Tag: Plugins

One of the most powerful advantages of choosing the WordPress website publishing platform is the ability to easily increase your WP website or blog’s functionality using inexpensive (even completely free) applications called ’plugins’.

About WordPress Plugins

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

You download and install an app!

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

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

A plugin is really similar to an app. You install a software that provides new functionality to your WP website …

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

Normally, if you decide to add a new feature to your web site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new features or enhancements are, this can get fairly expensive, especially if it requires editing code.

This is also applicable to setting up a new web site. Companies will often invest money on features and options they may simply not need.

To avoid unnecessary expenses, we suggest a sustainable approach to developing a web site and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine if you could:

1) Start simply and with minimal expense involved. Get your web presence up and running quickly, then …

2) As you need new features, you can add new applications with just a few mouse clicks that integrate with your existing website, and give your web site an entirely new range of possibilities, and …

3) Cost not a single cent more to download and install on your site?

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

Plugins – Benefits & Advantages

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

In fact, many useful plugins are freely available for users.

WP plugins that cost money are referred to as ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the cost of a Premium plugin to the price of paying for web development services to add similar functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are typically quite inexpensive.

Also, since WordPress makes its code available to everyone, anyone can create, edit and customize any part of the code. This has enabled many third-party web developers to build more applications that add new features to the WordPress application than you can probably imagine.

• Plugins allow you to start off with a simple web site and then expand only when required.
• Plugins allow you to add practically unlimited features to any web presence quickly and cheaply.
• Plugins give you practically unlimited expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow anyone to own a digital presence that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins normally work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to provide your site with new capabilities and features.
• Some plugins can be a little more complex and require some initial configuring.

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

Like many WP themes, loads of WordPress plugins are currently available for WP users … often at $0 cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you can find WordPress plugins that can do almost everything you can imagine.

Plugin categories cover:

• Site Management
• Content Management
• Online Traffic Generation
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Media
• Media Utilities Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Monitoring & Reporting Tools
• Securing Your

You can enhance your website with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Surveys
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce stores with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your site’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonials
• Language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your website from English to German)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage integration
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell spots on your website
• Set up client appointments and reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and email you reports
• Redirect users from missing pages to other areas on your site or other sites
• Monitor what social media users are posting about your business
• 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
• Import content from other publishing platforms
• Perform bulk content edits
• Fight SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook posts)
• Inserting scripts and code elements into your pages
• Add tables
• Display animated graphic elements 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
• Distribute your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and many others
• Show countdown timers (for expiring offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As you can clearly see, WordPress plugins give you practically endless business scalability. If you plan to build a website, or your existing website wasn’t built using WordPress, then consider getting a WordPress site or blog in the future, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

If you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using WP plugins, let’s take a look at how you can benefit by installing an inexpensive plugin on your website.

For example, if you need to protect your content, you can install plugins to make an area of your page inaccessible, or create a professional paid membership site with separate login details for users …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to enhance your website in so many ways. From installing features that enhance your business, your website visitors’ experience and your ability to review visitor data …

To extending your business reach across many social sites and search engines …

You can also add complex features to your site using relatively inexpensive paid WordPress plugins. For example, you can set up plugins that integrate and automate features on your website such as managing customer testimonials and booking events …

And also set up a complete bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying software developers to design similar functionality for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of built-in WP commenting features and plugins that will make your site even more interactive …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can grow into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then displayed throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on various social sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with other users through forums or even set up a private online social network on your domain.
• Engage with your staff using live chats
• Dial your business from their smart phones while visiting your pages
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

You can also integrate complex enterprise solutions within a WordPress “front end”. This lets you control your business marketing, while the 3rd-party application handles the technical functions …

Some Useful Tips About WP Plugins

• There are many WordPress plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can affect your site’s resources and page loading times. It also means more maintenance issues for you resulting from potential errors.
• Only keep those plugins you really need. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these also consume server resources.
• Many free plugins typically come with very little to no support from the plugin developer. When considering paid plugins, ensure that you check some reviews online and understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check our WordPress plugin reviews for additional information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two years), then think twice before using it on your site. The WordPress platform changes on a regular basis and out-of-date plugins can cause problems.
• Make sure that you always upgrade your plugins to the most recent version. Older plugin not only can cause conflicts, they may also have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

As you can see, WordPress plugins are an important component of WordPress and contribute to making it the most preferred CMS 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 developers.

One last thing regarding plugins:

Whatever functionality you need for your web presence, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already developed one that will do exactly what you want, and that this plugin will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that it will be reasonably inexpensive.

(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 a custom plugin that does exactly what you need it to do can probably be written for your business at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what they are and how they can significantly expand your WordPress site. See our related posts to learn about more popular plugins that we recommend using.

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