Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the most useful advantages of choosing the WordPress website management platform is the ability to quickly expand your WP site’s functionality using plugins.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

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

You download and install an app!

An app is a little piece of software that is easy to install and adds new functionality to your mobile device.

(Just like you can find social sharing apps …)

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

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

Generally, if you plan to add a new feature to an existing web site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new feature or enhancement is, this cost can be fairly significant, particularly if it involves website development.

This also applies when setting up a website. Organizations will often pay for added bells and whistles they probably will never need.

To minimize expenses, we recommend a cost-effective strategy to growing your website and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As you need more features, install new applications with a few mouse clicks that integrate seamlessly with your existing site, giving your web site an entirely new and expanded range of useful features, and …

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

Well, that’s just what a plugin enables you to do!

Benefits Of Using WordPress Plugins

Earlier, we compared plugins with mobile apps. Just like some apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little bit of money, the same applies with plugins.

In fact, thousands of plugins are available at no cost to WordPress users.

WP plugins that you have to pay for are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the price of purchasing a Premium WP plugin to the price of hiring a professional web developer to add the same functionality on your site, most Premium plugins cost very little.

Also, as WordPress makes its source code available to everyone, anyone can create, edit and customize any portion of the code. This has allowed thousands of professional software developers to enhance the WordPresssoftware.

• WP plugins let you start off simply with only a simple website and then add new features and enhancements to your site only as required.
• Plugins allow you to add practically endless functionality to your website quickly, easily and very inexpensively.
• Plugins give you almost endless expansion capabilities.
• WP plugins allow anyone to own a site that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins will 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 offer more extensive features and require some configuring.

Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Many Are) 100% FREE!

Just like WordPress themes, loads of great plugins are 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 can find WP plugins that can do almost anything you want done.

Plugin categories cover:

• Web Site Administration
• Content Distribution
• Online Traffic Generation
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Sharing
• Media Management Automation
• Increasing Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data & System Analysis
• Blog SEO

For example, you can add features to your WP site with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Surveys
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single sales with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce stores with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring payments, discount codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content 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 integration
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Business directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your site
• Set client appointments and appointment reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and email you reports
• Redirect website links
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add a site map
• Hide specific from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide post content sections
• Migrate data from non-WordPress applications
• Perform bulk content edits
• Fight SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor discussions (e.g. displaying Facebook posts)
• Insert scripts and code elements into your pages
• Add and format tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search results
• Add a map of your business location
• Post your content automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and many others
• Show countdown timers (for special offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As you can clearly see, WordPress plugins give you limitless business flexibility. If you plan to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing website 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.

In case you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using plugins, let me show you how you can benefit by simply installing a plugin on your web site.

For example, if you need content protection, you can use plugins to make a section of a post or page inaccessible, or create a professional membership site with personal login details for all users …

As mentioned before, free plugins can be used to improve your business site in lots of ways. From adding features that will enhance your business, your site’s user experience and your ability to analyze website data …

To increasing your business visibility across social networks and search engines …

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

And also run a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring software developers to create custom functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of native WordPress commenting features and plugins that can increase user engagement …

For example, your visitors can:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can grow into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then displayed throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site added exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on social networks.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with other members using online forums or even set up an online social network on your own domain.
• Engage with members of your team through live webcam conferencing and chatroom facilities
• Call your business from their smart phones when visiting your pages
• Get help via a dedicated customer support helpdesk
• And so much more …

You can even integrate complex enterprise-level solutions using a WP “front end”. This enables you to manage the content that your visitors see on your web site, while the third-party application handles the technological functions …

Some Useful Tips About WordPress Plugins

• There are lots of awesome plugins to choose from. Be careful not to overload your site with too many plugins, as this will begin to affect your website’s resources and site loading times. It can also create more maintenance issues for you resulting from potential errors.
• Only keep those plugins that you really plan to use. Delete any plugins you don’t need from your site, as these also utilize resources.
• Many free plugins often come with little to no support from the plugin author. When considering premium WP plugins, we recommend that you check some reviews online and understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to providing support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of the plugin reviews we provide here for more information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two or more years), then think carefully before installing it. The WordPress application is updated frequently and out-of-date plugins can cause problems.
• Always maintain your plugins up-to-date. Outdated plugins not only can create errors, they may also contain security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

As you can see, plugins are an important aspect of WordPress and contribute to making it the most used website management platform in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand quickly without having to spend thousands of dollars on web developers.

One last thing on the subject of plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you need for your website, you can be sure that a someone has probably already developed one that will do exactly what you need it to do, and that it can either be accessed at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that it will be fairly inexpensive.

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

And, if by chance such a WordPress plugin does not exist, then it can certainly be developed for you for a very reasonable price.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of WP plugins – what plugins are and how they can help improve your business blog. See our related posts to learn about more popular WordPress plugins that we recommend using.

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