Tag: What Are Plugins

One of the most unique benefits of WordPress is the ability to easily expand your WordPress site’s functionality using applications called plugins.

About Plugins

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

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software application that is very easy to install and immediately integrates new features into your smart phone.

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

A WordPress plugin is like an app. You install an application that provides new functionality to your WP website …

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

Typically, if you need to add new features to an existing site, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the new feature or enhancements, the cost can be significant, especially if it requires programming code.

This also applies when setting up a website or business blog. Businesses sometimes invest money up-front for added features they probably will never need.

For sound, strategic business planning reasons, we recommend considering a modular approach to growing your website and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get a basic, professional website up and running fast, then …

2) As the need for new features and functionality arises, add new software modules with only a couple of mouse clicks that integrate seamlessly with your web site, giving your website or blog a whole new range of useful functionality, and …

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

Well, this is precisely what a WordPress plugin enables you to do!

Benefits Of Using WordPress Plugins

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

In fact, loads of wonderful plugins are available at no cost to WP users.

WP plugins that you purchase are referred to as ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the cost of purchasing a Premium WordPress plugin to the cost of investing in web development services to add the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are typically quite inexpensive.

Also, since WordPress distributes its software as an Open Source application, any web developer can create, edit and customize any part of the code. This has enabled thousands of professional web development professionals to build more applications that “plug into” the WordPress platform than you can imagine.

• WordPress plugins let you start off with only a simple yet professional website and then add new features and enhancements to your site only when necessary.
• Plugins allow you to add almost unlimited features to your web site easily, quickly and really inexpensively.
• Plugins give you practically unlimited expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow business owners 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 website with immediate capabilities and features.
• Some plugins provide more advanced options and require some initial configuration.

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

Like WordPress themes, tens of thousands of plugins are currently available for WP users … and many of these great plugins are 100% FREE!

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

As mentioned earlier, you can find WP plugins that will do almost everything you want done.

There are plugins for:

• Website Administration
• Content Syndication
• Increasing Web Traffic
• User Engagement
• Social Sharing
• Managing Media Files – Videos, Images, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales Automation
• Increasing Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Monitoring & Reporting
• Optimizing Your WP Site

You can add features to a website with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Social contests
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• 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 your site’s content from English to French)
• 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
• Managing events
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell and manage spots on your website
• Set up client appointments and reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks on your pages and send you reports
• Redirect visitors from specific pages to other areas on your site or other websites
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude pages from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your posts and pages
• Import content from non-WordPress platforms
• Search and replace data
• Fight SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook posts)
• Insert scripts and script elements into your posts, pages and sidebar menus
• Add and format tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map of your business location
• Syndicate your content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and others
• Show countdown timers (for scarcity offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, WP plugins give you limitless business flexibility. If you are currently planning to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing website isn’t built with WordPress, then consider getting one in the future, or you could be missing out on some serious features.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WordPress plugins are, let me show you how you can benefit instantly by installing a plugin on your web site.

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

As mentioned before, you can use free plugins to enhance your web site in lots of different ways. From installing features that will improve your business, your web users’ experience and your understanding of what is happening on your site …

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

You can also add sophisticated features to your site using relatively inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can download plugins that automate tasks on your site such as customer feedback and event registrations management …

And also set up a complete bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to build custom functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of native WordPress commenting features and plugins that can allow you to engage more with your web visitors, customers and registered site users …

For example, your visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site additional exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on social networks.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with your team via forums or even set up an online social network on your own domain.
• Engage with members of your team via live webcam conferencing and chatrooms
• Dial your business from their devices when visiting your website
• Open a support ticket
• And so much more …

You can even integrate sophisticated third-party applications within a WordPress “front end”. This allows you to manage the content that your visitors see on your site, while your third-party application handles the technological areas …

Plugins – Useful Things You Should Know

• There are many amazing plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your server with too many plugins, as this will start to affect your website’s performance and page loading times. It also creates more maintenance issues for you resulting from potential errors.
• Only keep those plugins you really use. Delete any plugins from your site, as these also use server resources.
• Many free plugins normally receive very little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing paid WP plugins, make sure you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check some of our plugin reviews for additional 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. The WordPress software is updated on a frequent basis and older plugins that have not been updated can cause problems.
• Ensure that you always upgrade your plugins to the most recent version. Older plugins not only can cause errors and conflicts, they may also contain security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an important element of WordPress and contribute to making it the most powerful, flexible and scalable online open source software in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand without spending thousands of dollars on outsourced web development.

One last thing about plugins:

If there is any functionality you need for your website, you can be sure that a someone has probably already created one that will do exactly what you need it to do, and that this plugin will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a premium 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 one can probably be created for you for a reasonable price.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what plugins are and how they can expand your business blog. See our published posts to learn about more useful WordPress plugins that we recommend using.

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