Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the main features of WordPress is the ability to easily expand your WordPress website or blog’s functionality using plugins.

About WordPress Plugins

Like most people, you most likely have a cell phone. What happens when you want access to something new on your phone like a new game or business tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a little piece of software that is simple and easy to install and immediately integrates new features and functionality into your smart device.

(Just as you will find social sharing apps …)

A plugin is like an app. You simply install an application that adds new functionality to your WordPress web site …

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

Typically, if you decide to add new features to an existing website, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new features or enhancements are, this can get fairly expensive, particularly if it requires website development.

This also applies to creating a new website. Companies tend to pay for additional features or customizations they may not ever need.

To keep your business expenses to a minimum, we suggest using a sustainable approach to setting up your web site and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get your business website up and running quickly, then …

2) As you need more features and functionality, install new software modules with a couple of mouse clicks directly from your WP administration section, giving your web site a whole new range of useful functionality, and also …

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

Well, this is precisely what a WordPress plugin lets you do!

WP Plugins – Benefits & Advantages

Earlier, we compared plugins with apps. Just like some apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little bit of money, so do plugins.

In fact, thousands of plugins can be installed on your sites.

Plugins that cost money are referred to as “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare it to the cost of paying for web development services to get the same functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are typically quite inexpensive.

Also, because WordPress is an Open Source application, any web developer can create, edit and customize any part of the code. This has enabled thousands of third-party web development professionals to enhance the WordPresssoftware.

• WP plugins let you start off simply with a simple yet professional website and expand only if necessary.
• WordPress plugins let you add practically endless features to your web site quickly, easily and inexpensively.
• WordPress plugins give you practically unlimited expansion capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow business owners to have a web presence that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins will work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website instant new enhancements and features.
• Some plugins can be a little more complex and may need some configuring.

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

Like themes, thousands of great plugins are made available to WP users … and many of these great plugins are 100% FREE!

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find WP plugins that can do almost everything you need a website to do.

There are WordPress plugins for:

• Website Administration
• Content Distribution
• Traffic
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Connectivity
• Uploading Media – Video, Images, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Biz And Online Sales Automation
• Increasing Sales & Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Analysis
• Optimizing Your WordPress Website

You can add features to your website with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Social contests
• Managing banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single sales with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, discount codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Private Membership sites
• List-building opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonial forms
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to Portuguese)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media management
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events & bookings
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your site
• Set up appointments and appointment reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and send you reports
• Redirect users from missing pages to other pages on your site or other sites
• Monitor social conversations
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add a site map
• Exclude pages from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect content on your posts and pages
• Import information from other publishing platforms
• Search and replace content
• Block SPAM
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. display Facebook comments)
• Insert HTML and code elements into your pages
• Add formatted tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map
• Syndicate your posts automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and others
• Display countdown timers (for expiring offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As you can clearly see, WordPress plugins give you virtually limitless possibilities. If you plan to build a website, or your existing website isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider getting a WP site or blog added to your domain, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

In case you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using plugins, let me show you how you can benefit by simply adding an inexpensive plugin to your site.

For example, if you want to protect your content, you can install plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on a post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a complete paid membership site with separate login details for all users …

As mentioned before, free plugins can be used to improve your website in lots of ways. From adding new features that enhance your business, your visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is taking place on your site …

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

You can also add advanced features to your site using relatively inexpensive paid plugins. For example, you can install plugins that integrate and automate tasks on your pages like managing customer testimonials and event bookings …

And also set up a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to create similar applications for you …

You can also take advantage of native WordPress commenting features and plugins that can let you engage even more with visitors, clients and registered site members …

For example, your web visitors can:

• Leave comments on your site (which can grow into online discussions) using either the native WordPress commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
• Share your posts with other online visitors on social media.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with your support staff via forums or even set up a private social network on your own domain.
• Engage with members of your team via live chats
• Dial your business from their laptops while visiting your site
• Open a support ticket
• And so much more …

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

Additional Information About Plugins

• There are many WordPress plugins available. Be careful not to overload your site with too many plugins, as this can begin to affect your site’s performance and page loading speed. It also means more maintenance work for you resulting from possible errors.
• Install only those plugins you really use. Delete any plugins you don’t need from your site, as these use additional resources.
• Many free plugins typically come with very little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing premium WordPress plugins, we recommend that you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we publish here for more expert 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. The WordPress platform is updated often and out-of-date plugins can cause errors.
• Make sure to always maintain your plugins up-to-date. Outdated plugin not only can create errors and conflicts, they could also have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

As you can see, WordPress plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most powerful, flexible and scalable content management system available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add instant features to their website without spending thousands of dollars on web developers.

One last thing on the subject of WP plugins:

If there is a functionality you need for your web presence, you can be sure that a someone has probably already developed one that will do just 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 price to buy it will be minimal.

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

And, if by any chance this plugin does not exist, then it can most certainly be coded for your business at a reasonable cost.

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

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