Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the most unique features of WordPress is the ability to quickly and easily enhance your WP site’s functionality using plugins.

About Plugins

No doubt, you probably own a device like a mobile phone. What happens when you would like access to something new on your device like a new game or a business tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a software application that is easy to install and integrates new features into a smart device.

(Just like you will find social sharing apps …)

A plugin is similar to an app. You download and install a software application that adds new functionality to your WP web site …

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

Typically, if you decide to expand the functionality of an already-built site, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the new features or enhancement, this can get quite expensive, especially if it requires website development.

This is also applicable to creating a new website or business blog. Business owners tend to fork out money up front on bells and whistles they probably will never need.

To avoid incurring unnecessary costs, we suggest a cost-effective approach to developing a web site and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine if you could:

1) Start simply and with minimal expense involved. Get a professional business website up and running quickly, then …

2) As you need new features or functionality, you can install new applications with a couple of mouse clicks directly from within your WP dashboard panel, to give your website a whole new range of practical features and capabilities, and …

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

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

Benefits & Advantages Of Plugins

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

In fact, many plugins are freely available for users.

WP plugins that cost money are called ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when you compare these to the price of hiring a professional web developer to add the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are priced quite low.

Also, as WordPress is an Open Source application, any person can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the WP code. This has enabled many third-party web developers to create more tools that add new features to the WordPress application than you can imagine.

• WP plugins let you get started with only a basic yet professional website and add new features and enhancements to your site only as required.
• WordPress plugins let you add practically unlimited functionality to your web site easily and cheaply.
• Plugins give your online presence virtually endless expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow business owners to have a website that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins will normally work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your website instant new enhancements and features.
• Some plugins can be a little more advanced and may require some initial configuring.

WordPress Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Many Are) Completely FREE!

Like many themes, tens of thousands of great plugins are available to WordPress users … for FREE!

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

As mentioned earlier, you can find WordPress plugins that can do almost everything you can imagine.

There are plugins for:

• Site Management
• Content Syndication
• Traffic
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Monitoring
• Media Management Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Reporting Tools
• Optimizing Your

For example, you can expand a WP site with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single ordering with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to Spanish)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media management
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your blog
• Set up appointments and reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and send you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor social conversations
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add a site map
• Exclude pages from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect post content
• Import information from different publishing platforms
• Search and replace data
• Fight SPAM
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Insert scripts and code elements into your posts, pages and sidebars
• Add and format tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced font display formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google local search
• Add location maps
• Syndicate your posts automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and others
• Display countdown timers (for special offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, WordPress plugins give you endless business scalability. If you plan to build a web site for your business, or your existing site isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider choosing WordPress in the future.

In case you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using plugins, let me show you some practical advantages of installing an inexpensive plugin on your site.

For example, if you need content protection, you can use plugins to make a section of a page or post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a complete 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 ways. From installing new features that will enhance your business, your website visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is taking place on your site …

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

You can also add advanced features to your website using inexpensive premium WordPress plugins. For example, you can download plugins that integrate and automate functionality on your pages like managing customer testimonials and event registration details …

And also set up a custom-branded bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of paying web developers to create custom applications for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that can make your site even more interactive …

For example, your web visitors can:

• Post comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with added exposure).
• Share your content with other online visitors on social networks.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with other users using forums or even set up an online community on your own domain.
• Engage with your team using live chats
• Call your business from their cellphones while browsing your site
• Get support via a user support helpdesk
• And much more …

Finally you, can even integrate sophisticated enterprise applications using a WordPress “front end”. This lets you manage the content that your visitors see on your website, while your 3rd-party application handles the technical side of things …

Additional Tips About WP Plugins

• There are loads of awesome plugins available. Be careful not to overload your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can eventually begin to affect your website’s resources and page loading speed. It also means more maintenance work for you resulting from potential conflicts and errors.
• Install only those plugins you really need. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these utilize resources.
• Many free plugins typically come with little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing paid plugins, make sure you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to providing support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of our plugin recommendations for additional information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two or more years), then think carefully before using it. WordPress changes regularly and out-of-date WP plugins can cause problems.
• Make sure that you always maintain your plugins updated to their most recent version. Outdated plugin not only can create conflicts, they may also have security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an important aspect of WordPress and contribute to making it the most powerful, flexible and scalable content management system available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand without spending thousands of dollars on outsourced web development costs.

One last thing regarding plugins:

If there is any functionality you need for your web site, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already authored one that will do exactly what you want, and that this plugin can either be downloaded at no cost, or if it’s a premium plugin, that it will be surprisingly affordable.

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

And, if by chance this WP plugin does not exist, then a custom plugin that does exactly what you would like it to do can most certainly be written for your business for a reasonable price.

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

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