Tag: What Are WordPress Plugins

One of the main advantages of building a website with the WordPress platform is the ability to easily enhance your WP website or blog’s functionality using plugins.

What Are WP Plugins?

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

You download and install an app!

An app is a little software that is very easy to install and integrates new features and functionality into your smart phone.

(Just like you will find social sharing apps …)

A plugin is quite similar to an app. You download and install a software that adds new functionality to your WP web site …

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

Typically, if you want to add new features to a website, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the new features or enhancements, this could get fairly expensive, particularly if website developers have to add new code or modify programs or install scripts that integrate into your current site.

This is also applicable when setting up a website. Companies will often invest money up-front in bells and whistles they may simply not need.

For this reason, we recommend a sustainable approach to developing your digital presence presence and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply with minimal expense involved. Get a web site up and running fast, then …

2) As the need for new features and functionality becomes apparent, simply install new software modules with a couple of clicks of the mouse that integrate seamlessly with your existing website or blog, giving your website an entirely new and expanded range of possibilities, and also …

3) Cost not a single dollar more to add to your site?

Well, that’s precisely what a WP plugin lets you do!

Benefits Of Using Plugins

We began this article by comparing WordPress plugins with apps. Just like some apps are free to download and some may cost a little bit of money, so do plugins.

In fact, thousands of powerful plugins can be downloaded to your site at no cost.

WordPress plugins that you have to pay for are referred to as Premium plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the price of purchasing a Premium plugin to the price of paying for professional web development services to get the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. ”paid”) plugins cost very little.

Also, as WordPress makes its code available to everyone, any person can create, modify and customize any part of the code. This has allowed many professional web development professionals to enhance the WPsoftware.

• WordPress plugins let you get started with a basic site and expand only when necessary.
• Plugins allow you to add practically unlimited functionality to any web site quickly and cheaply.
• WordPress plugins give you almost unlimited expansion capabilities.
• WP plugins allow non-technical website owners to own a web presence that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins will work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website instant new capabilities and enhancements.
• Some plugins are a little more advanced and may need some initial configuring.

WordPress Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Often) Completely FREE!

Like many themes, thousands of great WordPress plugins are available for WP users … for FREE!

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

As previously mentioned, you can find WordPress plugins that will do almost anything you want done.

WP plugin categories cover:

• Blog Administration
• Content Distribution
• Traffic
• User Interactivity
• Social Connectivity
• Adding Media Files – Videocasts, Graphics & Images, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales And Advertising Automation
• Increasing Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Reporting Applications
• Optimizing Your

You can expand your WordPress site with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Managing banners
• E-commerce (from managing single sales with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, discount codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile integration
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonials
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your pages from English to French)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media management
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Business directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your site
• Set appointments and appointment reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and email you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor social conversations
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add a site map
• Hide pages from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your pages and posts
• Migrate content from other publishing applications
• Perform bulk data replacements
• Block SPAM
• Customize guest discussions (e.g. display Facebook comments)
• Inserting HTML and script elements into your posts
• Add formatted tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add location maps
• Publicize your posts automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and many others
• Show countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

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

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let me show you some practical advantages of installing an inexpensive plugin on your site.

For example, if you need to protect your content, you can install plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on a post inaccessible, or create a full membership site with personal login details for every user …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to enhance your website in so many ways. From adding functionality that enhance your business, your web users’ experience and your ability to analyze visitor data …

To extending your site’s reach across social networks and search engines …

You can also add complex functionality to your website using relatively inexpensive paid plugins. For example, you can set up plugins that integrate and automate functionality on your website like managing customer testimonials and event bookings …

And even set up a complete bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to design custom functionality for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that can allow you to engage in various ways with your visitors, clients and registered site users …

For example, your visitors can:

• Leave 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 the visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site increased exposure).
• Share your posts with other web users on social networks.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with other online users via online forums or even set up an online community on your own site.
• Engage with your support team via live video chats
• Dial your business from their devices when visiting your website
• Get help via a dedicated customer helpdesk
• And so much more …

Finally you, can also integrate sophisticated enterprise-level applications with a WP “front end”. This allows you to manage the content that your visitors will see on your web site, while the 3rd-party application handles the technological aspects …

Useful Things To Know About WP Plugins

• There are many plugins available. Be careful not to overload your server with too many plugins, as this can affect your website’s resources and page loading times. It can also mean more maintenance work for you resulting from potential conflicts.
• Only keep those plugins you really plan to use. Delete any plugins you don’t need from your site, as these use server resources.
• Many free plugins normally come with little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing paid WordPress plugins, ensure that you check around a little and understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, updates, new features, etc. Be sure to check some of the plugin reviews we provide here 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 using it. WordPress changes frequently and older plugins that have not been updated can create errors.
• Always upgrade your plugins. Older plugins not only can cause problems, they could also have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WordPress plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most used digital content management solution 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 development.

One last thing about WordPress plugins:

Whatever feature you want for your website, you can be sure that a someone has probably already created one that will do exactly what you want, and that this plugin can either be accessed at no cost, or if it’s a premium plugin, that it will be surprisingly affordable.

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

And, if by any chance this plugin does not exist, then a custom plugin that does precisely what you want it to do can certainly be coded for you at a reasonable cost.

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

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