Tag: What Are WordPress Plugins

One of the most useful features of WordPress is the ability to easily increase your WordPress website or blog’s functionality using plugins.

Understanding WP Plugins

No doubt, you probably have a device like a cell phone. What happens when you want access to something new on your device like a new application, game or a tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software that is simple and easy to install and instantly adds new functionality to a mobile phone.

(Just like you will find social sharing apps …)

A plugin is quite similar to an app. You simply download and install a little piece of software that provides new functionality to your WP web site …

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

Normally, if you need to add a new feature to a site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the feature or enhancement is, things can get quite expensive, especially if website developers have to create new code or edit code or install scripts to integrate with your existing site.

This is also applicable to starting a website or business blog. Many companies tend to invest up-front in added components they may probably never need.

To save money and keep your costs to a minimum, we suggest using a cost-effective strategy when developing your web site and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As more features and functionality are required, add new software modules with a couple of mouse clicks directly from your admin area, giving your web site a completely new range of practical capabilities, and also …

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

Well, this is just what WP plugins allow you to do!

Plugins – Benefits

We began this post by comparing plugins with smartphone apps. In the same way that some apps are free to download and some may cost a little money, the same applies to plugins.

In fact, many plugins are freely available for users.

WordPress plugins that you purchase are referred to as ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of investing in web development services to get similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are generally very inexpensive.

Also, as WordPress makes its source code available to everyone, anybody can create, edit and customize any part of the code. This has enabled thousands of professional web developers to build more tools that expand WordPress than you can probably imagine.

• WP plugins allow you to get started with a basic site and expand when necessary.
• Plugins allow you to add practically endless functionality to your site easily, quickly and inexpensively.
• WP plugins give you almost unlimited expanding capabilities.
• WP plugins allow non-technical users to own a site that they can fully manage.
• Most plugins will work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your web site with new capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins provide more advanced options and require some initial configuration.

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

Just like themes, thousands of great plugins are available for WP users … often at no cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you can find plugins that can do just about anything you can possibly want a site to do.

There are plugins for:

• Website Management
• Content Management
• Traffic
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Sharing
• Inserting Media – Video, Graphics & Images, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Biz And Online Sales Automation
• Improving Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data & System Reporting Applications
• Securing Your

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

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Surveys
• Rotating banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, discount codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer feedback forms
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change your website’s content from English to Spanish)
• 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 & bookings
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your site
• Set client appointments and reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and email you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor social signals
• 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 page content sections
• Import information from non-WordPress applications
• Perform bulk content edits
• Prevent SPAM
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. display Facebook comments)
• Inserting HTML and code elements into your content
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced font display formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add a map
• Post your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many others
• Show countdown timers (for expiring offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, WP plugins give you practically limitless possibilities. If you plan to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing web site wasn’t built with WordPress, then consider using WordPress in the future.

In case you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WordPress plugins are, let’s take a look at how you can benefit instantly by adding an inexpensive plugin to your site.

For example, if you want content protection, you can use plugins to make an area of a page inaccessible, or create a complete membership site with customized login details for each user …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to enhance your web presence in lots of different ways. From adding features that improve your business, your visitors’ experience and your ability to analyze visitor metrics …

To extending your business reach and visibility across social networks and search engines …

You can also add advanced functionality to your website using inexpensive paid WP plugins. For example, you can install plugins that integrate and automate functionality on your pages such as displaying customer testimonials and booking events …

And even run a custom bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying software developers to design these functionality for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that can make your site even more interactive …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with increased exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on social media.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with your team through forums or even set up a private community on your domain.
• Engage with your staff via live video chats
• Call your business directly from their cellphones while browsing your site
• Get support via a client help desk
• And much more …

You can also integrate complex enterprise applications using a WP “front end”. This enables you to control the content that your visitors will see on your website, while the third-party application handles the technical functions …

Plugins – Useful Information

• There are loads of useful plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your site with too many plugins, as this will affect your site’s resources and site loading speed. It also means more maintenance work for you as a result of possible conflicts and errors.
• Only keep those plugins you really need to use. Delete any plugins you don’t need from your site, as these use server resources.
• Many free plugins typically receive little to no support from the plugin author. When considering premium plugins, we recommend that you check around a little and see what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of our WordPress plugin reviews for more information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two years), then think carefully before installing it on your site. WordPress changes frequently and older plugins that have not been updated can cause conflicts.
• Make sure that you always update your plugins to their most recent version. Older plugin not only can cause errors, they could also have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

As you can see, plugins are an important part of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most preferred web management platform available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add instant functionality to their web presence without spending thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing about plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you need for your website, you can guarantee that a WP plugin currently exists that will do exactly what you want it to do, and that it will either be available for FREE, 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 chance this WordPress plugin does not exist, then it can probably be created for your business at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of plugins – what they are and how they can significantly to improve your business blog. See our published posts to learn about more popular plugins that we recommend using.

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