Tag: What Are Plugins

One of the most useful features of WordPress is the ability to quickly expand your WP web site’s functionality using plugins.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

Like most of us, you probably use a device like a mobile phone. What happens when you want to access something new on your phone like a new software or a new business productivity tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a little software application that is easy to install and immediately integrates new features and functionality into a mobile phone.

(Just like you can find social sharing apps …)

A WP plugin is very much like an app. You install an application that adds new functionality to your website or blog …

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

Normally, expanding the functionality of your site involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the new features or enhancement, this cost can be quite significant, especially if it requires programming code.

This also applies when starting a new web site. Organizations often spend money in advance on bells and whistles they probably will never need.

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

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As the need becomes apparent, just install new applications with just a couple of clicks of the mouse that integrate seamlessly with your current website and blog, giving your site an entirely new and expanded range of useful features, and …

3) Cost not a single dollar extra to add to your website?

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

Plugins – Benefits & Advantages

We began this post by comparing WordPress plugins with smartphone apps. In a similar way that many apps are free to download and some cost a little money, so do WP plugins.

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

Plugins that you buy are called ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of hiring a professional web developer to get the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are generally very inexpensive.

Also, as WordPress is an Open Source application, anybody can create, rewrite and customize any part of the code. This has allowed many professional software developers to enhance and contribute to the WordPresssoftware.

• WP plugins let you get started with just a basic site and then add new features and enhancements to your site if necessary.
• Plugins allow you to add practically endless features to any web site easily and cheaply.
• WP plugins give you virtually unlimited expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow non-technical website owners to have a site that they can fully manage.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your website instant new capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins offer more advanced options and require some configuring.

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

Like WP themes, thousands of WordPress plugins are available to WordPress users … often at $0 cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you will find plugins that will do just about anything you can imagine.

Plugin categories cover:

• Blog Administration
• Content Management
• Driving Web Traffic
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Engagement
• Managing Media Files – Videocasts, Images, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Biz And Online Sales & Advertising Automation
• Improving Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data & System Monitoring & Reporting
• Securing Your WordPress Blog

You can add features to a WP site with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Rotating banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single ordering with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring payments, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonial forms
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your site from English to Norwegian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media integration
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events & bookings
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell spots on your site
• Set appointments and reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and send you reports
• Redirect visitors from specific pages to other pages on your site or other websites
• Monitor what social media users are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add a site map
• Exclude certain from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide page content
• Migrate data from different publishing platforms
• Perform bulk data edits
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor discussions (e.g. display Facebook comments)
• Inserting code and script elements into your posts
• Add formatted tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced font display formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map
• Post your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and others
• Display countdown timers (for special offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As it’s clear to see, WP plugins give you practically limitless possibilities. If you are currently planning to build a website, or your existing web site isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider using WordPress in the future.

If you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using plugins, let’s take a look at some practical uses of adding an inexpensive plugin to your site.

For example, if you need to publish private content, you can install plugins to make a section of a post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a full paid membership site with separate login details for all users …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to enhance your web presence in lots of ways. From adding functionality that improve your business, your web users’ experience and your ability to review website data …

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

You can also add sophisticated features to your site using inexpensive premium WP plugins. For example, you can download plugins that integrate and automate functions on your website such as managing customer testimonials and booking events …

And also run a complete bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying web developers to build 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 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, giving your site added exposure).
• Share your posts with other web visitors on social networks.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with other customers through forums or even set up a private online social network on your own domain.
• Engage with members of your team via live video chats
• Call your business from their devices while visiting your site
• Get support via a dedicated user helpdesk
• And so much more …

You can also integrate sophisticated enterprise-level solutions within a WP “front end”. This lets you control your business sales and marketing, while the 3rd-party application handles the technical side of things …

WP Plugins – Additional Information

• There are loads of plugins to choose from. Be careful not to overload your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can begin to affect your site’s resources and page loading times. It can also create more maintenance issues for you as a consequence of potential errors.
• Install only the plugins you really need. Delete any plugins you don’t use from your site, as these utilize server resources.
• Many free plugins typically come with very little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing paid plugins, we recommend that you check some reviews online and understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check some of the plugin reviews we provide here for additional useful 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 on your website or blog. WordPress changes regularly and older plugins that have not been updated can create conflicts.
• Always upgrade your plugins. Outdated plugin not only can cause errors, they could also have security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

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

One last thing on the topic of WordPress plugins:

Whatever feature you want for your web presence, you can be sure that a someone has probably already created one that will do just what you need it to do, and that it will either be available for FREE, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the price to buy it will be reasonable.

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

And, if by any chance this plugin does not exist, then it can probably be created for you for a reasonable price.

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

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