Tag: What Are WordPress Plugins

One of the main advantages of using the WordPress web content publishing platform is the ability to easily increase your WP website’s functionality using inexpensive called plugins.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

No doubt, you most likely use a device like a cell phone. What happens when you would like access to something new on your phone like a new application, software 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 integrates new features into your smart device.

(Just as you can find social sharing apps …)

A plugin is really similar to an app. You simply install a software application that provides new functionality to your site …

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

Generally, expanding the functionality of a website involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the new feature or enhancement is, this cost can be quite significant, particularly if website developers have to create new code or edit templates or install scripts to integrate with your current set up.

This also applies to starting a new web site. Organizations often invest in features or options they may not need.

To keep expenses to a minimum, we suggest considering a cost-effective strategy to setting up a website and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine if you could:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get a professional-looking web site up and running fast, then …

2) As you need new features or functionality, add new applications with only a few clicks of the mouse that integrate with your website, giving your web site a whole new and expanded range of features and functionality, and …

3) Cost not a single cent extra to download and install on your website?

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

Benefits & Advantages Of Plugins

We began this post by comparing WP plugins with apps. Just like some apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little bit of money, the same is true of plugins.

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

Plugins that you have to pay for are called “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare it to the price of hiring a professional web developer to add similar functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are priced quite cheaply.

Also, since WordPress makes its code publicly available, anyone can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the WP code. This has enabled thousands of professional web development companies to create more applications that “plug into” WordPress than you can possibly imagine.

• Plugins let you get started with a basic yet professional website and then add new features and enhancements to your site as necessary.
• Plugins allow you to add practically unlimited functionality to any online business presence easily and quite inexpensively.
• WordPress plugins give you almost endless expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow anyone to own a website that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your site with new capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins provide more extensive features and may require some initial configuring.

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

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

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

As previously mentioned, you can find plugins that will do just about everything you need done.

There are plugins for:

• Website Management
• Content Distribution
• Driving Web Traffic
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Media
• Inserting Media – Videos, Graphics, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Biz And Online Sales & Marketing Automation
• Improving Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Reporting
• WP Security

You can enhance your business online presence with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Social contests
• Managing ad banners
• E-commerce (from managing single ordering with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• 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 interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media management
• Faster page loading
• Managing events
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your website
• Set client appointments and appointment reminders
• Manage reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and email you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor social conversations
• 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.)
• Protect post content sections
• Import information from non-WP applications
• Perform bulk data edits
• Prevent SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor discussions (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Inserting HTML and code elements into your posts, pages and sidebars
• Add tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map
• Syndicate your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and many others
• Display countdown timers (for expiring offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As you can clearly see, WordPress plugins give you virtually endless possibilities. If you are planning to build a web site for your business, or your existing web site was not built with WordPress, then consider getting one in the future, or you could be missing out on some serious functionality.

If you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using WP plugins, let me show you how you can benefit by adding an inexpensive plugin to your web site.

For example, if you need content protection, you can use plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on a page or post inaccessible, or create a professional paid membership site with personal login details for each member …

As mentioned previously, you can use free plugins to improve your web site in so many different ways. From installing features that will improve your business, your site’s user experience and your understanding of what is happening on your site …

To extending your site’s reach and visibility across a number of social media and search engines …

You can also add complex functionality to your website using relatively inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that integrate and automate tasks on your site like 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 programmers to design the same applications for you …

You can also take advantage of built-in WP commenting features and plugins that will let you engage even more with visitors, customers and registered site members …

For example, your web visitors can:

• Leave comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with added exposure).
• Share your content with other web visitors on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with your team members through forums or even set up a private community on your own site.
• Engage with your support team through live video chats
• Call your business directly from their devices when visiting your pages
• Get help via a dedicated client help desk
• And much more …

You can even integrate sophisticated enterprise applications with a WP “front end”. This allows you to manage your business sales and marketing, while your third-party application handles the technological functions …

Useful Tips About Plugins

• There are lots of great plugins available. Be careful not to overload your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can inevitably affect your website’s resources and site loading speed. It also means more maintenance work for you as a consequence of potential conflicts and errors.
• Only keep the plugins you really need. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these utilize server resources.
• Many free plugins normally come with little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing paid WP plugins, ensure that you check some reviews online and see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check our plugin recommendations for additional information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two years), then think carefully before installing it on your website. WordPress updates regularly and out-of-date plugins can create conflicts.
• Always upgrade your plugins to the latest software version. Older plugin not only can cause problems, they may also contain vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

As you can see, plugins are an important component of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most popular content management system available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add new functionality to their website without spending thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing regarding plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you need for your web presence, you can be sure that a WordPress plugin probably exists that will do just what you need it to do, and that it can either be accessed for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the cost will be very reasonable.

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

And, if by any chance this plugin has not been created yet, then a custom plugin that does exactly what you would like it to do can most certainly be coded for your business for a reasonable price.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what plugins are and how they can improve your WordPress web site. See our related posts section to learn about more great plugins that we recommend using.

***

***