Tag: Plugins

One of the main advantages of building a website with WordPress is that you can easily expand your WP website’s functionality using inexpensive (even 100% free) software called plugins.

What Are Plugins?

Like most of us, you most likely own a cell phone. What do you do when you want access to something new on your phone like a new software or a new business productivity tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software that is simple and easy to install and adds new features to any smart device.

(Just like you can find social sharing apps …)

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

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

Normally, if you decide to expand the functionality of your site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new feature or enhancement is, this could get fairly expensive, especially if web developers have to add new code or edit programs or develop scripts that integrate with your current set up.

This also applies when starting a new website or business blog. Business owners will often invest money in features they probably will never need.

For this reason, we recommend using a sustainable strategy to setting up a web site and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could:

1) Start simply with minimal cost involved. Get a professional business web presence up and running fast, then …

2) As you need more features and functionality, simply add new software modules with just a few mouse clicks directly from within your admin panel, to give your website a completely new and expanded range of possibilities, and …

3) Cost not a single cent extra to add to your website?

Well, that’s precisely what WordPress plugins allow you to do!

WP Plugins – Benefits & Advantages

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

In fact, many plugins can be installed on your websites.

Plugins that cost money are called “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare these to the price of hiring a professional web developer to get similar 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 person can create, edit and customize any portion of the WP code. This has enabled thousands of professional web development professionals to enhance and contribute to the WordPresssoftware.

• Plugins let you start simply with only a basic yet professional online business presence and then expand only as required.
• WordPress plugins let you add practically unlimited features to any web presence easily and inexpensively.
• Plugins give you practically unlimited expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow business owners to own a site that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website or blog instant new capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins can be slightly more advanced and require some initial configuration.

Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Many Are) Completely FREE!

Just like themes, thousands of great plugins are made available for WordPress users … often at $0 cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you can find plugins that can do almost everything you could think of.

There are WordPress plugins for:

• Site Management
• Content Distribution
• Traffic
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Monitoring
• Inserting Media Files – Video, Graphics & Images, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales & Advertising Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Analysis Applications
• Website SEO

You can enhance a website with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, coupons, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer feedback forms
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your site from English to Italian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage management
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your website
• Set up appointments and appointment reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and send you reports
• Redirect users from specified pages to other areas on your site or other websites
• Monitor social conversations
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude pages from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect content on your pages and posts
• Import data from non-WP platforms
• Perform bulk data replacements
• Prevent SPAM commenting
• Customize guest discussions (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Insert code and script elements into your posts, pages and sidebars
• Add tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced font display formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add location maps
• Post your content automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and many others
• Show countdown timers (for scarcity offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As you can clearly see, WP plugins give you virtually endless possibilities. If you are planning to build a web site, or your existing web site isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider using WordPress in the future.

In case you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WP plugins are, let’s take a look at how you can benefit instantly by simply adding an inexpensive plugin to your website.

For example, if you need to protect your content, you can install plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on a post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a professional paid membership site with customized login details for all users …

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

To increasing your business visibility across social sites and search engines …

You can also add complex functionality to your site using relatively inexpensive paid WordPress plugins. For example, you can install plugins that integrate and automate processes on your pages like customer feedback and event bookings management …

And even run a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of hiring software developers to build custom functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of built-in WP commenting features and plugins that can allow you to engage more with your web visitors, customers and registered site members …

For example, your web visitors can:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site additional exposure).
• Bookmark your content on various social sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with your staff through online forums or even set up a private social network on your domain.
• Engage with your support team using live chats
• Dial your business from their devices while visiting your site
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

You can even integrate sophisticated third-party solutions within a WP “front end”. This allows you to manage the content that your visitors see on your web site, while the third-party application handles the technological side of things …

Plugins – Additional Information

• There are loads of plugins available. Be careful of overloading your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can start to affect your website’s resources and page loading times. It also creates more maintenance issues for you as a consequence of potential errors.
• Only keep those plugins you really need. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these utilize additional server resources.
• Many free plugins often come with little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing paid plugins, make sure 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 more 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 on your site. WordPress is updated frequently and older WP plugins can create errors.
• Make sure to always upgrade your plugins. Older plugins not only can cause errors and conflicts, they may also contain security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

As you can see, plugins are an important feature of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most downloaded content management system available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add instant features to their website without spending thousands of dollars on outsourced web development costs.

One last thing about WordPress plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you need for your website, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already authored one that will do what you need it to do, and that this plugin will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the price will be reasonable.

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

And, if by any chance this plugin has not been created yet, then one can probably be coded for your business for a very reasonable price.

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

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