Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the most useful benefits of WordPress is the ability to quickly and easily increase your WordPress site’s functionality using plugins.

What Are WP Plugins?

No doubt, you most likely own a smart phone. What do you do when you want access to something new on your device like a new application, game or a tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software application that is really simple and easy to install and immediately adds new features and functionality to your mobile device.

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

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

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

Normally, if you need to expand the functionality of a site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the features or enhancements are, this could become quite expensive, especially if website developers need to add new code or modify templates or install scripts to integrate into your current set up.

This is also applicable when setting up a new website or business blog. Business owners will often fork out money upfront on added features they probably will never need.

To save money and keep your business costs to a minimum, we recommend using a cost-effective strategy to developing a website and WordPress plugins are ideal for doing this.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could:

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

2) As you need new features, add new software modules with a couple of clicks of the mouse that integrate with your website, to give your site an entirely new and expanded range of possibilities, and also …

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

Well, this is exactly what WP plugins allow you to do!

Benefits And Advantages Of Using WordPress Plugins

Earlier, we compared plugins with apps. Just like many apps are free to download and some may cost a little money, the same is true for WP plugins.

In fact, many plugins can be installed and activated on your websites.

WP plugins that cost money are referred to as “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare it to the price of hiring a professional web developer to get the same functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are priced quite cheaply.

Also, since WordPress distributes its software as an Open Source application, any web developer can create, edit and customize any portion of the WordPress code. This has enabled thousands of professional web developers to create more new plugins that plug seamlessly into WordPress than you can possibly imagine.

• Plugins let you start off with only a basic web presence and then expand only if required.
• WP plugins let you add almost unlimited functionality to your web presence quickly and quite inexpensively.
• WP plugins give your web site almost unlimited expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow non-technical users to have a website that they can fully manage.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to provide your website or blog with new capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins are slightly more complex and may need some configuring.

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

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

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find plugins that can do just about anything you can think of.

There are plugins for:

• User Management
• Content Distribution
• Online Traffic Generation
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Monitoring
• Media Utilities Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Monitoring & Reporting Applications
• WP SEO

You can enhance a WordPress site with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• User Surveys
• Display advertising banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce stores with online shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• List-building opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonial forms
• Instant language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your website 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.
• Offline storage management
• Faster page loading
• Managing events
• Business directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your blog
• Set appointments and appointment reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks on your pages and email you reports
• Redirect affiliate pages
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Hide specific from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect content on your pages and posts
• Migrate information from non-WordPress applications
• Search and replace data
• Prevent SPAM commenting
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Inserting code and code elements into your posts, pages and sidebars
• Add tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add location maps
• Publish your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and many others
• Display countdown timers (for special offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As you can clearly see, WP plugins give you practically limitless business scalability. If you are currently planning to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing site isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider getting a WP site or blog added to your domain, or you could be missing out on some serious features.

In case you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WP plugins are, let me show you some practical uses of adding an inexpensive plugin to your site.

For example, if you want to publish content which is only accessible to some users, you can use plugins to make an area of a page or post inaccessible, or create a professional membership site with personal login details for all users …

As mentioned before, you can use free plugins to improve your website in so many different ways. From adding functionality that can enhance your business, your visitors’ experience and your ability to review website data …

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

You can also add advanced features to your site using relatively inexpensive paid WordPress plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that automate features on your website like displaying customer testimonials and booking events …

And even run a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of paying programmers to build these functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of built-in WordPress commenting features and plugins that will allow you to engage in various ways with your visitors, clients and registered site members …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can grow into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site additional exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on various social sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online with your team through online forums or even set up an online social network on your site.
• Engage with members of your team through live web conferencing and chatroom facilities
• Dial your business from their mobile phones while browsing your website
• Get help and support via a customer support helpdesk
• And so much more …

You can even integrate sophisticated “back end” applications within a WordPress “front end”. This lets you control the content that your visitors see on your website, while the third-party application handles the technological functions …

WP Plugins – Some Useful Things You Should Know

• There are many WordPress plugins to choose from. Be careful not to overload your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will affect your site’s resources and page loading speed. It also creates more maintenance work for you as a consequence of potential errors.
• Install only the plugins that you really need. Delete any plugins you don’t use from your site, as these use extra resources.
• Many free plugins normally receive little to no support from the plugin developer. When considering paid plugins, we recommend that you check around a little and see what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to providing support, updates, new features, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we provide on this site for more 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 installing it. WordPress updates regularly and out-of-date plugins can create issues.
• Ensure to always keep your plugins up-to-date. Older plugins not only can cause errors and conflicts, they could also contain vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

As you can see, WP plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most used CMS in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to expand without spending thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing on the subject of plugins:

If there is a functionality you need for your web presence, you can guarantee that a plugin probably exists that will do what you need, and that it will either be available 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 chance such a WordPress plugin has not been created yet, then a custom plugin that does just what you would like it to do can certainly be created for you at a reasonable cost.

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

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