Tag: What Are WordPress Plugins

One of the most useful benefits of WordPress is the ability to quickly increase your WP website or blog’s functionality using plugins.

What Are Plugins?

Like most people, you probably use a smart phone. What do you do when you would like to access something new on your device like a new application, game or a productivity 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 device.

(Just like you will find social sharing apps …)

A plugin is similar to an app. You simply download and install a little piece of software that adds new functionality to your WordPress web site …

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

Normally, adding a new feature to your site involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the new feature or enhancements, things could become fairly expensive, particularly if website developers need to add new code or modify programs or install programs to integrate into your existing site.

This is also applicable when setting up a new website. Businesses tend to fork out money on bells and whistles they probably will never need.

As part of sound strategic business planning, we suggest considering a cost-effective strategy to growing a website and WordPress plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As the need for new capabilities becomes evident, add new applications with a few mouse clicks directly from your WordPress administration area, and give your site a completely new range of possibilities, and …

3) Cost not one dollar extra to add to your website?

Well, that’s just what a WP plugin lets you do!

Plugins – Benefits And Advantages

I started this post by comparing plugins with ’apps’. Just like some apps are free to download and some cost a little bit of money, the same is true with plugins.

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

Plugins that you have to pay for are called “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare these to the cost of paying for professional web development services to get similar functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are priced quite cheaply.

Also, because WordPress distributes its software as an Open Source application, any web developer can create, edit and customize any part of the code. This has allowed many professional software developers to build more applications that enhance WordPress than you can possibly imagine.

• WP plugins let you get started with a simple web site and add new features and enhancements to your site only when required.
• WP plugins allow you to add practically endless features to your web site easily, quickly and quite inexpensively.
• WP plugins give your digital business presence almost endless expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow ”non-techies” to have a digital presence that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins normally work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website or blog new capabilities and features.
• Some plugins are a little more complex and require some configuration.

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

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

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

As mentioned earlier, you can find WP plugins that can do almost anything you need done.

Plugin categories cover:

• Blog Administration
• Content Management
• Traffic
• User Interactivity
• Social Engagement
• Inserting Media Files – Videos, Images, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Biz And Online Sales Automation
• Improving Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Monitoring & Reporting Tools
• Website Optimization

For example, you can add features to a business online presence with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, discount codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User feedback forms
• Language translation plugins (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.
• Cloud storage integration
• Faster page loading
• Managing events
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your blog
• Set appointments and appointment reminders
• Manage reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and email you reports
• Redirect users from specific pages to other pages on your site or other websites
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add a site map
• Hide specific from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide post content sections
• Import information from non-WordPress applications
• Perform bulk content replacements
• Block SPAM
• Customize visitor commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Inserting HTML and code elements into your posts and pages
• Add formatted tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map of your business location
• Post your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and many others
• Show countdown timers (for expiring offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

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

If you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using plugins, let’s take a look at how you can benefit instantly by installing a plugin on your web site.

For example, if you need to publish content which is only accessible to some users, you can use plugins to make an area of a post or page inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a professional membership site with customized login details for each member …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to improve your website in so many ways. From installing features that will enhance your business, your visitors’ experience and your ability to review visitor metrics …

To increasing your site’s visibility across many social media and search engines …

You can also add complex functionality to your website using inexpensive paid plugins. For example, you can download plugins that integrate and automate functionality on your website such as customer testimonial and event bookings management …

And even set up a complete bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying web developers to design custom applications for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that will enhance user engagement …

For example, your visitors can:

• Post comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then displayed throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site additional exposure).
• Share your posts with other online visitors on social networks.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with your support staff via forums or even set up an online social network on your domain.
• Engage with your staff through live webcam conferencing and chatroom facilities
• Call your business directly from their smart phones when visiting your pages
• Get support via a dedicated client help desk
• And much more …

Finally you, can even integrate sophisticated “back end” applications using a WP “front end”. This enables you to control your business sales and marketing, while your 3rd-party application handles the technical functions …

Some Useful Things You Should Know About Plugins

• There are lots of WordPress plugins to choose from. Be careful not to overload your server with too many plugins, as this can begin to affect your site’s performance and page loading times. It also means more maintenance work for you resulting from potential conflicts.
• Only keep those plugins you really use. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these utilize additional resources.
• Many free plugins typically come with very little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing premium plugins, we recommend 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 WP plugin recommendations for more helpful information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two years), then think twice before installing it. The WordPress platform is updated frequently and older plugins that have not been updated can create issues.
• Make sure that you always upgrade your plugins to the latest version. Older plugin not only can create conflicts, they may also contain security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an important feature of WordPress and contribute to making it the most popular content open source tool in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to add instant functionality to their website without having to spend thousands of dollars on outsourced web developers.

One last thing about WP plugins:

Whatever functionality you want for your web site, you can be sure that a plugin probably exists that will do exactly what you need it to do, and that this plugin 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 chance this WordPress plugin has not been created yet, then a custom plugin that does exactly what you would like it to do can probably be written for you for a reasonable price.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of plugins – what plugins are and how they can significantly enhance the functionality of your business blog. See our related posts to learn more about using WP plugins.

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