Tag: What Are Plugins

One of the main benefits of using WordPress is the ability to quickly increase your WP web site’s functionality using inexpensive (even free) software called plugins.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

No doubt, you probably have a smart phone. What do you do when you would like to access something new on your device like a new game or a new business productivity tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a little software application that is really easy to install and adds new features and functionality to any smart phone.

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

A WordPress plugin is very much like an app. You simply install an application that provides new functionality to your site …

(… there are also social sharing plugins for WP!)

Normally, if you plan to add a new feature to an already-built site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new feature or enhancement is, the cost can be fairly significant, particularly if website developers need to add new code or edit code or install programs to integrate with your existing site.

This is also applicable when creating a website or business blog. Companies will often invest in extra features or customizations they probably will never need.

To avoid unnecessary expenses, we suggest a sustainable strategy when developing a web site and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply with minimal cost involved. Get your business website up and running fast, then …

2) As the need arises, simply add new applications with only a few mouse clicks that integrate seamlessly with your current web site, and give your website a completely new and expanded range of useful functionality, and …

3) Cost not one cent extra to download and install on your website?

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

Benefits And Advantages Of Using WordPress Plugins

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

In fact, loads of powerful plugins can be downloaded and installed on your websites.

WP plugins that you purchase are referred to as “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the cost 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, as WordPress makes its source code available to everyone, any person can create, modify and customize any part of the WordPress code. This has allowed many professional software development professionals to enhance the WordPresssoftware.

• Plugins let you start off with just a simple site and then expand only as required.
• WP plugins allow you to add almost endless features to your site quickly, easily and quite cheaply.
• Plugins give your website practically endless expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow ”non-techies” to have a website that they can manage.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to provide your website with instant new enhancements and features.
• Some plugins provide more extensive features and could require some configuring.

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

Like WordPress themes, thousands of plugins are available for WordPress users … for FREE!

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

As mentioned earlier, you can find plugins that will do almost everything you could possibly need a web site to do.

Plugin categories cover:

• Blog Management
• Content Management
• Driving Site Visitors
• User Interactivity
• Social Media
• Adding Media Files – Video, Graphics & Images, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales Automation
• Increasing Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Analysis
• Securing Your

You can enhance your WP site with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Surveys
• Rotating ad banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring payments, coupons, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonials
• Language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to Italian)
• 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 directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your website
• Set up appointments and reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks on your pages and send you reports
• Redirect affiliate links
• Monitor social conversations
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Hide pages from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect page content
• Migrate content from different publishing platforms
• Perform bulk content edits
• Prevent SPAM
• Customize visitor commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Inserting scripts and code elements into your content
• Add formatted tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map of your business location
• Post your content automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and others
• Show countdown timers (for scarcity offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As you can clearly see, WordPress plugins give you virtually endless business scalability. If you plan to build a website, or your existing site isn’t built with WordPress, then consider choosing WordPress in the future.

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

For example, if you want to publish content which is only accessible to some but not all users, you can use plugins to make a section of your post or page inaccessible, or create a professional paid membership site with customized login details for all users …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to improve your site in so many different ways. From installing functionality that can enhance your business, your website visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is happening on your site …

To increasing your business visibility across social media and search engines …

You can also add sophisticated functionality to your website using inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that automate tasks on your site like managing customer testimonials and booking events …

And even set up a custom bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying programmers to create similar functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of built-in WP commenting features and plugins that will increase your site’s interactivity …

For example, your web visitors can:

• Post 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 your visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with added exposure).
• Share your content with other web visitors on social networking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with your staff through forums or even set up an online social network on your own domain.
• Engage with your team through live chats
• Call your business directly from their smart phones when browsing your pages
• Get support via a customer helpdesk
• And so much more …

You can also integrate complex 3rd-party solutions within a WP “front end”. This enables you to control your business sales and marketing, while the third-party application handles the technological functions …

Plugins – Useful Tips

• There are so many awesome plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your site with too many plugins, as this can begin to affect your site’s performance and site loading speed. It also means more maintenance work for you resulting from possible errors.
• Only keep those plugins that you really need. Delete all unnecessary plugins from your site, as these utilize server resources.
• Many free plugins often come with little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing paid plugins, make sure you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of the plugin reviews we provide here for more information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two years), then think carefully before using it on your website. The WordPress software changes regularly and out-of-date WordPress plugins can cause errors.
• Ensure that you always update your plugins. Older plugin not only can cause errors, they could also have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most popular website publishing software in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to expand without having to spend thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing on the topic of plugins:

If there is any feature or functionality you want for your web site, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already created one that will do exactly what you want, and that it can either be downloaded at no cost, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the price to purchase it will be surprisingly reasonable.

(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 you at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of WP plugins – what plugins are and how they can enhance the functionality of your web site. See our related posts section to learn about more popular plugins that we recommend using.

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