Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the main benefits of building a website using WordPress is the ability to quickly and easily enhance your WordPress website’s functionality using plugins.

Understanding WordPress Plugins

No doubt, you most likely use a cell phone. What happens when you would like to access something new on your device like a new game or tool?

You download and install an app!

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

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

A WordPress plugin is like an app. You simply download and install a software that provides new functionality to your WordPress website …

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

Almost always, adding new features to a website involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the new feature or enhancement is, things could get fairly expensive, especially if it involves website development.

This also applies to starting a website or business blog. Business owners often pay upfront for bells and whistles they probably will never need.

For sound, strategic business planning reasons, we recommend using a sustainable strategy to setting up your online presence presence and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine if you could:

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

2) As new features and functionality are needed, simply install new software modules with just a few mouse clicks directly from within your administration area, giving your website or blog a whole new and expanded range of possibilities, and …

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

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

Benefits Of Using WP Plugins

I started this post by comparing plugins with apps. Just like some apps are free to download and some cost a little money, the same applies with WordPress plugins.

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

WordPress plugins that you have to buy are called “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of paying for web development services to get the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. ”paid”) plugins cost very little.

Also, because WordPress is an Open Source application, any person can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the WP code. This has allowed many third-party software developers to build more new tools that add new functionality to the WordPress engine than you can possibly imagine.

• Plugins allow you to start simply with a basic web presence and then expand as required.
• WordPress plugins allow you to add practically unlimited features to any web presence easily, quickly and inexpensively.
• Plugins give you almost endless expansion capabilities.
• WP plugins allow non-technical users to own a site that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins will normally work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your website or blog with immediate capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins are slightly more advanced and could require some initial configuring.

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

Just like WP themes, loads of great WP plugins are made available to WP users … often at no cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you will find WordPress plugins that will do almost everything you can think of.

There are WordPress plugins for:

• Blog Management
• Content Management
• Online Traffic Generation
• User Interactivity
• Social Engagement
• Media Utilities Automation
• Increasing Sales & Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Monitoring & Reporting Tools
• Site Optimization

For example, you can enhance a website with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Surveys
• Managing banners
• E-commerce (from managing single sales with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, coupons, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User feedback forms
• Automatic language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your website from English to French)
• 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
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Business directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your blog
• Set up appointments and reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links on your pages and send you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude specific from showing on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide page content sections
• Migrate content from different CMS platforms
• Perform bulk data replacements
• Fight SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook posts)
• Inserting code and code elements into your posts and pages
• Add and format tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add a map
• Syndicate your posts automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and many others
• Show countdown timers (for expiring offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As it’s clear to see, WP plugins give you endless business scalability. If you plan to build a web site for your business, or your existing web site isn’t built with WordPress, then consider getting a WP site or blog in the future, or you will be missing out on some serious functionality.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let’s take a look at some practical advantages of installing an inexpensive plugin on your web site.

For example, if you need content protection, you can use plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on a page or post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a professional paid membership site with separate login details for users …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to improve your business site in so many different ways. From installing new features that can improve your business, your site’s user experience and your ability to analyze visitor metrics …

To increasing your site’s visibility across many social networks and search engines …

You can also add sophisticated features to your site using relatively inexpensive paid WordPress plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that automate functions on your site such as user feedback and event registrations management …

And even set up a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to design similar applications for you …

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

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with added exposure).
• Share your content with other web visitors on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online directly with other customers via online forums or even set up an online community on your site.
• Engage with members of your team using live web conferencing and chatroom facilities
• Dial your business directly from their mobile phones when browsing your pages
• Open support tickets
• And much more …

You can even integrate sophisticated enterprise solutions with a WordPress “front end”. This lets you manage your business sales and marketing, while the third-party application handles the technological areas …

Plugins – Some Useful Tips

• There are lots of awesome plugins to choose from. Be careful not to overload your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will begin to affect your site’s resources and page loading speed. It also creates more maintenance work for you as a consequence of possible conflicts.
• Only keep those plugins you really use. Delete any plugins you don’t use from your site, as these use additional server resources.
• Many free plugins normally receive little to no support from the plugin developer. When considering paid plugins, make sure you check some reviews online and see what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, updates, new features, etc. Be sure to check some of our WP plugin reviews for more helpful information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two years), then think twice before using it. WordPress updates regularly and older plugins that have not been updated can create conflicts.
• Ensure to always keep your plugins updated. Older plugins not only can cause errors and conflicts, they may also have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, 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 an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand without spending thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing on the subject of plugins:

Whatever feature you want for your website, you can be sure that a someone has probably already developed one that will do just what you need it to do, and that it can either be downloaded for FREE, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the price to purchase it will be reasonable.

(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 written for your business for a very reasonable price.

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of plugins – what plugins are and how they can help to improve your business blog. See our published posts to learn more about usingplugins.

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