Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the most powerful benefits of using the WordPress software is that you can quickly increase your WordPress website or blog’s functionality using applications called plugins.

Understanding WordPress Plugins

Like most of us, you probably use a smart phone. What do you do when you would like to access something new on your device like a new software or a business productivity tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a software application that is really easy to install and adds new features to any smart phone.

(Just like you can find social sharing apps …)

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

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

Normally, adding a new feature to an existing web site involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the new feature or enhancement, this could become quite expensive, particularly if it involves website development.

This is also applicable to starting a website. Businesses sometimes invest money in extra components they may simply not need.

For sound, strategic business planning reasons, we recommend considering a modular strategy to developing a website and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine if you could:

1) Start simply with minimal cost involved. Get your web site up and running quickly, then …

2) As new features are required, add new applications with only a couple of clicks of the mouse that integrate with your current website or blog, and give your site an entirely new range of practical capabilities, and also …

3) Cost not a single dollar more to add to your site?

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

Benefits & Advantages Of Plugins

We started this post by comparing WP plugins with ’apps’. In a similar way that many apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little bit of money, the same is true with WP plugins.

In fact, many fantastic plugins can be downloaded to your site for free.

WP plugins that cost money are referred to as Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of hiring a professional web developer to add the same functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are typically quite inexpensive.

Also, as WordPress makes its source code available to everyone, any person can create, edit and customize any portion of the code. This has allowed many third-party software development companies to enhance and contribute to the WPsoftware.

• Plugins allow you to start off with a basic site and add new features and enhancements to your site only as necessary.
• Plugins let you add practically endless features to any online business presence easily and really inexpensively.
• Plugins give your site practically unlimited expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow business owners to have a website that they can fully manage.
• Most plugins normally work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your website with new capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins can be slightly more advanced and may need some initial configuring.

Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Often) 100% FREE!

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

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

As previously mentioned, you will find plugins that can do just about anything you need your web site to do.

WordPress plugin categories cover:

• Site Administration
• Content Distribution
• Traffic
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Engagement
• Media Utilities Automation
• Improving Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Reporting
• Optimizing Your WordPress Site

For example, you can expand your website with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Rotating banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce stores with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring payments, coupons, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer feedback forms
• Instant language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your website’s content 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.
• Media integration
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your site
• Set appointments and appointment reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks on your pages and email you reports
• Redirect users from certain pages to other areas on your site or other sites
• Monitor social conversations
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Hide pages from showing on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your pages and posts
• Import information from different CMS platforms
• Perform bulk content replacements
• Fight SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Insert scripts and code elements into your posts, pages and sidebar menus
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced font display formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add location maps
• Publish your content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and others
• Display countdown timers (for expiring offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, WordPress plugins give you limitless possibilities. If you plan to build a website for your business, or your existing website was not built with 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 me show you some practical uses of adding an inexpensive plugin to your website.

For example, if you need to protect your content, you can install plugins to make an area of your page inaccessible, or create a complete membership site with customized login details for all users …

As mentioned before, free plugins can be used to improve your website in lots of ways. From installing new features that enhance your business, your website visitors’ experience and your ability to analyze site metrics …

To increasing your site’s reach and visibility across a number of social networks and search engines …

You can also add complex features to your site using inexpensive paid WP plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that integrate and automate functionality on your site like customer feedback and event registrations management …

And also set up a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying programmers to code these functionality for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that will increase visitor engagement …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with your support team via online forums or even set up an online social network on your own domain.
• Engage with your support staff using live web conferencing and chatroom facilities
• Dial your business directly from their mobile phones while browsing your website
• Get support via a client support helpdesk
• And so much more …

You can even integrate complex enterprise solutions with a WP “front end”. This lets you control your business sales and marketing, while your 3rd-party application handles the technological areas …

Some Useful Information About Plugins

• There are lots of awesome plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will eventually start to affect your website’s performance and page loading speed. It can also mean more maintenance issues for you resulting from possible conflicts.
• Only keep the plugins that you really need. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these use additional resources.
• Many free plugins often receive little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing paid plugins, we recommend that you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, updates, new features, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we provide here 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 using it. WordPress changes frequently and out-of-date plugins can create problems.
• Always maintain all plugins up-to-date. Older plugin not only can create problems, they may also contain vulnerabilities that could 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 used CMS available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add new functionality to their website without having to spend thousands of dollars on web developers.

One last thing regarding plugins:

Whatever functionality you need for your web site, you can be sure that a WordPress plugin probably exists that will do what you need it to do, and that this plugin will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the cost will be surprisingly affordable.

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

And, if by any chance this WP plugin has not been created yet, then it can probably be developed for your business for a reasonable price.

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

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