Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the most powerful benefits of choosing WordPress is the ability to quickly expand your WP website’s functionality using applications called plugins.

Understanding Plugins

Like most people, you probably own a device like a mobile phone. What happens when you want access to something new on your device like a new game or a new tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a little software application that is very simple and easy to install and instantly integrates new functionality into any mobile phone.

(Just as there are social sharing apps …)

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

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

Almost always, adding a new feature to a site involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the features or enhancement, the cost can be fairly significant, especially if it requires website development.

This is also applicable to creating a web site. Organizations often invest money up-front in additional bells and whistles they may not ever need.

To reduce your costs, we recommend using a modular strategy to setting up a web site and WordPress plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get your web presence up and running quickly, then …

2) As you need new features and functionality, install new software modules with a few clicks of the mouse directly from your WordPress administration section, giving your web site an entirely new range of practical functionality, and also …

3) Cost not a single dollar more to install on your web site?

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

Benefits Of Using WP Plugins

I started this post by comparing plugins with smartphone apps. Just like many apps are free to download and some may cost a little bit of money, the same applies to WP plugins.

In fact, loads of plugins are available at no cost to WP users.

WP plugins that you buy are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of investing in web development services to get similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are priced quite cheaply.

Also, because WordPress makes its code available to everyone, anybody can create, edit and customize any portion of the WordPress code. This has enabled many third-party software development professionals to build more new plugins that work seamlessly with the WordPress platform than you can possibly imagine.

• WP plugins let you start off with a simple yet professional web site and then expand as required.
• Plugins let you add practically endless features to any site easily, quickly and inexpensively.
• Plugins give your website practically unlimited expanding capabilities.
• WP plugins allow non-technical users 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 give your site immediate capabilities and enhancements.
• Some plugins offer more extensive options and require some configuration.

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

Like WordPress themes, tens of thousands of great plugins are made available for WordPress users … and many of these great plugins are 100% FREE!

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

As previously mentioned, you will find WordPress plugins that will do just about anything you can possibly want a site to do.

Plugin categories cover:

• Website Management
• Content Syndication
• Traffic
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Media
• Media Management Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Monitoring & Reporting Applications
• Optimizing Your

For example, you can expand a WordPress site with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Managing advertising banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce stores with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, discount codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• 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
• Instant language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to Norwegian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media integration
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your blog
• Set appointments and reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links on your pages and email you reports
• Redirect web pages
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude specific from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your pages and posts
• Import content from other publishing applications
• Perform bulk data edits
• Block SPAM
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Insert scripts and script elements into your website’s header and footer
• Add formatted tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search results
• Add business location maps
• Publish your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and many others
• Show countdown timers (for special offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you virtually limitless business flexibility. If you plan to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing website wasn’t built with WordPress, then consider using WordPress in the future.

In case you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using WP plugins, let’s take a look at how you can benefit instantly by adding a plugin to your website.

For example, if you want to protect your content, you can install plugins to make a section of your post or page inaccessible, or create a complete membership site with separate login details for each user …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to improve your website in so many different ways. From adding functionality that improve your business, your visitors’ experience and your ability to review website metrics …

To extending your business reach and visibility across multiple social media and search engines …

You can also add complex functionality to your site using relatively inexpensive paid plugins. For example, you can install plugins that automate functionality on your site such as customer feedback and event bookings management …

And also set up a custom-branded bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to design custom functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that can increase visitor engagement …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with increased exposure).
• Share your content with other online users on social media.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with your team using forums or even set up a private online social network on your own site.
• Engage with members of your team using live chats
• Dial your business from their cellphones when browsing your pages
• Get help and support via a client helpdesk
• And so much more …

Finally you, can also integrate sophisticated “back end” solutions with a WordPress “front end”. This lets you control your business marketing, while your 3rd-party application handles the technological areas …

Plugins – Some Useful Information

• There are loads of plugins available. Be careful of overloading your site with too many plugins, as this can start to affect your website’s performance and page loading speed. It also creates more maintenance work for you resulting from potential errors.
• Only keep the plugins that you really use. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these utilize resources.
• Many free plugins typically receive very little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing premium WordPress plugins, ensure that you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we publish on this site for more expert information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two years), then think twice before using it. The WordPress application updates regularly and older plugins that have not been updated can cause problems.
• Always update your plugins. Older plugin not only can cause errors and conflicts, they may also contain vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an important feature of WordPress and contribute to making it the most used content management system in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand quickly without spending thousands of dollars on web development.

One last thing on the topic of WP plugins:

If there is any functionality you need for your website, you can be sure that a someone has probably already authored one that will do just what you need, and that this plugin will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the price will be reasonable.

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

And, if by chance this WordPress plugin is not available, then one can probably be written for you at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of plugins – what they are and how they can expand your web site. See our related posts section to learn more about usingplugins.

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