Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the main benefits of building an online business presence with the WordPress web site management platform is the ability to quickly expand your WordPress website’s functionality using inexpensive called plugins.

What Are WP Plugins?

Like most of us, you most likely have a device like a cell phone. What happens when you want to access something new on your phone like a new application, software or a new business tool?

You download and install an app!

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

(Just like you can find social sharing apps …)

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

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

Typically, adding new features to an already-built web site involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the feature or enhancements, this cost can be quite significant, particularly if web developers need to create new code or modify programs or develop programs to integrate into your current site.

This also applies to developing a new website. Companies often invest money up-front in extra features they may not ever need.

To save money and keep costs low, we suggest considering a sustainable strategy to developing your digital presence presence and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get your web site up and running fast, then …

2) As the need arises, you can add new applications with a couple of clicks of the mouse directly from within your WP administration area, giving your site an entirely new and expanded range of possibilities, and …

3) Cost not a single dollar more to install on your website?

Well, this is just what plugins allow you to do!

Plugins – Benefits

We started this post by comparing WP plugins with apps. In a similar way that some apps are free to download and some may cost a little bit of money, so do plugins.

In fact, many great plugins are freely available for users.

Plugins that cost money are called “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare these to the cost of hiring a professional web developer to get the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins cost very little.

Also, because WordPress makes its code available to everyone, any person can create, modify and customize any portion of the WP code. This has enabled many professional software development professionals to build more plugins that add new functionality to the WordPress engine than you can imagine.

• WordPress plugins let you get started simply with only a basic yet professional website and add new features and enhancements to your site when required.
• Plugins allow you to add practically endless functionality to your website quickly and cheaply.
• WP plugins give you virtually endless expansion capabilities.
• WP plugins allow anyone to own a digital presence that they can fully manage.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your website or blog with instant new enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins can be slightly more complex and require some initial configuration.

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

Like many WordPress themes, loads of great plugins are currently available for WordPress users … often at $0 cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you will find WP plugins that will do almost anything you can imagine.

Plugin categories cover:

• Web Site Management
• Content Syndication
• Driving Site Traffic
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Sharing
• Adding Media – Videos, Graphics, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales And Marketing Automation
• Increasing Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Reporting
• Optimizing Your WP Web Site

For example, you can add features to a website with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Managing advertising banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce stores with online shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, discount codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Automatic language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your site from English to Italian)
• 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
• Event management
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell and manage spots on your website
• Set appointments and appointment reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links on your pages and email you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Hide certain from showing on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide post content
• Migrate content from non-WordPress applications
• Search and replace content
• Fight SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor commenting (e.g. display Facebook comments)
• Inserting scripts and code elements into your site’s header or footer
• Add and format tables
• Display animated graphic elements and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add business location maps
• Post your posts automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and others
• Display countdown timers (for expiring offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you practically limitless business flexibility. If you are planning to build a website for your business, or your existing website was not built with WordPress, then consider getting a WP site or blog in the future, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WordPress plugins are, let me show you how you can benefit by adding an inexpensive plugin to your site.

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

As mentioned before, free plugins can be used to improve your web presence in so many ways. From installing features that can enhance your business, your website visitors’ experience and your ability to analyze visitor metrics …

To extending your business visibility across a number of social networks and search engines …

You can also add advanced features to your site using relatively inexpensive premium WordPress plugins. For example, you can buy plugins that automate functions on your site like customer feedback and event registrations management …

And even set up a custom bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying programmers to design these applications for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of built-in WP commenting features and plugins that will allow you to engage even more with visitors, customers and registered site members …

For example, your visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site additional exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on social media.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with your team members through online forums or even set up a private online social network on your domain.
• Engage with members of your team via live video chats
• Dial your business from their smart phones while visiting your pages
• Open a support ticket
• And much more …

Finally you, can also integrate complex “back end” solutions within a WP “front end”. This lets you manage your business sales and marketing, while the 3rd-party application handles the technological functions …

Additional Things You Should Know About WP Plugins

• There are loads of great WordPress plugins available. Be careful of overloading your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will affect your website’s performance and page loading times. It can also mean more maintenance issues for you resulting from potential conflicts.
• Only keep the plugins you really use. Delete any plugins from your site, as these use additional resources.
• Many free plugins typically receive very little to no support from the plugin author. When considering paid plugins, ensure that you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the 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 twice before installing it. WordPress is updated often and older plugins can create issues.
• Make sure to always upgrade your plugins. Older plugin not only can create errors, they may also contain security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WP plugins are an important part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most preferred online publishing solution in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add new functionality to their web presence without spending thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing about plugins:

If there is any functionality you want for your website, you can be sure that a plugin currently exists that will do just what you need it to do, and that it will either be available 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 any chance such a WordPress plugin has not been created yet, then it can probably be coded for your business at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what they are and how they can significantly to improve your business blog. See our related posts to learn more about usingplugins.

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