Tag: What Are Plugins

One of the most powerful benefits of building a website using WordPress is that you can quickly increase your WP website’s functionality using plugins.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

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

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

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

(Just as there are social sharing apps …)

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

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

Generally, if you plan to expand the functionality of an existing website, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the new feature or enhancements, the cost can be quite significant, especially if web developers have to create new code or modify code or install programs to integrate into your existing site.

This is also applicable when developing a new web site. Companies often invest money upfront for bells and whistles they probably will never need.

For sound, strategic business planning reasons, we recommend considering a cost-effective approach when growing a web site and WordPress plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get a professional-looking web presence up and running fast, then …

2) As more features are needed, add new software modules with a couple of mouse clicks that integrate with your existing site, to give your website an entirely new range of useful functionality, and also …

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

Well, this is just what plugins let you do!

WordPress Plugins – Benefits And Advantages

We started this blog post by comparing plugins with ’apps’. Just like some apps are free to download and some may cost a little money, so do WP plugins.

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

WordPress plugins that cost money are referred to as “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the cost of hiring a professional web developer to add similar functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are typically quite inexpensive.

Also, because WordPress makes its source code publicly available, any person can create, edit and customize any part of the code. This has allowed many third-party software development professionals to build more applications that “plug into” the WordPress platform than you can probably imagine.

• Plugins allow you to start off with only a basic web site and add new features and enhancements to your site if required.
• WP plugins let you add almost endless functionality to any web site easily, quickly and inexpensively.
• WP plugins give your web site almost unlimited expanding capabilities.
• WP plugins allow anyone to own a site that they can fully manage.
• Most plugins will normally work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your site with immediate enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins offer more advanced features and may require some configuration.

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

Like WP themes, loads of WordPress plugins are made available for WP users … and many of these great plugins are 100% FREE!

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find WP plugins that will do just about everything you need your site to do.

WP plugin categories cover:

• Web Site Management
• Content Syndication
• Traffic
• User Interactivity
• Social Sharing
• Managing Media Files – Video, Graphics, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Analysis
• Securing Your WP Web Site

For example, you can add features to a website with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Surveys
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single sales with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring payments, discount codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private 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 German)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage management
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Business directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your blog
• Set client appointments and appointment reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links on your pages and send you reports
• Redirect affiliate links
• 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 pages from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect content on your pages and posts
• Import information from non-WP applications
• Perform bulk data replacements
• Prevent SPAM
• Customize guest commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Insert scripts and code elements into your website’s header or footer
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add a map
• Publish your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many others
• Display countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As you can clearly see, plugins give you practically limitless business scalability. If you are planning to build a web site, or your existing website isn’t built with WordPress, then consider choosing it in the future.

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

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

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

To extending your site’s reach across social media and search engines …

You can also add sophisticated functionality to your website using relatively inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can install plugins that integrate and automate processes on your website such as user feedback and event registration management …

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

You can also take advantage of native WordPress commenting features and plugins that can increase your site’s interactivity …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can grow into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
• Share your content with other web visitors on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online with your support staff via online forums or even set up a private community on your own site.
• Engage with members of your team via live webcam conferencing and chatroom facilities
• Call your business from their cellphones when browsing your site
• Open support tickets
• And much more …

Finally you, can also integrate complex 3rd-party solutions using a WP “front end”. This lets you control the content that your visitors will see on your website, while the third-party application handles the technological functions …

WP Plugins – Some Useful Information

• There are many plugins available. Be careful of overloading your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can start to affect your website’s resources and site loading times. It also creates more maintenance issues for you as a result of possible conflicts.
• Only keep the plugins you really plan to use. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these utilize resources.
• Many free plugins often receive little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing paid WordPress plugins, ensure that you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check our WordPress plugin reviews for more useful information.
• If you see that a 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 updates on a regular basis and out-of-date plugins can cause issues.
• Always update your plugins to their latest version. Older plugin not only can cause errors, they could also contain vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

As you can see, WP plugins are an important aspect of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most used content management system available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to expand quickly without having to spend thousands of dollars on outsourced web development costs.

One last thing about WordPress plugins:

If there is any feature or functionality you want for your web presence, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already developed one that will do exactly what you want, and that this plugin will either be available for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the cost will be minimal.

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

And, if by chance such a plugin does not exist, then a custom plugin that does just what you need it to do can probably be developed for you at a reasonable cost.

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

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