Tag: What Are WordPress Plugins

One of the main features of the WordPress website publishing software is the ability to quickly and easily expand your WP website or blog’s functionality using plugins.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

No doubt, you probably have a device like a mobile phone. What happens when you want access to something new on your device like a new application, software or business productivity tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software that is very easy to install and adds new features to your mobile phone.

(Just like you will find social sharing apps for smart devices …)

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

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

Typically, expanding the functionality of a site involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the features or enhancements, this could get quite expensive, especially if it involves programming code.

This also applies when developing a website or business blog. Business owners tend to spend money in advance on additional bells and whistles they may not need.

As part of sound strategic business planning, we suggest a cost-effective approach to developing your web site and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get a basic, professional business website up and running fast, then …

2) As new features or functionality are needed, just install new software modules with a few mouse clicks directly from your WordPress admin area, giving your website or blog a completely new and expanded range of possibilities, and …

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

Well, that’s precisely what plugins let you do!

Benefits Of Using Plugins

We began this post by comparing plugins with apps. In the same way that some apps are free to download and some apps cost a little money, so do plugins.

In fact, many plugins are freely available for WP users.

WordPress plugins that you buy are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when you compare it to the cost of hiring a professional web developer to add the same functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are typically very inexpensive.

Also, because WordPress makes its source code available to everyone, any web developer can create, edit and customize any part of the WordPress code. This has enabled thousands of professional software developers to enhance the WPsoftware.

• Plugins let you start off with only a basic site and add new features and enhancements to your site as required.
• WordPress plugins allow you to add practically unlimited features to any site easily, quickly and quite inexpensively.
• WP plugins give your website practically unlimited expanding capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow anyone to have a site that they can fully manage.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your site instant new capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins can be slightly more complex and require some initial configuring.

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

Just like themes, thousands of plugins are made available for WordPress users … for FREE!

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

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

There are plugins for:

• Site Management
• Content Syndication
• Traffic
• User Engagement
• Social Connectivity
• Uploading Media – Video, Graphics, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Biz And Online Sales & Marketing Automation
• Improving Sales & Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Analysis Tools
• Securing Your

You can expand your website with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Social contests
• Managing advertising banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to enterprise scale e-commerce stores with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring payments, coupons, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonial forms
• Language translation plugins (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 interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage management
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Business directories
• Automatically sell and manage spots on your blog
• Set client appointments and reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and send you reports
• Redirect visitors from broken pages to other pages on your site or other sites
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add a site map
• Exclude pages from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect content on your pages and posts
• Migrate information from non-WP applications
• Perform bulk content edits
• Fight SPAM commenting
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Insert scripts and script elements into your pages
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google local search
• Add location maps
• Post your content automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and many others
• Display countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you limitless possibilities. If you are planning to build a web site for your business, or your existing web site isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider choosing WordPress in the future.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WordPress plugins are, let me show you how you can benefit by installing an inexpensive plugin on your web site.

For example, if you want to publish private content, you can use plugins to make a section of a post or page inaccessible, or create a full membership site with customized login details for each member …

As mentioned before, free plugins can be used to improve your web presence in so many ways. From installing functionality that improve your business, your website visitors’ experience and your ability to review website data …

To increasing your business visibility across a number of social sites and search engines …

You can also add advanced functionality to your site using relatively inexpensive paid WordPress plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that integrate and automate features on your website such as user feedback and event registration management …

And also set up a custom-branded bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to code the same applications for you …

You can also take advantage of built-in WP commenting features and plugins that will make your site even more interactive …

For example, your 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 displayed throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on various social sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with other online users through forums or even set up an online social network on your site.
• Engage with your staff via live chats
• Call your business from their laptops when visiting your site
• Open a support ticket
• And so much more …

Finally you, can also integrate complex 3rd-party solutions within a WordPress “front end”. This lets you control the content that your visitors will see on your website, while your third-party application handles the technical side of things …

Plugins – Additional Information

• There are so many plugins available. Be careful not to overload your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can affect your site’s performance and page loading speed. It can also mean more maintenance work for you as a result of possible errors.
• Only keep those plugins that you really need. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these utilize additional resources.
• Many free plugins typically receive little to no support from the plugin developer. When considering paid plugins, make sure you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we provide here for additional helpful 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 regularly and older plugins that have not been updated can create errors.
• Always update your plugins. Older plugin not only can cause errors and conflicts, they may also have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

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

One last thing about plugins:

If there is a functionality you want for your web presence, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already developed one that will do what you need it to do, and that this plugin will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the price will be very affordable.

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

And, if by any chance this WP plugin has not been created yet, then one can probably be created for your business for a reasonable price.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of plugins – what they are and how they can significantly enhance the functionality of your website. See our published posts to learn about more great plugins that we recommend using.

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