Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the most powerful benefits of building a website using WordPress is the ability to quickly increase your WP site’s functionality using inexpensive called plugins.

About WordPress Plugins

Like most of us, you most likely own a cell phone. What do you do when you would like to access something new on your device like a new application, game or business productivity tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a piece of software that is very simple and easy to install and instantly integrates new features into your mobile phone.

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

A WP plugin is very much like an app. You install an application that adds new functionality to your website …

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

Typically, if you need to add new features to your site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new features or enhancements are, this can become fairly expensive, particularly if website developers have to create new code or modify code or install scripts that integrate into your current set up.

This is also applicable to creating a new web site. Companies will often pay money in advance for additional bells and whistles they probably will never need.

For sound, strategic business planning reasons, we suggest a sustainable strategy when developing your presence online presence and WordPress plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine if you could:

1) Start simply and with minimal cost involved. Get your business web presence up and running fast, then …

2) As you need more features, add new software modules with just a couple of mouse clicks directly from within your WordPress admin area, giving your website or blog a completely new range of possibilities, and also …

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

Well, that’s just what WP plugins allow you to do!

Benefits Of Using Plugins

Earlier, we compared WP plugins with ’apps’. In a similar way that some apps are free to download and some apps cost a little money, the same applies to plugins.

In fact, loads of useful plugins can be downloaded to your site at no cost.

Plugins that you purchase are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of paying for web development services to get the same functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are typically very inexpensive.

Also, because WordPress makes its code publicly available, anyone can create, edit and customize any portion of the code. This has enabled many professional web developers to enhance the core software application.

• WP plugins allow you to start off with only a basic website and then expand only as required.
• WP plugins let you add almost endless functionality to your website easily, quickly and cheaply.
• Plugins give your web site virtually unlimited expansion capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow business owners to own a site that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins normally work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your website or blog with new capabilities and enhancements.
• Some plugins are slightly more advanced and require some initial configuring.

WP Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Often) Completely FREE!

Like WP themes, thousands of plugins are available for WordPress users … for FREE!

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

As previously mentioned, you will find plugins that will do just about everything you need done.

WordPress plugin categories cover:

• Blog Administration
• Content Syndication
• Online Traffic Generation
• User Interactivity
• Social Media
• Media Utilities Automation
• Increasing Sales & Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data & System Monitoring & Reporting Tools
• Securing Your WordPress Web Site

You can expand your website with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Managing ad banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• List-building opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonial forms
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your pages from English to Spanish)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Cloud storage integration
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your blog
• Set up client appointments and reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and send you reports
• Redirect visitors from certain pages to other pages on your site or other sites
• Monitor what other sites 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. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect post content
• Import information from other CMS applications
• Perform bulk data edits
• Block SPAM
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. display Facebook comments)
• Inserting scripts and code elements into your posts
• Add tables
• Display animated graphic elements and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map
• Publish your posts automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and others
• Display countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As you can clearly see, plugins give you virtually endless possibilities. If you are currently planning to build a web site, or your existing web site isn’t built with 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’s take a look at some practical advantages of adding an inexpensive plugin to your web site.

For example, if you want to protect your content, you can use plugins to make an area of a page or post inaccessible, or create a full paid membership site with separate login details for all users …

As mentioned before, you can use free plugins to improve your site in so many different ways. From installing new features that can improve your business, your visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is taking place on your site …

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

You can also add sophisticated features to your website using relatively inexpensive paid plugins. For example, you can set up plugins that automate tasks on your site like displaying customer testimonials and event bookings …

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

You can also take advantage of native WordPress commenting features and plugins that can increase your site’s interactivity …

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 are then shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with added exposure).
• Share your content with other web users on social networking sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with other online users via forums or even set up a private online community on your domain.
• Engage with your staff via live webcam conferencing and chatroom facilities
• Call your business directly from their laptops when visiting your site
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

You can also integrate complex “back end” solutions with a WP “front end”. This lets you manage your business marketing, while the third-party application handles the technological areas …

WordPress Plugins – Useful Things To Know

• There are loads of amazing plugins available. Be careful not to overload your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can start to affect your site’s resources and site loading speed. It also creates more maintenance work for you as a consequence of potential conflicts and errors.
• Install only those plugins that you really use. Delete any plugins from your site, as these also consume resources.
• Many free plugins often come with little to no support from the plugin developer. When considering paid plugins, we recommend that you check around a little and understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, updates, new features, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we provide here for additional information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two years), then think carefully before using it. The WordPress software is updated often and out-of-date WordPress plugins can create issues.
• Always keep your plugins updated. Older plugins not only can create issues, they may also contain security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

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

One last thing about WP plugins:

If there is any functionality you want for your website, you can be sure that a someone has probably already created one that will do what you need, and that this plugin will either be available for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that it will be fairly inexpensive.

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

And, if by any chance this WordPress plugin does not exist, then a custom plugin that does precisely what you want it to do can probably be coded for you at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what plugins are and how they can to improve your web site. See our published posts to learn about more useful WP plugins that we recommend using.

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