Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the main advantages of building a website using WordPress is that you can quickly and easily expand your WordPress web site’s functionality using plugins.

About WordPress Plugins

Like most of us, you most likely use a cell phone. What do you do when you would like to access something new on your phone like a new game or a new productivity tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a piece of software that is simple and easy to install and integrates new features into a smart phone.

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

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

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

Typically, expanding the functionality of an existing website involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the feature or enhancements, this could get fairly expensive, particularly if website developers need to add new code or edit code or install scripts to integrate with your existing site.

This also applies when starting a website. Organizations often pay money upfront for added components they probably will never need.

To keep expenses low, we suggest a cost-effective approach to developing your web presence and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and with minimal cost involved. Get a basic, professional-looking website up and running fast, then …

2) As you need more features, just add new software modules with just a few clicks of the mouse directly from within your dashboard panel, and give your website a whole new range of useful features, and also …

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

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

Plugins – Benefits

Earlier, we compared plugins with apps. In a similar way that many apps are free to download and some may cost a little money, the same applies to WordPress plugins.

In fact, many useful plugins can be downloaded to your website for free.

Plugins that you buy are referred to as “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the price of purchasing a Premium WordPress plugin to the cost of investing in web development services to get the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are generally very inexpensive.

Also, as WordPress makes its code publicly available, any web developer can create, modify and customize any part of the WordPress code. This has allowed thousands of third-party web development companies to build more new plugins that plug seamlessly into WordPress than you can imagine.

• WordPress plugins allow you to get started with a simple yet professional website and then add new features and enhancements to your site if necessary.
• WordPress plugins let you add almost endless functionality to your web site easily, quickly and quite inexpensively.
• WP plugins give you almost unlimited expanding capabilities.
• WP plugins allow anyone to own a site that they can manage.
• Most plugins normally work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website or blog new capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins are slightly more complex and require some configuring.

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

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

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find plugins that can do just about everything you want done.

Plugin categories cover:

• Site Administration
• Content Syndication
• Web Traffic Generation
• User Interactivity
• Social Sharing
• Inserting Media Files – Videocasts, Graphics, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales & Advertising Automation
• Increasing Sales & Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data & System Reporting
• WP Optimization

You can expand a WordPress site with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Social contests
• Managing banners
• E-commerce (from managing single sales with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupons, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile integration
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your website from English to Norwegian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media management
• Faster page loading
• Managing events
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell spots on your blog
• Set up appointments and reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and send you reports
• Redirect users from certain pages to other areas on your site or other sites
• Monitor social signals
• 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. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide page content
• Migrate data from other publishing platforms
• Search and replace content
• Block SPAM
• Customize guest commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Insert code and script elements into your posts, pages and sidebar menus
• Add tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search results
• Add business location maps
• Syndicate your posts automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and many others
• Display countdown timers (for scarcity offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As you can clearly see, plugins give you practically limitless possibilities. If you plan to build a website for your business, or your existing web site wasn’t built using WordPress, then consider choosing it in the future.

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

For example, if you need 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 full membership site with personal login details for all users …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to enhance your web presence in so many ways. From installing features that improve your business, your site’s user experience and your ability to review site data …

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

You can also add sophisticated features to your site using relatively inexpensive paid plugins. For example, you can install plugins that automate functions on your site like user feedback and event registration management …

And also run a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying web developers to create similar functionality for you …

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

For example, your visitors can:

• Leave comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then displayed throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site added exposure).
• Share your content with other web users on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with other customers through forums or even set up an online social network on your own site.
• Engage with members of your team using live video chats
• Call your business directly from their smart phones while browsing your website
• Get help and support via a user help desk
• And much more …

Finally you, can also integrate sophisticated 3rd-party solutions within a WordPress “front end”. This allows you to manage your business marketing, while your 3rd-party application handles the technological aspects …

Some Useful Information About WordPress Plugins

• There are lots of great plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your site with too many plugins, as this will invariably begin to affect your website’s resources and page loading speed. It also means more maintenance issues for you as a consequence of potential conflicts.
• Install only the plugins that you really use. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these utilize extra server resources.
• Many free plugins typically come with very little to no support from the plugin author. When considering premium plugins, make sure you check around a little and see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of the plugin reviews we provide here for more helpful information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two years), then think carefully before using it on your website. The WordPress core software changes often and out-of-date WordPress plugins can cause conflicts.
• Make sure to always maintain your plugins upgraded to their latest software version. Outdated plugins not only can create errors and conflicts, they may also contain vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WP plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most used content management system 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 outsourced web development costs.

One last thing about plugins:

If there is a functionality you need for your web site, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already created one that will do exactly what you want it to do, and that it can either be downloaded for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the price will be reasonable.

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

And, if by chance such a plugin is not available, then a custom plugin that does just what you need it to do can certainly be coded for you for a very reasonable price.

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

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