Category: WordPress Plugins

One of the main advantages of choosing the WordPress website publishing software is that you can easily increase your WordPress web site’s functionality using inexpensive (even completely free) applications called plugins.

Understanding WP Plugins

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

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

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

(Just as there are social sharing apps …)

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

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

Normally, if you decide to add a new feature to your website, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the new feature or enhancement, this cost can be fairly significant, particularly if web developers need to add new code or edit templates or develop programs that integrate with your current set up.

This is also applicable to creating a new website or business blog. Companies often spend money for extra components they probably will never need.

As part of sound strategic business planning, we recommend considering a sustainable approach when setting up your web site and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As you need new features or functionality, add new software modules with a few clicks of the mouse that integrate with your web site, giving your site a whole new and expanded range of useful features, and …

3) Cost not one dollar more to install on your site?

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

WP Plugins – Benefits

Earlier, we compared plugins with smartphone apps. In a similar way that many apps are free to download and some cost a little bit of money, so do plugins.

In fact, many fantastic 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 it to the price of investing in professional web development services to get similar functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are priced quite low.

Also, as WordPress distributes its software as an Open Source application, anybody can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the WP code. This has enabled many third-party software developers to create more new applications that add new features to WordPress than you can possibly imagine.

• WP plugins let you start off with a basic website and then expand when required.
• Plugins allow you to add almost endless features to any website easily, quickly and very cheaply.
• Plugins give you practically endless expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow business owners to own 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 provide your web site with immediate capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins are a little more advanced and may need some configuring.

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

Like many WP themes, thousands of great plugins are currently available for WordPress users … often at $0 cost!

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

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

WP plugin categories cover:

• Web Site Administration
• Content Distribution
• Web Traffic Generation
• User Engagement
• Social Engagement
• Media Utilities Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data & System Monitoring & Reporting Applications
• Optimizing Your

You can expand your website with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Rotating banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupons, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonial forms
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your pages from English to Portuguese)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage integration
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events
• Business directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your website
• Set up appointments and reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and send you reports
• Redirect visitors from specific pages to other areas on your site or other sites
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add a site map
• Exclude certain from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your posts and pages
• Import data from non-WP applications
• Search and replace data
• Prevent SPAM
• Customize visitor comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Inserting code and code elements into your content
• Add formatted tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add a map
• Post your posts automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and many others
• Display countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

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

In case you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using WP plugins, let’s take a look at some practical uses of installing a plugin on your website.

For example, if you need to publish content which is only accessible to some but not all users, you can install plugins to make an area of a page or post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a full paid membership site with personal login details for each user …

As mentioned before, you can use free plugins to enhance your web presence in lots of different ways. From adding functionality that improve your business, your web users’ experience and your understanding of what is taking place on your site …

To increasing your business reach across various social sites and search engines …

You can also add sophisticated functionality to your website using relatively inexpensive paid WP plugins. For example, you can buy plugins that integrate and automate features on your site like user testimonial and event registration management …

And also set up a complete bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying programmers to design similar functionality for you …

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

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Leave 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).
• Share your posts with other web users on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with your team through forums or even set up a private online community on your domain.
• Engage with your team through live chats
• Call your business from their smart phones while browsing your site
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

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

Plugins – Additional Things You Should Know

• There are many great plugins available. Be careful of overloading your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can eventually affect your site’s resources and site loading times. It can also mean more maintenance issues for you resulting from possible errors.
• Install only those plugins that you really use. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these use resources.
• Many free plugins typically come with very little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing premium plugins, ensure 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 our plugin recommendations for more useful 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 carefully before using it on your website. WordPress changes frequently and older plugins that have not been updated can create problems.
• Always update your plugins. Older plugins not only can create errors, they could also contain security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

As you can see, plugins are an important component of WordPress and contribute to making it the most used content management system in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add new features to their web presence without having to spend thousands of dollars on web development.

One last thing about plugins:

If there is a functionality you need for your website, you can guarantee that a plugin probably exists that will do what you need, and that it can either be accessed for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the cost will be quite reasonable.

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

And, if by chance this WP plugin has not been created yet, then a custom plugin that does just what you would like it to do can probably be coded for you at a reasonable cost.

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

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