Tag: Plugins

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

About Plugins

Like most of us, you probably use a smart phone. What do you do when you would like to access something new on your phone like a new application, game or a productivity tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a little piece of software that is simple and easy to install and immediately adds new functionality to any smart device.

(Just like there are social sharing apps for mobile phones …)

A WP plugin is very much like an app. You download and install a software application that adds new functionality to your WP website or blog …

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

Almost always, expanding the functionality of an existing website involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the feature or enhancement is, the cost can be fairly significant, particularly if web developers need to create new code or edit code or develop scripts to integrate into your existing set up.

This is also applicable to setting up a website. Companies will often fork out money in advance on features they probably will never need.

To save money and keep your business expenses low, we suggest using a modular approach to developing a web presence presence and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get your business website up and running fast, then …

2) As more features become necessary, add new applications with a couple of mouse clicks directly from within your dashboard panel, to give your website or blog an entirely new range of useful features, and also …

3) Cost not a single dollar extra to install on your web site?

Well, this is just what plugins allow you to do!

Benefits Of Using WordPress Plugins

We started this post by comparing plugins with ’apps’. Just like some apps are free to download and some cost a little bit of money, so do plugins.

In fact, thousands of great plugins are freely available for WordPress users.

Plugins that cost money are referred to as Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the cost of hiring a professional web developer to get the same features and 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 code. This has allowed thousands of professional software developers to enhance the core software application.

• WP plugins let you start off with only a basic website and expand only as necessary.
• Plugins let you add practically unlimited functionality to your web presence easily, quickly and quite cheaply.
• Plugins give you practically unlimited expanding capabilities.
• WP plugins allow non-technical users to own a site that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to provide your site with instant new capabilities and enhancements.
• Some plugins are a little more advanced and may need some initial configuration.

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

Like many WP themes, loads of WordPress plugins are currently available to WordPress users … for FREE!

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find WordPress plugins that can do almost everything you can think of.

There are WordPress plugins for:

• User Administration
• Content Distribution
• Traffic
• User Engagement
• Social Media
• Media Utilities Automation
• Increasing Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Analysis Tools
• Securing Your

For example, you can enhance your WP site with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Surveys
• Rotating ad banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Automatic language translation (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
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media management
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Business directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your website
• Set appointments and appointment reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and email you reports
• Redirect users from old pages to other areas on your site or other sites
• Monitor social conversations
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Hide specific from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide post content
• Migrate content from different publishing applications
• Search and replace data
• Prevent SPAM
• Customize guest commenting (e.g. display Facebook discussions)
• Inserting scripts and code elements into your posts, pages and sidebar menus
• Add formatted tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map
• Syndicate your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and others
• Display countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, WP plugins give you endless business flexibility. If you plan to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing web site was not built using WordPress, then consider using WordPress in the future.

In case you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let’s take a look at how you can benefit instantly by simply installing a plugin on your web site.

For example, if you need content protection, you can install plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on a page inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a complete paid membership site with separate login details for users …

As mentioned previously, you can use free plugins to enhance your website in lots of ways. From adding new features that improve your business, your site’s user experience and your ability to review website data …

To increasing your site’s reach and visibility across various social media and search engines …

You can also add sophisticated functionality to your site using relatively inexpensive paid WordPress plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that automate functions on your site such as displaying customer testimonials and event bookings …

And also run a custom-branded bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to design similar functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of native WordPress commenting features and plugins that can increase your site’s interactivity …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site added exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with your team via online forums or even set up a private online community on your own site.
• Engage with your support staff using live chats
• Call your business directly from their laptops when visiting your site
• Open support tickets
• And much more …

You can also integrate sophisticated enterprise-level solutions within a WP “front end”. This allows you to manage your business sales and marketing, while your 3rd-party application handles the technological aspects …

WP Plugins – Useful Information

• There are so many plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can affect your site’s performance and site loading times. It also means more maintenance work for you resulting from potential conflicts and errors.
• Install only those plugins that you really plan to use. Delete any plugins from your site, as these utilize extra server resources.
• Many free plugins typically come with very little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing paid plugins, ensure that you check around a little and understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of our WordPress plugin recommendations for additional helpful information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two years), then think twice before installing it. The WordPress application changes regularly and out-of-date plugins can create issues.
• Always upgrade your plugins. Outdated plugins not only can create errors, they may also contain vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

As you can see, WordPress plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most popular CMS available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to expand without spending thousands of dollars on outsourced web developers.

One last thing regarding WordPress plugins:

If there is any feature or functionality you want for your web site, you can guarantee that a WP plugin currently exists that will do exactly what you want it to do, and that this plugin can either be downloaded for FREE, or if it’s a paid plugin, that it will be surprisingly affordable.

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

And, if by any chance this WordPress plugin is not available, then one can probably be developed for your business for a reasonable price.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of plugins – what plugins are and how they can significantly improve your business blog. See our related posts to learn more about usingplugins.

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