Tag: What Are Plugins

One of the most unique advantages of choosing WordPress is that you can easily enhance your WP site’s functionality using plugins.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

Like most people, you probably use a smart phone. What happens when you want to access something new on your phone like a new application, software or a business productivity tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a little piece of software that is very easy to install and instantly adds new features to any mobile device.

(Just like there are social sharing apps …)

A WP plugin is similar to an app. You simply download and install a software application that adds new functionality to your website …

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

Normally, expanding the functionality of a site involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the features or enhancement, the cost can be significant, especially if website developers have to add new code or modify templates or develop programs that integrate with your existing set up.

This is also applicable when creating a new web site. Many business owners tend to fork out money on additional bells and whistles they probably will never need.

As part of sound strategic business planning, we recommend using a sustainable strategy to growing your web presence presence and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As you need new features or functionality, simply install new applications with a couple of mouse clicks directly from your WordPress dashboard area, giving your web site a completely new range of practical functionality, and also …

3) Cost not one dollar more to add to your web site?

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

Plugins – Benefits And Advantages

We started this article by comparing plugins with apps. In a similar way that some apps are free to download and some may cost a little money, so do WP plugins.

In fact, loads of useful plugins can be downloaded to your website at no cost.

WP plugins that cost money are referred to as ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the cost of investing in web development services to add the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. ”paid”) plugins are generally very inexpensive.

Also, as WordPress makes its source code available to everyone, anybody can create, edit and customize any portion of the WP code. This has enabled thousands of third-party web development professionals to build more plugins that enhance WordPress than you can possibly imagine.

• Plugins allow you to get started with only a basic online business presence and then add new features and enhancements to your site when required.
• Plugins allow you to add practically unlimited features to any web site easily, quickly and really inexpensively.
• WP plugins give you virtually unlimited expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow anyone to have a digital presence that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your website new capabilities and enhancements.
• Some plugins can be a little more advanced and require some initial configuring.

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

Just like WP themes, loads of great plugins are made available to WordPress users … often at $0 cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you will find plugins that can do just about everything you can possibly need your site to do.

There are WP plugins for:

• User Management
• Content Management
• Traffic
• User Interactivity
• Social Monitoring
• Media Utilities Automation
• Increasing Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Analysis Applications
• Optimizing Your

For example, you can enhance your business online presence with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Managing banners
• E-commerce (from managing single sales with PayPal buttons, to enterprise scale e-commerce with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring payments, coupons, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonial forms
• 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.
• Offline storage management
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your website
• Set appointments and reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links on your pages and send you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude certain from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your pages and posts
• Import information from non-WordPress applications
• Search and replace content
• Fight SPAM
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. display Facebook discussions)
• Inserting code and script elements into your site’s header or footer
• Add tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google local search
• Add a map of your business location
• Post your posts automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many others
• Display countdown timers (for expiring offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you virtually endless possibilities. If you are currently planning to build a web site for your business, or your existing web site isn’t built with WordPress, then consider getting a WP site or blog built on your domain, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let’s take a look at some practical uses of installing an inexpensive plugin on your website.

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

As mentioned before, you can use free plugins to improve your web site in so many ways. From installing new features that enhance your business, your website visitors’ experience and your ability to analyze website data …

To increasing your business 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 integrate and automate functions on your pages such as customer feedback and event bookings management …

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

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

For example, your web visitors can:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then displayed throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site additional exposure).
• Share your content with other web users on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with your support team via forums or even set up a private social network on your site.
• Engage with members of your team through live webcam conferencing and chatrooms
• Dial your business directly from their cellphones while visiting your website
• Open support tickets
• And much more …

You can even integrate sophisticated enterprise-level solutions with a WordPress “front end”. This lets you control your business sales and marketing, while your third-party application handles the technological side of things …

Additional Tips About Plugins

• There are so many amazing plugins available. Be careful not to overload your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can begin to affect your site’s performance and site loading speed. It can also create more maintenance work for you as a result of possible conflicts.
• Only keep those plugins that you really need. Delete any plugins you don’t use from your site, as these utilize additional resources.
• Many free plugins often receive very little to no support from the plugin developer. When considering premium WP plugins, we recommend 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 our plugin reviews for more information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two or more years), then think twice before installing it on your site. WordPress updates frequently and older plugins that have not been updated can cause conflicts.
• Always update your plugins to the most recent version. Older plugin not only can create errors, they could also have security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an important part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most powerful, flexible and scalable content management system available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add new functionality to their website without having to spend thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing about WordPress plugins:

Whatever feature you need for your web presence, you can guarantee that a plugin probably exists that will do exactly what you want it to do, and that it will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the cost will be reasonable.

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

And, if by any chance this plugin is not available, then a custom plugin that does just what you would like it to do can certainly be written for you at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of plugins – what plugins are and how they can help to improve your WP site. See our published posts to learn about more great plugins that we recommend using.

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