Tag: Plugins

One of the most useful benefits of WordPress is the ability to quickly and easily expand your WP website’s functionality using inexpensive called plugins.

About WordPress Plugins

No doubt, you most likely use a cell phone. What do you do when you want access to something new on your device like a new application, game or a tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a little software that is easy to install and adds new features and functionality to your smart device.

(Just like you can find social sharing apps for mobile devices …)

A plugin is like an app. You simply download and install a software that adds new functionality to your site …

(… there are also social sharing plugins for WordPress users!)

Generally, if you need to add a new feature to your website, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the feature or enhancement, things can become fairly expensive, particularly if it involves website development.

This is also applicable when developing a web site. Companies will often fork out money upfront for features they may probably never need.

As part of sound strategic business planning, we suggest a cost-effective approach when developing a web site and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could:

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

2) As the need arises, you can install new applications with a few mouse clicks that integrate with your current website and blog, to give your website or blog an entirely new range of possibilities, and …

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

Well, this is just what a WP plugin enables you to do!

Benefits Of Plugins

We began this article by comparing plugins with smartphone apps. Just like many apps are free to download and some cost a little bit of money, the same applies with plugins.

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

WordPress plugins that cost money are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the price of a Premium WordPress plugin to the price of hiring a professional web developer to get similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are priced quite cheaply.

Also, because WordPress distributes its software as an Open Source application, any person can create, rewrite and customize any part of the code. This has allowed many third-party software developers to create more plugins that work seamlessly with WordPress than you can imagine.

• Plugins let you start off with just a basic web site and add new features and enhancements to your site only when necessary.
• Plugins let you add practically unlimited features to your website quickly, easily and really cheaply.
• WordPress plugins give your site virtually unlimited expansion capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow ”non-techies” to own a web presence that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your web site new capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins provide more extensive options and may need some configuration.

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

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

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

As previously mentioned, you can find plugins that can do almost anything you need done.

Plugin categories cover:

• Web Site Administration
• Content Syndication
• Increasing Site Traffic
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Media
• Media Management Automation
• Improving Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Monitoring & Reporting
• Optimizing Your WordPress Blog

For example, you can add features to your WP site with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Rotating banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single ordering with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce stores with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupons, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Membership sites
• List-building opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonials
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your website from English to Spanish)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage management
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell spots on your blog
• Set client appointments and reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks on your pages and email you reports
• Redirect affiliate pages
• 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 showing on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your pages and posts
• Migrate data from other CMS applications
• Search and replace content
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize guest commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Insert code and code elements into your content
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced font display formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map of your business location
• Publish your posts automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and many others
• Display countdown timers (for special offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As you can clearly see, WordPress plugins give you practically endless possibilities. If you plan to build a website or blog, or your existing site wasn’t built with WordPress, then consider choosing WordPress in the future.

In case you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using WP plugins, let me show you how you can benefit by simply installing an inexpensive plugin on your site.

For example, if you need to publish private content, you can install plugins to make a section of a page inaccessible, or create a full membership site with customized login details for users …

As mentioned previously, you can use free plugins to enhance your web site in lots of different ways. From adding functionality that enhance your business, your web users’ experience and your ability to analyze visitor metrics …

To increasing your business reach across many social networks and search engines …

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

And also run a complete bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to design these applications for you …

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

For example, your visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can grow into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with increased exposure).
• Share your posts with other online users on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with other online users using forums or even set up a private community on your site.
• Engage with members of your team through live chats
• Call your business from their smart phones when visiting your website
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

Finally you, can even integrate complex enterprise-level applications within a WP “front end”. This allows you to control your business sales and marketing, while the third-party application handles the technological aspects …

Useful Information About Plugins

• There are so many plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your server with too many plugins, as this can affect your website’s resources and page loading speed. It also creates more maintenance issues for you as a consequence of possible errors.
• Only keep the plugins that you really need to use. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these also use server resources.
• Many free plugins often receive very little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing premium plugins, ensure that you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check some of the plugin reviews we provide on this site for more 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 twice before using it. The WordPress platform updates often and older plugins that have not been updated can cause conflicts.
• Always update your plugins to their most recent version. Older plugin not only can cause errors and conflicts, they may also have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

As you can see, WordPress plugins are an important component of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most powerful, flexible and scalable digital content open source software in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add new features to their website without having to spend thousands of dollars on outsourced web development.

One last thing about WordPress plugins:

If there is a feature you want for your web presence, you can be sure that a WordPress plugin probably exists that will do what you need it to do, and that this plugin can either be downloaded for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the cost will be very affordable.

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

And, if by any chance such a plugin has not been created yet, then it can most certainly be developed for your business at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what plugins are and how they can help to improve your web site. See our related posts section to learn more about usingplugins.

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