Tag: What Are WordPress Plugins

One of the main advantages of choosing WordPress is that you can easily expand your WordPress site’s functionality using applications called plugins.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

No doubt, you most likely have a smart phone. What happens when you would like access to something new on your device like a new game or a new business tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a little piece of software that is easy to install and adds new features and functionality to a smart device.

(Just as there are social sharing apps for smart phones …)

A WordPress plugin is very much like an app. You install an application that adds new functionality to your WP web site …

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

Almost always, if you plan to add a new feature to your website, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the new feature or enhancement, this can get quite expensive, particularly if website developers need to add new code or modify programs or install scripts that integrate into your existing site.

This is also applicable to starting a new website. Businesses will often invest money upfront in additional components they probably will never need.

For sound, strategic business planning reasons, we suggest a modular approach when setting up your website and WordPress plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine if you could:

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

2) As new features or functionality are required, add new applications with a few mouse clicks directly from your admin panel, giving your site a whole new and expanded range of practical capabilities, and …

3) Cost not one dollar more to install on your site?

Well, that’s exactly what a plugin allows you to do!

WP Plugins – Benefits

Earlier, we compared WordPress plugins with apps. Just like some apps are free to download and some may cost a little bit of money, the same is true of WP plugins.

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

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 plugins cost very little.

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

• WordPress plugins let you start off with only a basic site and then expand only as required.
• Plugins let you add almost unlimited functionality to your web site quickly, easily and very cheaply.
• Plugins give you virtually endless expanding capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow non-technical website owners to own a digital presence that they can fully manage.
• Most plugins normally work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your website or blog with immediate enhancements and features.
• Some plugins offer more advanced features and may require some initial configuring.

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

Like themes, thousands of WP plugins are available for WordPress users … often at no cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you can find plugins that can do almost everything you need a web site to do.

There are plugins for:

• User Management
• Content Distribution
• Driving Site Visitors
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Monitoring
• Inserting Media – Videocasts, Graphics, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales And Advertising Automation
• Improving Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Reporting
• Optimizing Your WordPress Web Site

For example, you can expand your website with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• User Surveys
• Rotating banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupons, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User feedback forms
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change your website’s content from English to Portuguese)
• 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 management
• Faster page loading
• Managing events
• Business directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your site
• Set appointments and reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks on your pages and send you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude specific from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide page content sections
• Import information from different publishing applications
• Perform bulk content replacements
• Fight SPAM
• Customize visitor commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Insert scripts and code elements into your posts and pages
• Add and format tables
• Display animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map
• Post your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and many others
• Show countdown timers (for special offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

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

In case you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let’s take a look at how you can benefit by simply adding an inexpensive plugin to your site.

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

As mentioned before, you can use free plugins to improve your site in lots of ways. From adding features that can enhance your business, your visitors’ experience and your ability to review site data …

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

You can also add sophisticated functionality to your website using inexpensive paid WP plugins. For example, you can download plugins that automate functionality on your pages such as displaying customer testimonials and event bookings …

And even run a complete bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to build similar applications for you …

You can also take advantage of built-in WP commenting features and plugins that will allow you to engage in various ways with your web visitors, clients and registered site members …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the native WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
• Share your content with other online users on social networks.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with other customers via forums or even set up a private community on your own site.
• Engage with your team via live video chats
• Dial your business directly from their devices when browsing your pages
• Get help via a dedicated client support helpdesk
• And much more …

Finally you, can also integrate sophisticated “back end” solutions using a WordPress “front end”. This allows you to control your business marketing, while the third-party application handles the technological functions …

Some Useful Things To Know About Plugins

• There are so many plugins available. Be careful of overloading your server with too many plugins, as this will start to affect your site’s resources and site loading times. It also creates more maintenance work for you resulting from possible errors.
• Install only those plugins that you really use. Delete any plugins you don’t use from your site, as these also consume resources.
• Many free plugins normally receive little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing paid plugins, make sure you check around a little and understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we publish here for additional 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 on your site. WordPress changes often and out-of-date plugins can create problems.
• Make sure that you always maintain your plugins up-to-date. Outdated plugin not only can create errors and conflicts, they may also contain vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

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

One last thing about plugins:

Whatever functionality you need for your web site, you can be sure that a WordPress plugin currently exists that will do exactly what you need, and that this plugin can either be accessed at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that it will be fairly affordable.

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

And, if by any chance such a plugin is not available, then a custom plugin that does precisely what you need it to do can most certainly be written for you at a reasonable cost.

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

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