Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the most useful benefits of WordPress is the ability to quickly increase your WP website or blog’s functionality using applications called plugins.

What Are Plugins?

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

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a little piece of software that is easy to install and instantly adds new functionality to your smart device.

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

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

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

Almost always, adding a new feature to a web site involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the feature or enhancement is, the cost can be significant, especially if it involves editing code.

This is also applicable when creating a new website. Businesses tend to invest money up front in extra features and customizations they may simply not need.

For this reason, we recommend a sustainable strategy to growing a presence online presence and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine if you could:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get a website up and running fast, then …

2) As you need new features, add new applications with a couple of clicks of the mouse directly from within your WordPress dashboard area, giving your site an entirely new range of practical capabilities, and …

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

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

Plugins – Benefits

We started this post by comparing plugins with ’apps’. In a similar way that some apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little bit of money, so do plugins.

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

Plugins that you have to pay for are called “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the price of a Premium plugin to the cost of investing in web development services to get the same functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are generally quite inexpensive.

Also, as WordPress is an Open Source application, any person can create, modify and customize any part of the code. This has enabled thousands of third-party web development professionals to enhance the WordPresssoftware.

• WP plugins let you start off with just a basic yet professional site and then add new features and enhancements to your site only if necessary.
• Plugins allow you to add almost unlimited functionality to any web site quickly and very inexpensively.
• Plugins give you almost unlimited expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow business owners to own a website that they can manage.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website immediate capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins are a little more advanced and could require some initial configuring.

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

Like many WordPress themes, thousands of WP plugins are currently available to WordPress users … often at $0 cost!

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find WordPress plugins that can do just about everything you could possibly want your website to do.

WordPress plugin categories cover:

• Site Management
• Content Distribution
• Traffic
• User Interactivity
• Social Monitoring
• Uploading Media – Videocasts, Graphics, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Monitoring & Reporting Applications
• Web Site Optimization

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

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Surveys
• Managing banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with online shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, coupons, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• 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.
• Offline storage integration
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Business directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your website
• Set up client appointments and reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and send you reports
• Redirect users from certain pages to other pages on your site or other websites
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add a site map
• Hide pages from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your posts and pages
• Import content from non-WP applications
• Search and replace content
• Fight SPAM
• Customize guest commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Inserting scripts and code elements into your posts
• Add formatted tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced font display formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search results
• Add a map
• Publicize your content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and many others
• Show countdown timers (for special offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you virtually endless possibilities. If you are currently planning to build a website or blog, or your existing site wasn’t built using WordPress, then consider choosing it in the future.

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

For example, if you need content protection, you can use plugins to make a section of your post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a professional paid membership site with personal login details for all users …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to enhance your site in so many ways. From adding new features that enhance your business, your visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is happening on your site …

To increasing your business reach across a number of social networks and search engines …

You can also add advanced functionality to your site using inexpensive paid WordPress plugins. For example, you can set up plugins that integrate and automate processes on your pages such as user feedback and event registrations management …

And even set up a custom-branded bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of paying programmers to create custom functionality for you …

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

For example, your visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can grow into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
• Bookmark your content on various social sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with other users via online forums or even set up a private community on your own site.
• Engage with your support team via live video chats
• Call your business directly from their cellphones while browsing your pages
• Open a support ticket
• And much more …

Finally you, can even integrate sophisticated “back end” applications within a WordPress “front end”. This allows you to manage the content that your visitors see on your site, while the 3rd-party application handles the technical aspects …

Some Useful Things You Should Know About Plugins

• There are so many plugins available. Be careful of overloading your site with too many plugins, as this can eventually affect your website’s performance and site loading times. It can also mean more maintenance work for you resulting from potential errors.
• Install only the plugins you really need. Delete any plugins you don’t need from your site, as these use resources.
• Many free plugins often come with very little to no support from the plugin author. When considering paid plugins, we recommend that you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we provide on this site for more information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two or more years), then think twice before installing it on your website or blog. WordPress changes often and older plugins can create issues.
• Always maintain all plugins up-to-date. Older plugin not only can create problems, they could also have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

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

One last thing on the subject of WP plugins:

Whatever functionality you want for your website, you can guarantee that a plugin currently exists that will do exactly what you want, and that this plugin can either be accessed at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the cost will be minimal.

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

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

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

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