Tag: What Are WordPress Plugins

One of the most powerful benefits of WordPress is that you can easily enhance your WordPress website or blog’s functionality using plugins.

What Are WP Plugins?

No doubt, you probably own a device like a smart phone. What happens when you would like access to something new on your device like a new application, software or a business tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a little software application that is very simple and easy to install and integrates new functionality into any mobile phone.

(Just as there are social sharing apps …)

A plugin is like an app. You download and install a software that provides new functionality to your website or blog …

(… you can also find social sharing plugins for WP users!)

Almost always, if you decide to add new features to an existing web site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the feature or enhancement is, this cost can be significant, particularly if it involves editing code.

This also applies to starting a new website. Companies sometimes pay up front for features and options they may probably never need.

For this reason, we suggest considering a cost-effective approach when developing your digital presence presence and WordPress plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get your business web site up and running fast, then …

2) As new features or functionality become necessary, simply add new applications with only a few mouse clicks that integrate seamlessly with your existing web site, to give your web site a whole new and expanded range of useful functionality, and …

3) Cost not a single dollar more to install on your website?

Well, this is just what plugins let you do!

Plugins – Benefits

Earlier, we compared WP plugins with smartphone apps. In the same way that many apps are free to download and some cost a little bit of money, the same is true of WordPress plugins.

In fact, loads of powerful plugins can be downloaded to your website for free.

Plugins that you purchase are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of hiring a professional web developer to get the same functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are priced quite cheaply.

Also, as WordPress makes its source code publicly available, any person can create, modify and customize any part of the WordPress code. This has allowed many professional software development companies to build more new applications that add new features to WordPress than you can possibly imagine.

• WP plugins allow you to start off simply with just a simple web site and then add new features and enhancements to your site when required.
• Plugins allow you to add practically endless features to your web site quickly, easily and cheaply.
• WordPress plugins give you almost unlimited expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow anyone to have a digital presence that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to provide your website or blog with new capabilities and features.
• Some plugins offer more extensive features and require some configuring.

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

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

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find plugins that can do almost anything you want done.

There are plugins for:

• Website Administration
• Content Management
• Online Traffic Generation
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Monitoring
• Adding Media – Video, Graphics, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Biz And Online Sales Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Analysis Tools
• Blog Security

You can expand a WP site with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• User Surveys
• Display advertising banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single ordering with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with online shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, discount codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonial forms
• Instant language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your website’s content from English to Norwegian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media integration
• Faster page loading
• Managing events
• Business directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your blog
• Set appointments and reminders
• Manage reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and send you reports
• Redirect web links
• Monitor what social media users are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude certain from showing on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your posts and pages
• Import information from non-WordPress applications
• Search and replace content
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor discussions (e.g. display Facebook discussions)
• Insert code and script elements into your posts and pages
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google local search
• Add location maps
• Post your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and many others
• Show countdown timers (for special offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you practically limitless business flexibility. If you plan to build a website for your business, or your existing web site isn’t built with WordPress, then consider getting one in the future, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

In case you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let’s take a look at how you can benefit by installing a plugin on your website.

For example, if you want to protect your content, you can use plugins to make a section of your post or page inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a professional paid membership site with personal login details for each member …

As mentioned previously, you can use free plugins to improve your web presence in lots of different ways. From installing functionality that improve your business, your web users’ experience and your understanding of what is taking place on your site …

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

You can also add complex features to your website using inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can buy plugins that integrate and automate functions on your website like customer testimonial and event registration management …

And also run a complete bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of paying web developers to design the same applications for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of built-in WordPress commenting features and plugins that will allow you to engage in various ways with visitors, clients and registered site users …

For example, your visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site added exposure).
• Share your posts with other online users on social media.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online with your support staff using forums or even set up a private online social network on your own site.
• Engage with members of your team via live chats
• Call your business from their cellphones while browsing your site
• Open a support ticket
• And much more …

Finally you, can even integrate sophisticated 3rd-party applications with 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 so many plugins to choose from. Be careful not to overload your site with too many plugins, as this can affect your website’s performance and site loading speed. It can also mean more maintenance work for you resulting from potential conflicts and errors.
• Only keep the plugins that you really need. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these utilize server resources.
• Many free plugins normally receive very little to no support from the plugin author. When considering premium plugins, make sure you check around a little and understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we publish on this site for more expert 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. WordPress is updated frequently and older WordPress plugins can create conflicts.
• Always maintain all plugins updated to their latest version. Older plugins not only can create issues, they could also contain security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WordPress plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most downloaded CMS available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add new features to their website without spending thousands of dollars on outsourced web developers.

One last thing about plugins:

If there is any feature you need for your web site, you can be sure that a someone has probably already developed one that will do just what you want, and that this plugin will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the cost will be reasonable.

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

And, if by any chance such a plugin does not exist, then a custom plugin that does exactly what you need it to do can certainly be developed for your business for a very reasonable price.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of WP plugins – what plugins are and how they can help enhance the functionality of your web site. See our related posts to learn more about usingplugins.

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