Category: WordPress Training Manual

One of the main benefits of building a website with the WordPress software is that you can easily increase your WordPress website or blog’s functionality using plugins.

About Plugins

No doubt, you probably own a device like a smart phone. What do you do when you want access to something new on your phone like a new application, game or a new business tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software that is very simple and easy to install and integrates new features into a mobile phone.

(Just as there are social sharing apps …)

A WP plugin is similar to an app. You install an application that provides new functionality to your WP site …

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

Typically, if you need to add new features to your site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new feature or enhancement is, this cost can be quite significant, especially if it involves programming code.

This also applies when setting up a website. Companies will often invest money in features they may never need.

For sound, strategic business planning reasons, we recommend a cost-effective approach when setting up a web site and WordPress plugins are ideal for doing this.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could:

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

2) As you need more features, add new software modules with just a couple of clicks of the mouse directly from within your WordPress dashboard panel, giving your site an entirely new range of features and functionality, and also …

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

Well, this is just what a WordPress plugin allows you to do!

Benefits Of WP Plugins

Earlier, we compared plugins with ’apps’. In the same way that many apps are free to download and some apps cost a little money, the same applies to WP plugins.

In fact, thousands of plugins can be downloaded to your website for free.

WordPress plugins that you buy are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of hiring a professional web developer to add similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are generally quite inexpensive.

Also, because WordPress makes its source code publicly available, anyone can create, rewrite and customize any part of the code. This has enabled thousands of third-party web development companies to create more new plugins that add new functionality to the WordPress platform than you can probably imagine.

• Plugins let you start off with only a basic yet professional website and then expand if necessary.
• Plugins let you add practically endless functionality to any site easily and inexpensively.
• WordPress plugins give you almost unlimited expansion capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow anyone to have a website that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins will normally work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your web site with immediate capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins are a little more complex and could require some initial configuring.

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

Like many themes, thousands of great WordPress plugins are available to WP users … often at no cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you can find plugins that will do almost anything you could possibly want your site to do.

There are WP plugins for:

• User Administration
• Content Management
• Traffic
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Sharing
• Managing Media – Videocasts, Images, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales & Advertising Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Analysis Tools
• Securing Your WordPress Blog

You can enhance your website with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Surveys
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from managing single ordering with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, coupons, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• List-building opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonials
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your website from English to Portuguese)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage integration
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events & bookings
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your blog
• Set appointments and reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and send you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor social conversations
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude pages from showing on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your pages and posts
• Migrate content from other publishing platforms
• Perform bulk data replacements
• Prevent SPAM commenting
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. display Facebook posts)
• Inserting code and code elements into your posts and pages
• Add tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• 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 expiring offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

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

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WordPress plugins are, let me show you some practical advantages of installing an inexpensive plugin on your website.

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

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

To extending your business reach and visibility across a number of 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 site like displaying customer testimonials and booking events …

And also run a complete bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to build the same applications for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of built-in WordPress commenting features and plugins that can allow you to engage even more with web visitors, clients and registered site members …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then 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 members using online forums or even set up a private community on your site.
• Engage with members of your team through live web conferencing and chatrooms
• Dial your business from their smart phones while visiting your website
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

Finally you, can also integrate sophisticated enterprise-level solutions with a WP “front end”. This allows you to manage the content that your visitors see on your website, while your 3rd-party application handles the technological aspects …

Useful Tips About Plugins

• There are lots of amazing plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your site with too many plugins, as this will begin to affect your website’s resources and site loading speed. It also creates more maintenance work for you as a result of possible errors.
• Only keep those plugins you really plan to use. Delete any plugins you don’t need from your site, as these use server resources.
• Many free plugins typically come with little to no support from the plugin developer. When considering premium plugins, we recommend that you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, updates, new features, etc. Be sure to check some of our WordPress plugin reviews for additional useful information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two years), then think twice before installing it. WordPress is updated often and outdated plugins can cause issues.
• Make sure to always maintain your plugins up-to-date. Outdated plugins not only can cause conflicts, they could also have security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an important feature of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most downloaded digital content open source software available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add instant functionality to their web presence without having to spend thousands of dollars on outsourced web development.

One last thing on the subject of plugins:

If there is any functionality you want for your web presence, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already authored one that will do just what you want, and that this plugin can either be accessed at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the price to buy it will be reasonable.

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

And, if by any chance this WP plugin is not available, then it can most certainly be developed for your business for a reasonable price.

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

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