with plugins.

In fact, loads of wonderful plugins are available at no cost to users.

WordPress plugins that you buy are referred to as “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the cost of purchasing a Premium WP plugin to the price of paying for web development services to get similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. ”paid”) plugins are generally quite inexpensive.

Also, since WordPress makes its code publicly available, any person can create, edit and customize any portion of the WordPress code. This has allowed many professional software developers to enhance and contribute to the WPsoftware.

• Plugins allow you to start off with a basic site and then expand only if necessary.
• Plugins allow you to add practically endless features to any web site easily, quickly and inexpensively.
• Plugins give you almost unlimited expansion capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow business owners to have a website that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins will work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your website or blog instant new capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins offer more extensive options and may need some initial configuring.

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

Just like WP themes, tens of thousands of great plugins are currently available for WP users … and many of these great plugins are 100% FREE!

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

As previously mentioned, you can find WordPress plugins that can do just about everything you can possibly need a website to do.

There are plugins for:

• Web Site Administration
• Content Syndication
• Traffic
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Media
• Uploading Media – Video, Graphics & Images, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Biz And Online Sales Automation
• Increasing Sales & Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Reporting
• WP Optimization

You can add features to a WP site with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Display advertising banners
• E-commerce (from managing single ordering with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, discount codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Automatic language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your website’s content from English to German)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media integration
• Making pages load faster
• 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 website links
• Monitor what social media users are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude specific from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect content on your posts and pages
• Import information from other publishing platforms
• Perform bulk content edits
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor commenting (e.g. display Facebook comments)
• Inserting code and code elements into your content
• Add and format tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced font display formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search listings
• Add location maps
• Publicize your content automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and others
• Display countdown timers (for expiring offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As it’s clear to see, WordPress plugins give you limitless possibilities. If you plan to build a web site for your business, or your existing website was not built with WordPress, then consider choosing WordPress in the future.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let’s take a look at some practical uses of adding an inexpensive plugin to your web site.

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

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to enhance your website in so many ways. From adding new features that enhance your business, your visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is taking place on your site …

To extending your business reach and visibility across various social media and search engines …

You can also add advanced features to your site using inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can buy plugins that integrate and automate tasks on your pages such as displaying customer testimonials and booking events …

And even set up a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring web developers to create custom functionality for you …

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

For example, your web visitors can:

• Leave comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site added exposure).
• Bookmark your content on social media.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with your team members through forums or even set up a private community on your site.
• Engage with members of your team using live video chats
• Call your business directly from their mobile phones while visiting your website
• Open a support ticket
• And so much more …

You can even integrate complex enterprise-level applications within a WP “front end”. This enables you to manage the content that your visitors see on your site, while your 3rd-party application handles the technological functions …

Useful Tips About WP Plugins

• There are loads of amazing plugins available. Be careful of overloading your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can inevitably affect your website’s performance and site loading times. It can also create more maintenance issues for you resulting from potential errors.
• Only keep the plugins that you really need. Delete all deactivated plugins from your site, as these utilize resources.
• Many free plugins often come with very little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing premium WordPress plugins, we recommend that you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check our plugin recommendations for additional information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two or more years), then think twice before using it. WordPress changes on a regular basis and older plugins that have not been updated can cause errors.
• Make sure that you always keep your plugins upgraded to their most recent software version. Older plugins not only can cause issues, they could also have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

As you can see, plugins are an important element of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most preferred web publishing solution available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add new functionality to their website without having to spend thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing on the subject of WP plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you need for your web presence, you can guarantee that a WP plugin probably exists that will do just what you need, and that this plugin will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the price will be surprisingly reasonable.

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

And, if by chance such a WordPress plugin is not available, then a custom plugin that does just what you want it to do can certainly be coded for you at a reasonable cost.

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

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