Tag: What Are WordPress Plugins

One of the main advantages of building an online business presence with the WordPress web content publishing platform is the ability to easily increase your WP website’s functionality using plugins.

What Are Plugins?

Like most people, you most likely have a mobile phone. What happens when you want access to something new on your phone like a new application, software or a business productivity tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a software application that is really easy to install and integrates new functionality into any smart phone.

(Just as there are social sharing apps …)

A plugin is very much like an app. You simply install an application that provides new functionality to your WP website …

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

Typically, expanding the functionality of an existing site involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the new feature or enhancements, things could get quite expensive, particularly if website developers have to add new code or edit code or install scripts that integrate with your existing set up.

This also applies when setting up a new website. Organizations sometimes fork out money in advance for extra features they may probably never need.

To reduce unnecessary expenses, we suggest considering a cost-effective strategy to setting up a website and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and with minimal expense involved. Get your business website up and running quickly, then …

2) As more features or functionality are needed, install new software modules with just a few mouse clicks directly from within your dashboard section, giving your web site an entirely new range of possibilities, and …

3) Cost not one cent extra to add to your web site?

Well, that’s exactly what WordPress plugins allow you to do!

Plugins – Benefits

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

In fact, thousands of plugins are freely available for users.

Plugins that cost money are referred to as ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when you compare it to the cost of investing in professional web development services to get similar functionality on your site, most Premium plugins cost very little.

Also, since WordPress distributes its software as an Open Source application, anyone can create, edit and customize any part of the code. This has enabled many third-party web developers to build more new plugins that “plug into” WordPress than you can imagine.

• Plugins let you start off simply with a simple online business presence and then add new features and enhancements to your site only when necessary.
• Plugins allow you to add almost unlimited functionality to your web site quickly and very cheaply.
• Plugins give you practically endless expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow business owners to own a digital presence that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your website or blog with new capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins are slightly more advanced and require some configuring.

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

Like themes, tens of thousands of great plugins are currently available for WP users … for FREE!

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

As mentioned earlier, you can find plugins that will do almost everything you can think of.

There are WordPress plugins for:

• Site Administration
• Content Distribution
• Online Traffic Generation
• User Interactivity
• Social Media
• Media Management Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data & System Reporting Applications
• Blog Optimization

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

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Surveys
• Rotating advertising banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change your website’s content from English to Spanish)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media management
• Faster page loading
• Managing events & bookings
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your site
• Set up client appointments and reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and send you reports
• Redirect web links
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Hide specific from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide page content sections
• Migrate data from non-WordPress platforms
• Perform bulk data replacements
• Fight SPAM commenting
• Customize guest commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook posts)
• Inserting code and code elements into your content
• Add formatted tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add business location maps
• Publish your posts automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and many others
• Show countdown timers (for expiring offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you endless business scalability. If you plan to build a website or blog, or your existing website isn’t built with WordPress, then consider getting a WordPress site or blog 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 me show you some practical advantages of installing a plugin on your site.

For example, if you want to protect your content, you can use plugins to make an area of a post inaccessible, or create a professional membership site with customized login details for all users …

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

To increasing your business visibility across social networks and search engines …

You can also add sophisticated functionality to your site using relatively inexpensive paid plugins. For example, you can download plugins that automate functions on your site such as managing customer testimonials and booking events …

And even run a custom bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring software developers to create similar functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of native WordPress commenting features and plugins that will enhance visitor engagement …

For example, your visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can grow into online discussions) using either the native WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site additional exposure).
• Bookmark your content on social networks.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with other online users using forums or even set up a private online social network on your domain.
• Engage with your support team via live webcam conferencing and chatrooms
• Dial your business from their devices when visiting your site
• Get help via a user support helpdesk
• And so much more …

Finally you, can also integrate complex enterprise solutions with a WordPress “front end”. This allows you to manage your business sales and marketing, while the 3rd-party application handles the technical areas …

Additional Information About WordPress Plugins

• There are so many WordPress plugins available. Be careful not to overload your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can inevitably affect your website’s performance and page loading speed. It also means more maintenance issues for you resulting from possible conflicts and errors.
• Only keep those plugins you really need to use. Delete all inactive plugins from your site, as these use server resources.
• Many free plugins normally receive little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing premium plugins, make sure you check some reviews online and understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we publish on this site for additional 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 carefully before installing it on your website. WordPress is updated often and older plugins that have not been updated can cause conflicts.
• Always keep all plugins up-to-date. Older plugin not only can cause errors, they may also have security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most popular content management system in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand quickly without spending thousands of dollars on outsourced web development costs.

One last thing regarding WordPress plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you want for your web presence, you can guarantee that a plugin probably exists that will do exactly what you want, and that this plugin will either be available for FREE, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the price to buy it will be reasonable.

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

And, if by chance such a WordPress plugin is not available, then it can certainly be developed for you at a reasonable cost.

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

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