Tag: What Are WordPress Plugins

One of the most powerful advantages of building a web presence with WordPress is the ability to quickly enhance your WordPress website or blog’s functionality using plugins.

About WP Plugins

Like most people, you most likely have a device like a smart phone. What do you do when you want to access something new on your device like a new software or a new tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a little software application that is easy to install and adds new functionality to a mobile phone.

(Just as you will find social sharing apps …)

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

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

Almost always, if you need to add a new feature to your site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new features or enhancements are, things can get fairly expensive, especially if it involves programming code.

This is also applicable when developing a website or business blog. Many companies often fork out money in advance on additional bells and whistles they may simply not need.

To keep expenses to a minimum, we recommend a sustainable approach to developing your web presence and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could:

1) Start simply and with minimal cost involved. Get your website up and running fast, then …

2) As you need new features, simply install new software modules with only a couple of mouse clicks that integrate seamlessly with your web site, to give your site an entirely new range of features and functionality, and also …

3) Cost not one cent extra to download and install on your web site?

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

Plugins – Benefits

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

In fact, many great plugins can be installed and activated on your websites.

Plugins that you purchase are called ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the price of a Premium plugin to the price of hiring a professional web developer to get the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are generally quite inexpensive.

Also, as WordPress distributes its software as an Open Source application, anyone can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the WordPress code. This has enabled thousands of professional web developers to enhance and contribute to the WPsoftware.

• WP plugins let you get started simply with only a basic yet professional website and add new features and enhancements to your site if necessary.
• WP plugins allow you to add practically endless functionality to your website quickly and cheaply.
• Plugins give your website practically endless expanding capabilities.
• WP plugins allow ”non-techies” to have a digital presence that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins will normally work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your web site new enhancements and features.
• Some plugins are a little more advanced and may require some configuring.

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

Just like WordPress themes, tens of thousands of plugins are available to WordPress users … often at $0 cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you can find WP plugins that will do just about anything you could think of.

There are WordPress plugins for:

• Blog Administration
• Content Syndication
• Web Traffic Generation
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Connectivity
• Uploading Media Files – Videos, Graphics, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales Automation
• Improving Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data & System Reporting Tools
• Web Site Optimization

You can enhance your WP site with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Social contests
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to enterprise scale e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, coupons, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonials
• Instant language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your website’s content from English to German)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media integration
• Faster page loading
• Managing events & bookings
• Business directories
• Automatically sell spots on your site
• Set up client appointments and reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and send you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude pages from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect page content
• Migrate information from non-WP platforms
• Search and replace data
• Block SPAM
• Customize visitor commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Insert scripts and script elements into your blog’s header and footer
• 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
• Publicize your content automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and many others
• Display countdown timers (for special offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As it’s clear to see, WordPress plugins give you virtually endless business scalability. If you plan to build a website or blog, or your existing web site isn’t built with WordPress, then consider using WordPress in the future.

In case you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using WordPress plugins, let me show you some practical uses of adding an inexpensive plugin to your site.

For example, if you want to protect your content, you can use plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on a page inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a full membership site with personal login details for all users …

As mentioned previously, you can use free plugins to enhance your web site in so many ways. From adding functionality that will improve your business, your visitors’ experience and your ability to review visitor metrics …

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

You can also add advanced features to your site using inexpensive paid WordPress plugins. For example, you can buy plugins that automate tasks on your pages such as customer feedback and event registration management …

And also run a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring web developers to build custom applications for you …

You can also take advantage of built-in WP commenting features and plugins that can enhance user engagement …

For example, your visitors can:

• Leave comments on your site (which can grow into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with added exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on various social sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with other users via forums or even set up a private online social network on your domain.
• Engage with members of your team using live video chats
• Call your business from their devices when browsing your website
• Get help via a dedicated customer helpdesk
• And much more …

You can also integrate sophisticated 3rd-party applications within a WordPress “front end”. This lets you manage your business marketing, while your 3rd-party application handles the technical side of things …

Plugins – Additional Information

• There are lots of awesome plugins available. Be careful not to overload your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can eventually affect your site’s resources and site loading times. It can also create more maintenance issues for you as a consequence of possible conflicts and errors.
• Only keep those plugins you really use. Delete all unnecessary plugins from your site, as these utilize server resources.
• Many free plugins normally receive very little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing paid WP plugins, ensure that you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of our plugin reviews for more expert 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 twice before using it on your website or blog. The WordPress application changes regularly and outdated plugins can cause errors.
• Ensure that you always maintain all plugins up-to-date. Outdated plugin not only can cause problems, they could also have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

As you can see, WordPress plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most downloaded content management system in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to add new functionality to their web presence without spending thousands of dollars on outsourced web developers.

One last thing on the topic of WP plugins:

Whatever feature you need for your web site, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already created one that will do exactly what you want it to do, and that it can either be downloaded for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that it will be reasonably affordable.

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

And, if by any chance such a WP plugin is not available, then it can probably be developed for you for a very reasonable price.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of plugins – what plugins are and how they can significantly to improve your business blog. See our published posts to learn more about usingplugins.

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