Tag: What Are Plugins

One of the main features of the WordPress content publishing platform is the ability to quickly enhance your WP site’s functionality using plugins.

About WP Plugins

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

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software that is really simple and easy to install and immediately integrates new functionality into your smart device.

(Just like there are social sharing apps for mobile phones …)

A WP plugin is very much like an app. You simply install and activate a software that adds new functionality to your WP website …

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

Normally, expanding the functionality of an existing web site involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the feature or enhancement is, the cost can be significant, especially if web developers have to add new code or modify code or install scripts that integrate into your existing set up.

This is also applicable to setting up a new web site. Companies tend to fork out money for added features and customizations they probably will never need.

As part of sound strategic business planning, we suggest considering a cost-effective approach when growing your website and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As the need becomes apparent, add new applications with a few mouse clicks that integrate with your site, giving your site an entirely new and expanded range of capabilities and functionality, and also …

3) Cost not a single cent more to download and install on your web site?

Well, that’s precisely what WordPress plugins let you do!

Benefits & Advantages Of Using WP Plugins

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

In fact, many plugins can be downloaded to your website at no cost.

WordPress plugins that you purchase are referred to as Premium plugins. The good news, is that when you compare these to the price of paying for professional web development services to add the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins cost very little.

Also, as WordPress makes its code available to everyone, anyone can create, edit and customize any portion of the code. This has enabled many third-party web developers to build more applications that plug seamlessly into WordPress than you can possibly imagine.

• Plugins let you get started with only a basic yet professional online business presence and add new features and enhancements to your site if necessary.
• WordPress plugins let you add practically endless features to any online business presence easily, quickly and quite cheaply.
• Plugins give you almost endless expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow business owners to have a site that they can manage.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your web site immediate capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins provide more extensive options and require some configuring.

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

Just like WP themes, tens of thousands of great plugins are made available to WP users … and many of these great plugins are 100% FREE!

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

As mentioned earlier, you can find WordPress plugins that will do almost anything you need a site to do.

WordPress plugin categories cover:

• User Administration
• Content Management
• Traffic
• User Engagement
• Social Engagement
• Adding Media Files – Video, Images, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales Automation
• Improving Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Reporting Applications
• Website SEO

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

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Display ad banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to enterprise scale e-commerce with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, discount codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Automatic language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your site from English to French)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Cloud storage integration
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events & bookings
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your blog
• Set up client appointments and reminders
• Manage reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and send you reports
• Redirect users from broken pages to other pages on your site or other sites
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude specific from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your pages and posts
• Migrate information from non-WordPress applications
• Search and replace content
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Inserting HTML and script elements into your content
• Add and format tables
• Display animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map of your business location
• Post your posts automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and others
• Display countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, WP plugins give you endless business scalability. If you plan to build a website, or your existing website isn’t built with WordPress, then consider getting one in the future, or you will be missing out on some serious functionality.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WP plugins are, let me show you some practical uses of installing a plugin on your web site.

For example, if you want to publish private content, you can install plugins to make an area of a page or post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a full membership site with personal login details for all users …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to improve your web presence in so many different ways. From adding new features that enhance your business, your website visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is taking place on your site …

To increasing your site’s reach and visibility across various social sites and search engines …

You can also add advanced features to your site using relatively inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that integrate and automate features on your website such as user testimonial and event bookings management …

And even set up a custom-branded bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring web developers to create similar applications for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of built-in WP commenting features and plugins that will allow you to engage better with your web visitors, customers and registered site users …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your blog posts (which can grow into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with increased exposure).
• Bookmark your content on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with other customers via forums or even set up a private online social network on your site.
• Engage with your team through live video chats
• Call your business from their smart phones when browsing your website
• Get help via a dedicated user helpdesk
• And much more …

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

Additional Tips About WordPress Plugins

• There are so many WordPress plugins available. Be careful not to overload your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can affect your site’s performance and site loading speed. It also means more maintenance issues for you resulting from possible conflicts and errors.
• Install only the plugins you really need. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these use extra server resources.
• Many free plugins normally come with little to no support from the plugin developer. When considering premium WP plugins, ensure 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 the plugin reviews we publish here for more information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two or more years), then think carefully before installing it. The WordPress software is updated on a regular basis and older plugins that have not been updated can cause issues.
• Ensure that you always update your plugins to their most recent version. Outdated plugins not only can cause conflicts, they may also have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

As you can see, plugins are an important aspect of WordPress and contribute to making it the most used CMS available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to expand quickly without spending thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing about WP plugins:

If there is any functionality you need for your web site, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already developed one that will do exactly what you need, and that it can either be downloaded for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the price will be minimal.

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

And, if by any chance such a plugin is not available, then one can probably be coded for your business for a reasonable price.

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

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