Tag: What Are Plugins

One of the most unique advantages of using the WordPress platform is that you can quickly and easily expand your WordPress web site’s functionality using inexpensive (and often 100% free) applications called ’plugins’.

What Are Plugins?

No doubt, you most likely own a mobile phone. What do you do when you want to access something new on your device like a new application, software or a productivity tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software that is simple and easy to install and instantly adds new features and functionality to your smart phone.

(Just like you will find social sharing apps for mobile phones …)

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

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

Generally, expanding the functionality of a website involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the new features or enhancements, things could get fairly expensive, particularly if website developers need to add new code or edit programs or develop scripts to integrate into your current site.

This also applies to setting up a website or business blog. Many companies tend to fork out money upfront on added features they probably will never need.

For this reason, we recommend using a modular approach to growing a digital presence presence and WordPress plugins are ideal for doing this.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get a basic, professional web site up and running quickly, then …

2) As the need becomes evident, add new software modules with a few mouse clicks that integrate seamlessly with your website or blog, and give your site an entirely new and expanded range of useful functionality, and also …

3) Cost not one dollar extra to add to your site?

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

Plugins – Benefits

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

In fact, many wonderful plugins are available at no cost to users.

WP plugins that you have to pay for are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of paying for professional web development services to add similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins cost very little.

Also, since WordPress is an Open Source application, anyone can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the code. This has allowed thousands of third-party web development companies to build more applications that expand the WordPress engine than you can imagine.

• Plugins allow you to start off with a simple web site and then add new features and enhancements to your site if required.
• Plugins let you add practically unlimited functionality to any website quickly, easily and inexpensively.
• Plugins give your web site almost endless expanding capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow ”non-techies” to own a web presence that they can fully manage.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your site immediate enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins offer more advanced options and could require some configuring.

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

Just like themes, thousands of great plugins are made available to WP users … for FREE!

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

As previously mentioned, you will find plugins that will do just about everything you need a website to do.

Plugin categories cover:

• Blog Management
• Content Distribution
• Web Traffic Generation
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Sharing
• Managing Media – Video, Graphics & Images, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales Automation
• Increasing Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Monitoring & Reporting Applications
• Securing Your WP Site

For example, you can expand a WP site with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Social contests
• Managing banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, coupons, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer feedback forms
• Instant language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your pages from English to Spanish)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage integration
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Business directories
• Automatically sell and manage spots on your blog
• Set appointments and appointment reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks on your pages and send you reports
• Redirect visitors from specific pages to other pages on your site or other sites
• Monitor social conversations
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Hide certain from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect content on your pages and posts
• Import information from other publishing platforms
• Search and replace content
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. display Facebook posts)
• Insert HTML and script elements into your content
• Add formatted tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced content formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add business location maps
• Post your posts automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and others
• Display countdown timers (for expiring offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you limitless business flexibility. If you plan to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing web site isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider getting one built on your domain, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

In case you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using WordPress plugins, let’s take a look at how you can benefit by simply adding an inexpensive plugin to your web site.

For example, if you need content protection, you can use plugins to make an area of a page or post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a professional paid membership site with customized login details for every user …

As mentioned before, you can use free plugins to improve your web site in lots of different ways. From adding functionality that enhance your business, your site’s user experience and your ability to review visitor data …

To extending your site’s reach across social sites and search engines …

You can also add complex features to your website using inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can download plugins that automate tasks on your site such as displaying customer testimonials and booking events …

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

You can also take advantage of built-in WP commenting features and plugins that can allow you to engage in various ways with visitors, customers and registered site users …

For example, your visitors can easily:

• Leave 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 displayed throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
• Bookmark your content on various social sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with your support team via forums or even set up a private community on your own site.
• Engage with your staff through live web conferencing and chatrooms
• Call your business from their mobile phones while visiting your pages
• Open support tickets
• And much more …

You can also integrate complex enterprise applications within a WP “front end”. This lets you control your business sales and marketing, while your 3rd-party application handles the technical areas …

WP Plugins – Some Useful Things You Should Know

• There are loads of plugins to choose from. Be careful not to overload your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can affect your website’s resources and site loading times. It can also mean more maintenance work for you as a result of possible errors.
• Only keep the plugins that you really plan to use. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these use server resources.
• Many free plugins often receive very little to no support from the plugin author. When considering premium plugins, make sure you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check our plugin recommendations for additional helpful 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 using it. WordPress updates frequently and older plugins that have not been updated can create errors.
• Ensure that you always update your plugins to their latest software version. Outdated plugins not only can create errors, they may also have security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

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

One last thing about WP plugins:

If there is a feature you want for your website, you can be sure that a WordPress plugin currently exists that will do exactly what you need it to do, and that this plugin can either be accessed for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the cost to purchase it will be reasonable.

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

And, if by chance this WordPress plugin does not exist, then it can certainly be coded for your business for a very reasonable price.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of plugins – what they are and how they can help enhance the functionality of your blog. See our published posts to learn more about usingplugins.

***

***