Tag: What Are WordPress Plugins

One of the most powerful advantages of building a website using WordPress is that you can quickly and easily enhance your WP site’s functionality using applications called plugins.

About Plugins

Like most of us, you most likely own a device like a mobile phone. What happens when you want access to something new on your device like a new game or a new business tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a little piece of software that is easy to install and instantly adds new functionality to a smart device.

(Just like there are social sharing apps …)

A WordPress plugin is like an app. You simply install an application that adds new functionality to your WordPress site …

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

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

This also applies when starting a website or business blog. Organizations tend to invest money in features they may not need.

For this reason, we recommend using a sustainable approach when developing your website and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine if you could:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get your website up and running fast, then …

2) As you need new features or functionality, install new applications with a couple of clicks of the mouse directly from your WordPress administration area, giving your site a completely new and expanded range of useful features, and also …

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

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

Benefits And Advantages Of Using WP Plugins

Earlier, we compared WordPress plugins with apps. Just like some apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little money, the same applies to plugins.

In fact, many fantastic plugins can be downloaded to your website for free.

Plugins that you purchase are referred to as “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare it to the cost of paying for web development services to get similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins cost very little.

Also, as WordPress distributes its software as an Open Source application, any person can create, modify and customize any part of the WordPress code. This has enabled many professional web development professionals to create more plugins that enhance the WordPress engine than you can probably imagine.

• WordPress plugins let you get started with a basic yet professional web presence and then add new features and enhancements to your site as necessary.
• WP plugins allow you to add almost endless features to your web site easily, quickly and really inexpensively.
• WP plugins give your online business presence virtually endless expanding capabilities.
• WP plugins allow anyone to own a web presence that they can self-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 and functionality.
• Some plugins can be slightly more advanced and require some initial configuration.

WordPress Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Often) 100% FREE!

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

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

As previously mentioned, you can find plugins that can do almost everything you want done.

WordPress plugin categories cover:

• Site Management
• Content Distribution
• Web Traffic Generation
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Monitoring
• Inserting Media Files – Videocasts, Graphics & Images, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales Automation
• Increasing Sales & Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Analysis
• Optimizing Your

You can add features to a business online presence with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Surveys
• Managing advertising banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce stores with online shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, discount codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonial forms
• Automatic language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your website from English to French)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Cloud storage integration
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Business directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your site
• Set up client appointments and appointment reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks on your pages and email you reports
• Redirect website pages
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude pages from showing on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect content on your pages and posts
• Import data from non-WP platforms
• Search and replace data
• Prevent SPAM commenting
• Customize guest commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Insert HTML and code elements into your posts
• Add tables
• Display animated graphic elements and advanced text formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map of your business location
• Syndicate your posts automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and many others
• Show countdown timers (for special offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As you can clearly see, plugins give you limitless business flexibility. If you plan to build a web site, or your existing website isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider getting one in the future, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

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

For example, if you need to publish private content, you can install plugins to make a section of your page or post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a complete paid membership site with separate login details for all users …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to improve your business site in lots of different ways. From installing new features that improve your business, your site’s user experience and your understanding of what is taking place on your site …

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

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

And even run a custom-branded bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying programmers to create custom applications for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that will increase your site’s interactivity …

For example, your 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 shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site increased exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on social networks.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with your team via forums or even set up a private community on your site.
• Engage with members of your team through live video chats
• Call your business directly from their laptops when visiting your site
• Get help via a dedicated client support helpdesk
• And much more …

Finally you, can even integrate sophisticated third-party solutions with a WordPress “front end”. This enables you to manage your business sales and marketing, while your 3rd-party application handles the technical functions …

Useful Things To Know About WordPress Plugins

• There are so many WordPress plugins available. Be careful of overloading your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can start to affect your site’s resources and page loading times. It also creates more maintenance work for you as a consequence of possible conflicts and errors.
• Only keep those plugins that you really use. Delete all unnecessary plugins from your site, as these use server resources.
• Many free plugins normally come with little to no support from the plugin author. When considering paid WP plugins, we recommend that you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we publish on this site for more information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two or more years), then think carefully before installing it. WordPress is updated regularly and older plugins that have not been updated can create errors.
• Ensure to always upgrade your plugins to their latest version. Outdated plugin not only can cause errors, they may also have security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WP plugins are an important aspect of WordPress and contribute to making it the most popular CMS available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add new features to their web presence without spending thousands of dollars on web development.

One last thing about WP plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you want for your web presence, you can be sure that a WP plugin probably exists that will do what you want, and that this plugin will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the cost will be minimal.

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

And, if by chance such a WP plugin has not been created yet, then a custom plugin that does precisely what you need it to do can most certainly be created for your business for a very reasonable price.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of plugins – what plugins are and how they can improve your business blog. See our related posts to learn about more useful plugins that we recommend using.

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