Tag: What Are WordPress Plugins

One of the most useful benefits of building an online business presence with the WordPress software is the ability to quickly enhance your WP website’s functionality using plugins.

What Are Plugins?

No doubt, you most likely use a smart phone. What happens when you want access to something new on your phone like a new software or a new productivity tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a little software application that is easy to install and instantly adds new features and functionality to your smart phone.

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

A WordPress plugin is very much like an app. You install a little piece of software that adds new functionality to your WP website or blog …

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

Almost always, adding new features to a web site involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the feature or enhancement is, this cost can be quite significant, especially if web developers have to add new code or edit code or develop scripts that integrate into your existing set up.

This is also applicable to creating a new website or business blog. Many organizations tend to invest in added features they probably will never need.

For this reason, we recommend considering a cost-effective approach to growing a website and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine if you could:

1) Start simply and with minimal cost involved. Get a professional-looking web presence up and running quickly, then …

2) As you need new features, simply install new applications with just a couple of clicks of the mouse directly from your WP admin panel, giving your website a whole new and expanded range of possibilities, and …

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

Well, that’s precisely what a WordPress plugin allows you to do!

Benefits Of Plugins

Earlier, we compared 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, loads of plugins are available at no cost to users.

Plugins that you have to pay for are referred to as Premium plugins. The good news, is that when you compare it to the price of investing in web development services to add similar functionality on your site, most Premium plugins cost very little.

Also, as WordPress is an Open Source application, any web developer can create, edit and customize any part of the code. This has allowed thousands of professional software development companies to enhance and contribute to the WPsoftware.

• WP plugins let you get started with only a basic site and add new features and enhancements to your site only as required.
• WordPress plugins allow you to add almost unlimited features to any web presence quickly and inexpensively.
• Plugins give you practically unlimited expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow ”non-techies” to have a site that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website immediate capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins provide more advanced options and could require some initial configuring.

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

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

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

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

Plugin categories cover:

• Website Management
• Content Distribution
• Driving Site Traffic
• User Interactivity
• Social Sharing
• Media Management Automation
• Increasing Sales & Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Monitoring & Reporting
• WP SEO

For example, you can expand a WordPress site with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Rotating banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonial forms
• Language translation (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 menus
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media integration
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your website
• Set appointments and appointment reminders
• Manage reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links on your pages and send you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add a site map
• Hide pages from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your pages and posts
• Migrate content from non-WP platforms
• Perform bulk data replacements
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. display Facebook comments)
• Inserting HTML and code elements into your posts
• Add tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add a map of your business location
• Syndicate your content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and others
• Display countdown timers (for special offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As you can clearly see, WP plugins give you virtually limitless business scalability. If you are planning to build a web site, or your existing web site wasn’t built with WordPress, then consider getting a WP site or blog in the future, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

In case you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WordPress plugins are, let’s take a look at how you can benefit by simply installing a plugin on your site.

For example, if you want to publish private content, you can use plugins to make an area of your page inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a full membership site with separate login details for all users …

As mentioned before, free plugins can be used to improve your business site in lots of different ways. From installing functionality that will improve your business, your visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is happening on your site …

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

You can also add complex features to your site using relatively inexpensive premium WordPress plugins. For example, you can download plugins that automate processes on your pages like displaying customer testimonials and event registration details …

And even set up a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of hiring web developers to build similar applications for you …

You can also take advantage of native WordPress commenting features and plugins that will make your site even more interactive …

For example, your web visitors can:

• Leave comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then displayed throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with increased exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with your team members through online forums or even set up an online community on your own domain.
• Engage with members of your team through live chats
• Call your business from their laptops while browsing your pages
• Open support tickets
• And much more …

You can even integrate complex “back end” applications within a WP “front end”. This lets you manage your business marketing, while the 3rd-party application handles the technological areas …

Plugins – Useful Tips

• There are lots of great plugins available. Be careful not to overload your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will begin to affect your website’s resources and site loading times. It also creates more maintenance work for you resulting from possible conflicts.
• Install only those plugins that you really plan to use. Delete all inactive plugins from your site, as these utilize resources.
• Many free plugins often come with very little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing paid WordPress plugins, we recommend that you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check some of the plugin reviews we provide on this site for more information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two years), then think twice before installing it on your website. WordPress updates on a regular basis and older plugins that have not been updated can cause issues.
• Ensure to always maintain all plugins updated. Outdated plugin not only can cause problems, they may also have security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

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

One last thing on the subject of WP plugins:

If there is a feature you want for your web presence, you can be sure that a someone has probably already authored one that will do exactly what you want it to do, and that it can either be accessed for FREE, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the price will be reasonable.

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

And, if by chance this plugin has not been created yet, then it can most certainly be written for your business at a reasonable cost.

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

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