Tag: Plugins

One of the most powerful advantages of building a website with the WordPress website publishing platform is that you can easily expand your WordPress web site’s functionality using plugins.

Understanding Plugins

Like most people, you most likely use a smart phone. What happens when you want access to something new on your device like a new application, software or business tool?

You download and install an app!

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

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

A plugin is similar to an app. You simply install a little software application that adds new functionality to your WordPress web site …

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

Almost always, expanding the functionality of an already-built site involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the new features or enhancements are, things can become quite expensive, particularly if it involves programming code.

This also applies when creating a new web site. Companies sometimes pay money in advance for additional components they may not need.

As part of sound strategic business planning, we suggest a cost-effective approach to growing a web presence and WordPress plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As you need new features, you can add new applications with only a few mouse clicks directly from within your admin section, to give your website or blog a whole new and expanded range of possibilities, and …

3) Cost not one cent extra to install on your site?

Well, that’s exactly what WP plugins allow you to do!

WP Plugins – Benefits

Earlier, we compared WordPress plugins with apps. Just like some apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little bit of money, so do plugins.

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

WP plugins that cost money are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the cost of a Premium WordPress plugin to the price of paying for professional web development services to add similar functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are priced quite low.

Also, since WordPress is an Open Source application, any web developer can create, modify and customize any portion of the code. This has enabled many professional web developers to build more new tools that “plug into” WordPress than you can imagine.

• Plugins let you start off with a simple site and add new features and enhancements to your site only if necessary.
• Plugins allow you to add almost endless features to any online business presence easily, quickly and really inexpensively.
• WP plugins give your digital business presence almost endless expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow ”non-techies” to have a site that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website instant new enhancements and features.
• Some plugins can be a little more advanced and may require some initial configuring.

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

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

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find plugins that can do just about anything you can think of.

Plugin categories cover:

• Web Site Administration
• Content Distribution
• Increasing Web Visitors
• User Engagement
• Social Media
• Media Utilities Automation
• Improving Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data & System Monitoring & Reporting Tools
• Web Site SEO

For example, you can enhance your website with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• User Surveys
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to enterprise scale e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonial forms
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to French)
• 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
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events & bookings
• Business directories
• Automatically sell spots on your site
• Set appointments and appointment reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and email you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude certain from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect page content
• Import information from non-WP applications
• Perform bulk content replacements
• Fight SPAM commenting
• Customize guest commenting (e.g. display Facebook comments)
• Insert code and script elements into your posts
• Add tables
• Display animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map of your business location
• Publicize your posts automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and others
• Show countdown timers (for expiring offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As you can clearly see, plugins give you practically limitless business flexibility. If you plan to build a website for your business, or your existing web site isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider getting one added to your domain, or you could be missing out on some serious functionality.

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 site.

For example, if you want content protection, you can use plugins to make a section of your post or page inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a professional membership site with separate login details for all users …

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

To increasing your site’s visibility across a number of social networks and search engines …

You can also add sophisticated features to your site using relatively inexpensive paid plugins. For example, you can set up plugins that integrate and automate features on your pages like displaying customer testimonials and booking events …

And even run a custom-branded bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of paying programmers to design the same applications for you …

You can also take advantage of built-in WordPress commenting features and plugins that will enhance your site’s interactivity …

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 your visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online with your team using online forums or even set up a private social network on your site.
• Engage with your support staff using live chats
• Call your business directly from their laptops while browsing your pages
• Open a support ticket
• And so much more …

Finally you, can also integrate sophisticated third-party solutions with a WP “front end”. This enables you to manage your business marketing, while the third-party application handles the technological aspects …

Plugins – Useful Things To Know

• There are so many great WordPress plugins available. Be careful of overloading your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will affect your website’s performance and site loading speed. It can also create more maintenance issues for you as a result of potential conflicts and errors.
• Install only the plugins you really need. Delete any plugins from your site, as these utilize server resources.
• Many free plugins often receive very little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing premium WordPress plugins, we recommend that you check around a little 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 reviews for additional information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two years), then think carefully before using it. The WordPress platform updates frequently and older plugins that have not been updated can create problems.
• Make sure that you always keep your plugins updated. Older plugins not only can cause issues, they may also contain vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WP plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most powerful, flexible and scalable CMS 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 web development costs.

One last thing about plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you want for your website, you can guarantee that a plugin probably exists that will do just what you need, and that it will either be available for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that it will be fairly inexpensive.

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

And, if by any chance this plugin does not exist, then one can probably be written for you at a reasonable cost.

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

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