Tag: What Are Plugins

One of the most useful benefits of choosing WordPress is the ability to quickly and easily expand your WordPress site’s functionality using inexpensive called plugins.

Understanding Plugins

Like most people, you most likely use a mobile phone. What happens when you would like to access something new on your phone like a new application, game or a new business productivity tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a piece of software that is easy to install and instantly adds new features to your mobile phone.

(Just as there are social sharing apps …)

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

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

Typically, expanding the functionality of a site involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the features or enhancements are, this can become fairly expensive, particularly if it involves website development.

This is also applicable to creating a new website. Many businesses will often pay for bells and whistles they may never need.

For this reason, we recommend a modular strategy when setting up your web presence presence and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine if you could:

1) Start simply with minimal expense involved. Get a basic, professional business web site up and running quickly, then …

2) As the need for new features and functionality becomes apparent, you can install new applications with only a couple of mouse clicks that integrate seamlessly with your site, to give your web site an entirely new range of useful capabilities, and …

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

Well, this is precisely what WP plugins allow you to do!

Benefits And Advantages Of Plugins

Earlier, we compared plugins with apps. In a similar way that many apps are free to download and some may cost a little money, so do plugins.

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

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 get the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins cost very little.

Also, since WordPress makes its code publicly available, any web developer can create, edit and customize any part of the WordPress code. This has enabled many professional software development companies to create more new tools that integrate with WordPress than you can possibly imagine.

• Plugins let you start off with a simple website and expand if required.
• Plugins allow you to add practically unlimited functionality to your web presence easily, quickly and cheaply.
• Plugins give you almost unlimited expanding capabilities.
• WP plugins allow non-technical website owners to own a website that they can manage.
• Most plugins will normally work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your site immediate enhancements and features.
• Some plugins are a little more complex and may require some initial configuration.

Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Often) Completely FREE!

Like themes, thousands of great plugins are made available for WordPress users … often at $0 cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you can find WP plugins that will do almost anything you could imagine.

There are WordPress plugins for:

• User Administration
• Content Management
• Increasing Web Visitors
• User Engagement
• Social Monitoring
• Managing Media Files – Videos, Images, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales And Marketing Automation
• Increasing Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Analysis Applications
• Optimizing Your WP Site

You can add features to your website with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Managing advertising banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce stores with online shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, coupons, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• List-building opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonial forms
• Language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to Spanish)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media integration
• Faster page loading
• Managing events & bookings
• Business directories
• Automatically sell spots on your blog
• Set up client appointments and reminders
• Manage reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and email you reports
• Redirect visitors from specific pages to other pages on your site or other websites
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude certain from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect page content
• Migrate information from different publishing platforms
• Search and replace data
• Prevent SPAM
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Inserting scripts and code elements into your posts and pages
• Add formatted tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map
• Post your content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and others
• Show countdown timers (for special offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you practically endless business flexibility. If you plan to build a web site for your business, or your existing website was not built using WordPress, then consider using it in the future.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WP plugins are, let me show you how you can benefit by simply adding an inexpensive plugin to your website.

For example, if you want to publish private content, you can install plugins to make a section of a page inaccessible, or create a complete membership site with separate login details for every user …

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

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

You can also add advanced functionality to your site using inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can set up plugins that integrate and automate functionality on your pages like managing customer testimonials and event bookings …

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 these functionality 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 visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can grow into online discussions) using either the native WordPress commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
• Bookmark your content on various social sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with other users through online forums or even set up a private online social network on your own site.
• Engage with your staff via live webcam conferencing and chatrooms
• Call your business from their laptops while visiting your pages
• Get help and support via a user support helpdesk
• And so much more …

Finally you, can also integrate sophisticated “back end” applications with a WordPress “front end”. This lets you control the content that your visitors see on your site, while the 3rd-party application handles the technological functions …

Plugins – Some Useful Things To Know

• There are loads of plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will affect your site’s resources and page loading times. It can also create more maintenance issues for you resulting from possible conflicts.
• Install only those plugins that you really need. Delete any plugins from your site, as these utilize resources.
• Many free plugins typically receive very little to no support from the plugin author. 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 improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of our WordPress plugin recommendations for more information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two or more years), then think twice before installing it on your website. The WordPress core software is updated frequently and older WordPress plugins can create conflicts.
• Always keep all plugins up-to-date. Older plugin not only can cause errors and conflicts, they may also have security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an important part of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most popular CMS in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to add new functionality to their web presence without having to spend thousands of dollars on web developers.

One last thing on the topic of plugins:

Whatever functionality you want for your web presence, you can guarantee that a WP plugin currently exists that will do what you want it to do, and that it can either be accessed 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 WP plugin is not available, then one can certainly be created for you for a reasonable price.

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

***

***