Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the main benefits of WordPress is the ability to quickly enhance your WP site’s functionality using applications called plugins.

Understanding Plugins

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

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a little piece of software that is easy to install and immediately adds new features and functionality to any smart phone.

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

A WordPress plugin is similar to an app. You simply download and install an application that provides new functionality to your WordPress web site …

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

Normally, adding a new feature to an existing site involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the new feature or enhancement is, things can get quite expensive, particularly if it involves modifying code.

This also applies to starting a website or business blog. Companies will often invest money in extra features and options they probably will never need.

As part of sound strategic business planning, we suggest a modular strategy to growing your website and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get a basic, professional business web site up and running fast, then …

2) As the need for new features becomes evident, just install new applications with a few clicks of the mouse directly from within your WordPress admin section, to give your web site a whole new range of features and functionality, and also …

3) Cost not one cent extra to download and install on your website?

Well, that’s exactly what plugins let you do!

Plugins – Benefits & Advantages

We started this blog post by comparing plugins with ’apps’. In the same way that many apps are free to download and some apps cost a little money, the same applies to WP plugins.

In fact, thousands of plugins can be installed on your sites.

Plugins that you purchase are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of hiring a professional web developer to get the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins cost very little.

Also, because WordPress distributes its software as an Open Source application, any person can create, modify and customize any portion of the code. This has enabled thousands of third-party software development professionals to enhance and contribute to the core software application.

• Plugins allow you to get started simply with only a simple website and expand as necessary.
• WordPress plugins let you add practically unlimited features to any site easily, quickly and inexpensively.
• WP plugins give you practically endless expansion capabilities.
• WP plugins allow business owners to have a website that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your web site new capabilities and enhancements.
• Some plugins are slightly more complex and may require some initial configuring.

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

Like themes, thousands of WP plugins are available to WP users … and many of these great plugins are 100% FREE!

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

As mentioned earlier, you can find plugins that will do just about everything you could imagine.

There are WP plugins for:

• Site Administration
• Content Distribution
• Traffic
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Connectivity
• Media Utilities Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Reporting
• Securing Your WordPress Web Site

You can expand a website 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, coupons, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• List-building opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonial forms
• Automatic language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to Italian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media management
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your site
• Set up client appointments and appointment reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links on your pages and send you reports
• Redirect website links
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude pages from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect post content
• Migrate data from different CMS platforms
• Search and replace data
• Fight SPAM
• Customize visitor discussions (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Inserting code and code elements into your website’s header and footer
• Add formatted tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced content formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search results
• Add business location maps
• Distribute your posts automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and others
• Display countdown timers (for expiring offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you practically endless possibilities. If you plan to build a web site for your business, or your existing web site was not 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 about the power and flexibility of using WordPress plugins, let me show you how you can benefit by adding an inexpensive plugin to your website.

For example, if you want content protection, you can install plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on a page or post inaccessible, or create a professional membership site with personal login details for each member …

As mentioned before, free plugins can be used to enhance your site in so many ways. From adding new features that will improve your business, your site’s user experience and your ability to analyze visitor data …

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

You can also add sophisticated features to your site using inexpensive premium WP plugins. For example, you can install plugins that automate functions on your pages such as user feedback and event bookings management …

And also run a complete bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to design the same applications for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of built-in WP commenting features and plugins that can let you engage more with your web visitors, clients and registered site members …

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 feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
• Share your posts with other online visitors on social networks.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online with your team using forums or even set up a private social network on your domain.
• Engage with members of your team using live video chats
• Call your business directly from their cellphones when browsing your pages
• Open a support ticket
• And much more …

Finally you, can also integrate complex “back end” applications using a WordPress “front end”. This lets you manage your business sales and marketing, while the third-party application handles the technical aspects …

WordPress Plugins – Some Useful Tips

• There are loads of plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will start to affect your site’s performance and site loading speed. It also means more maintenance issues for you as a result of potential conflicts and errors.
• Only keep the plugins you really 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 developer. When choosing premium WordPress plugins, ensure that you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new features, 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 very long time (e.g. two years), then think carefully before using it. The WordPress core software updates often and outdated plugins can create problems.
• Ensure to always upgrade your plugins to the latest software version. Outdated plugins not only can cause errors, they could also contain security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

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

One last thing about plugins:

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

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

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

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

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