Tag: What Are WordPress Plugins

One of the main features of the WordPress platform is the ability to easily increase your WP website’s functionality using plugins.

About WP Plugins

No doubt, you most likely use a cell phone. What do you do when you would like to access something new on your phone like a new application, game or productivity tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software application that is simple and easy to install and adds new features and functionality to any smart device.

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

A WP plugin is like an app. You install a software that provides new functionality to your web site …

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

Almost always, if you plan to expand the functionality of a website, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the new feature or enhancements, this could become quite expensive, especially if it requires website development.

This also applies when setting up a new website. Many businesses tend to invest upfront in features they may not ever need.

For sound, strategic business planning reasons, we suggest a cost-effective strategy to growing your web site and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get a professional web presence up and running quickly, then …

2) As you need new features and functionality, just install new software modules with a couple of mouse clicks directly from your admin panel, to give your website a whole new and expanded range of useful features, and also …

3) Cost not a single dollar extra to install on your site?

Well, this is exactly what plugins let you do!

WP Plugins – Benefits

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

In fact, many plugins can be installed on your sites.

Plugins that you have to pay for are called ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the cost of paying for web development services to add similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are priced quite low.

Also, since WordPress makes its code publicly available, any person can create, edit and customize any portion of the code. This has enabled thousands of professional software developers to build more new applications that add new features to the WordPress application than you can probably imagine.

• WP plugins let you get started with just a simple website and then expand when necessary.
• WP plugins let you add practically endless features to your site easily and very cheaply.
• WordPress plugins give you practically unlimited expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow ”non-techies” to have a site that they can manage.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your website or blog with immediate enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins offer more extensive features and require some initial configuring.

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

Like many themes, loads of great WordPress plugins are currently available for WP users … often at no cost!

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

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

Plugin categories cover:

• Website Management
• Content Syndication
• Traffic
• User Engagement
• Social Monitoring
• Media Management Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Reporting Tools
• Securing Your

For example, you can enhance a WP site with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Surveys
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonial forms
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your pages from English to Norwegian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage integration
• Faster page loading
• Managing events & bookings
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your blog
• Set up client appointments and reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and email you reports
• Redirect web links
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude pages from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect page content
• Migrate content from different publishing applications
• Perform bulk content edits
• Fight SPAM
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook posts)
• Insert scripts and script elements into your posts and pages
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced text formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google local search
• Add a map of your business location
• Post your posts automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and many others
• Display countdown timers (for scarcity offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As you can clearly see, WordPress plugins give you virtually limitless possibilities. If you plan to build a website for your business, or your existing site was not built using WordPress, then consider getting one built on your domain, or you could be missing out on some serious functionality.

In case you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let me show you some practical uses of adding a plugin to your web site.

For example, if you want to publish content which is only accessible to some users, you can install plugins to make a section of your page inaccessible, or create a full membership site with customized login details for every member …

As mentioned before, free plugins can be used to improve your site in lots of different ways. From adding functionality that can improve your business, your site’s user experience and your ability to analyze visitor metrics …

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

You can also add sophisticated features to your site using relatively inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can set up plugins that automate functions on your website such as managing customer testimonials and event bookings …

And even run a custom-branded bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to design these applications for you …

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

For example, your web visitors can:

• Post comments on your site (which can grow into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site increased exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on social networking sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with your team via forums or even set up an online community on your own domain.
• Engage with members of your team using live web conferencing and chatrooms
• Call your business directly from their mobile phones while visiting your pages
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

You can even integrate sophisticated “back end” solutions within a WordPress “front end”. This enables you to manage the content that your visitors will see on your website, while the 3rd-party application handles the technological areas …

Some Useful Things To Know About Plugins

• There are so many plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can inevitably begin to affect your site’s performance and site loading times. It also creates more maintenance work for you resulting from possible conflicts and errors.
• Install only those plugins you really plan to use. Delete all inactive plugins from your site, as these also use resources.
• Many free plugins normally come with very little to no support from the plugin developer. When considering premium plugins, make sure you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, updates, new features, etc. Be sure to check our plugin recommendations for additional useful information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two or more years), then think carefully before installing it on your website. WordPress updates regularly and older plugins that have not been updated can cause conflicts.
• Ensure that you always keep your plugins upgraded to their most recent software version. Outdated plugins not only can create issues, they may also contain vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

As you can see, WordPress plugins are an important element of WordPress and contribute to making it the most popular digital content management software in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to expand without having to spend thousands of dollars on web developers.

One last thing on the topic of plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you want for your web presence, you can be sure that a someone has probably already developed one that will do what you need it to do, and that it can either be accessed at no cost, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the cost will be quite reasonable.

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

And, if by any chance this WordPress plugin is not available, then a custom plugin that does exactly what you would like it to do can probably be created for your business for a very reasonable price.

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

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