Tag: What Are WordPress Plugins

One of the main benefits of building a website using WordPress is that you can easily enhance your WP website’s functionality using plugins.

What Are Plugins?

Like most people, you probably have a device like a smart phone. What do you do when you want access to something new on your phone like a new application, software or a new business tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software application that is very easy to install and immediately adds new features to a mobile phone.

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

A WP plugin is quite similar to an app. You install a software application that adds new functionality to your WP website …

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

Typically, if you want to add new features to your web site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new feature or enhancement is, the cost can be significant, particularly if website developers need to create new code or edit code or develop programs to integrate into your current set up.

This is also applicable to creating a website. Companies often invest up front in additional features and options they may not need.

For sound, strategic business planning reasons, we recommend using a sustainable strategy when growing your web site and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As new features or functionality are needed, just add new software modules with a couple of mouse clicks directly from your dashboard section, to give your site an entirely new and expanded range of capabilities and functionality, and also …

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

Well, this is precisely what WP plugins let you do!

Benefits Of Using Plugins

We started this blog post by comparing WordPress plugins with ’apps’. Just like many apps are free to download and some may cost a little bit of money, the same is true for plugins.

In fact, loads of powerful plugins can be downloaded to your site for free.

Plugins that cost money are referred to as Premium plugins. The good news, is that when you compare these to the price of investing in web development services to get similar functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are typically very inexpensive.

Also, because WordPress is an Open Source application, any web developer can create, modify and customize any portion of the code. This has allowed thousands of professional software developers to build more new tools that expand WordPress than you can probably imagine.

• Plugins allow you to get started simply with a basic site and expand if necessary.
• Plugins allow you to add practically unlimited features to any website quickly, easily and really inexpensively.
• Plugins give you practically endless expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow ”non-techies” to have a web presence that they can manage.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your web site instant new capabilities and enhancements.
• Some plugins are slightly more complex and could require some configuring.

Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Many Are) Completely FREE!

Just like themes, thousands of plugins are available for WordPress users … often at $0 cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you will find WordPress plugins that will do just about anything you could think of.

There are plugins for:

• Site Management
• Content Syndication
• Web Traffic Generation
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Connectivity
• Managing Media Files – Video, Graphics & Images, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales And Advertising Automation
• Increasing Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Monitoring & Reporting
• Securing Your WordPress Blog

You can add features to your WP site with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Surveys
• Rotating advertising banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your site’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User feedback forms
• Language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your pages from English to German)
• 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 blog
• Set up client appointments and appointment reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links on your pages and email you reports
• Redirect web links
• Monitor what social media users are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude certain from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect post content sections
• Migrate data from non-WP platforms
• Search and replace data
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Inserting scripts and script elements into your posts and pages
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add location maps
• Post your content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and many others
• Show countdown timers (for expiring offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you practically endless possibilities. If you plan to build a website for your business, or your existing site wasn’t built using WordPress, then consider getting one in the future, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let me show you how you can benefit by simply installing a plugin on your web site.

For example, if you need to publish content which is only accessible to some but not all users, you can use plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on a post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a professional membership site with customized login details for users …

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

To increasing your site’s reach across social sites and search engines …

You can also add sophisticated features to your site using relatively inexpensive paid plugins. For example, you can download plugins that integrate and automate features on your site like customer feedback and event registration management …

And even set up a complete bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to create the same applications for you …

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

For example, your visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your blog posts (which can grow into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site added exposure).
• Share your posts with other online visitors on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with other members using online forums or even set up a private community on your own domain.
• Engage with your support staff using live webcam conferencing and chatroom facilities
• Call your business from their devices while browsing your pages
• Get help and support via a dedicated customer support helpdesk
• And much more …

You can also integrate complex enterprise solutions using a WordPress “front end”. This lets you control the content that your visitors will see on your web site, while the third-party application handles the technological aspects …

Some Useful Information About WordPress Plugins

• There are so many great WordPress plugins to choose from. Be careful not to overload your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can invariably start to affect your website’s resources and site loading times. It can also create more maintenance issues for you as a consequence of possible errors.
• Install only the plugins that you really plan to use. Delete all unnecessary plugins from your site, as these use server resources.
• Many free plugins typically come with very little to no support from the plugin author. When considering premium plugins, we recommend that you check some reviews online and see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check our plugin recommendations for additional useful 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 is updated regularly and older plugins that have not been updated can cause problems.
• Always maintain all plugins up-to-date. Older plugin not only can cause conflicts, they may also have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WP plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most popular CMS available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand quickly without spending thousands of dollars on outsourced web development.

One last thing on the topic of plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you need for your web presence, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already created one that will do what you want, and that this plugin can either be downloaded for FREE, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the cost will be surprisingly reasonable.

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

And, if by any chance this plugin is not available, then a custom plugin that does just what you want it to do can probably be created for your business for a reasonable price.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of WP plugins – what they are and how they can expand your blog. See our related posts section to learn more about usingplugins.

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