Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the most powerful benefits of building an online presence with WordPress is the ability to quickly and easily enhance your WordPress website’s functionality using plugins.

Understanding Plugins

Like most people, you most likely have a cell phone. What do you do when you would like to access something new on your phone like a new application, game or a new productivity tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software application that is easy to install and instantly integrates new features into a mobile phone.

(Just like there are social sharing apps for smart phones …)

A plugin is very much like an app. You install a software application that provides new functionality to your website …

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

Normally, adding new features to a site involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the new feature or enhancement is, this could become quite expensive, particularly if web developers need to create new code or modify programs or install programs that integrate into your existing set up.

This is also applicable when creating a website. Business owners will often invest money in advance in extra bells and whistles they probably will never need.

For this reason, we recommend using a modular strategy to growing a website and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As the need for new capabilities and functionality arises, install new software modules with a couple of mouse clicks that integrate with your existing web site, giving your website an entirely new range of possibilities, and …

3) Cost not one cent extra to add to your web site?

Well, this is exactly what a plugin allows you to do!

Benefits Of Using Plugins

Earlier, we compared WP plugins with apps. In a similar way that many apps are free to download and some may cost a little money, so do plugins.

In fact, loads of wonderful plugins are freely available for WordPress users.

Plugins that you have to buy are called “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare these to the price of investing in web development services to add the same functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are priced quite low.

Also, because WordPress is an Open Source application, anybody can create, modify and customize any portion of the code. This has enabled many professional software development professionals to enhance the WordPresssoftware.

• Plugins let you start off with a simple website and expand as required.
• WP plugins let you add practically unlimited features to any web site quickly, easily and quite cheaply.
• Plugins give your web site almost endless expansion capabilities.
• WP plugins allow anyone to have a site that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to provide your website with new capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins can be slightly more advanced and require some configuration.

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

Like themes, loads of great plugins are available to WordPress users … often at no cost!

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find plugins that will do just about anything you need done.

WordPress plugin categories cover:

• User Administration
• Content Distribution
• Web Traffic Generation
• User Engagement
• Social Monitoring
• Media Management Automation
• Increasing Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Analysis Applications
• WordPress Security

For example, you can expand your website with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Surveys
• Rotating ad banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, coupons, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Private Membership sites
• List-building opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to French)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media integration
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell and manage spots on your blog
• Set up client appointments and appointment reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and email you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add a site map
• Hide specific from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your posts and pages
• Import content from non-WP platforms
• Perform bulk content edits
• Block SPAM
• Customize guest discussions (e.g. display Facebook posts)
• Inserting HTML and script elements into your content
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add a map
• Post your posts automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and many others
• Show countdown timers (for scarcity offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you practically endless possibilities. If you are currently planning to build a website or blog, or your existing site was not built using WordPress, then consider getting one in the future, or you could be missing out on some serious functionality.

In case you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using WP plugins, let’s take a look at some practical uses of adding a plugin to your web site.

For example, if you need to protect your content, you can use plugins to make a section of a page or post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a full paid membership site with personal login details for every member …

As mentioned before, free plugins can be used to improve your site in so many different ways. From adding new features that will enhance your business, your website visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is taking place on your site …

To increasing your business visibility across many social sites and search engines …

You can also add advanced features to your site using inexpensive paid WordPress plugins. For example, you can download plugins that integrate and automate processes on your website like managing 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 hiring web developers to design the same functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that can allow you to engage better with your web visitors, clients and registered site members …

For example, your visitors can:

• Leave comments on your blog posts (which can grow into online discussions) using either the native WordPress commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site additional exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on social media.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online with other customers using online forums or even set up a private online social network on your domain.
• Engage with members of your team through live video chats
• Call your business directly from their laptops while visiting your pages
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

Finally you, can even integrate complex enterprise applications within a WordPress “front end”. This enables you to control the content that your visitors will see on your website, while your third-party application handles the technological functions …

Plugins – Useful Tips

• There are lots of good plugins available. Be careful not to overload your site with too many plugins, as this can affect your site’s performance and site loading speed. It also creates more maintenance work for you as a result of potential 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 normally come with little to no support from the plugin developer. When considering paid plugins, make sure you check around a little and understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we provide here for more expert information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two or more years), then think carefully before installing it. The WordPress platform is updated frequently and outdated plugins can cause conflicts.
• Ensure that you always keep all plugins up-to-date. Outdated plugins not only can cause errors and conflicts, they could also contain vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

As you can see, plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most preferred online publishing solution 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 regarding WP plugins:

Whatever functionality you want for your web site, you can be sure that a plugin currently exists that will do exactly what you want, and that it will either be available at no cost, 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 chance such a WordPress plugin does not exist, then one can probably be coded for your business for a very reasonable price.

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

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