Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the most powerful advantages of using WordPress is the ability to quickly and easily expand your WordPress site’s functionality using applications called plugins.

What Are Plugins?

No doubt, you most likely use a smart phone. What happens when you want access to something new on your device like a new software or a business tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a piece of software that is easy to install and adds new features and functionality to a mobile phone.

(Just like you can find social sharing apps …)

A plugin is quite similar to an app. You simply install an application that provides new functionality to your website or blog …

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

Normally, expanding the functionality of a site involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the features or enhancement, this can get quite expensive, especially if web developers need to add new code or edit programs or develop scripts that integrate with your current site.

This is also applicable when developing a website. Organizations sometimes invest upfront in extra bells and whistles they probably will never need.

To save money and keep your business costs to a minimum, we recommend using a modular strategy to developing a web site and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As more features become necessary, you can add new software modules with only a couple of clicks of the mouse directly from your WP dashboard area, and give your site a whole new and expanded range of useful functionality, and …

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

Well, that’s precisely what a WP plugin lets you do!

Benefits Of WP Plugins

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

In fact, many plugins can be downloaded to your site at no cost.

Plugins that cost money are referred to as ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of investing in professional web development services to get the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are priced quite cheaply.

Also, since WordPress makes its code publicly available, anybody can create, edit and customize any part of the code. This has allowed thousands of professional software developers to build more applications that “plug into” the WordPress platform than you can imagine.

• WordPress plugins allow you to start off simply with a basic web site and add new features and enhancements to your site if required.
• WordPress plugins allow you to add almost endless features to your web site quickly, easily and cheaply.
• Plugins give you practically endless expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow business owners to have a website that they can manage.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your website with instant new capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins can be a little more advanced and require some configuring.

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

Like themes, loads of plugins are made available to WordPress users … often at no cost!

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

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

Plugin categories cover:

• Blog Administration
• Content Management
• Online Traffic Generation
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Connectivity
• Managing Media – Videos, Images, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales & Advertising Automation
• Improving Sales & Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Monitoring & Reporting Tools
• Web Site Security

For example, you can expand your business online presence with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Managing banners
• E-commerce (from managing single sales with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce stores with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring payments, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• List-building opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your pages 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 integration
• Faster page loading
• Managing events & bookings
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell spots on your site
• Set appointments and reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and email you reports
• Redirect visitors from certain pages to other pages on your site or other sites
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add a site map
• Hide specific from showing on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect page content sections
• Import data from other publishing applications
• Search and replace content
• Prevent SPAM
• Customize visitor commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Insert scripts and script elements into your pages
• Add tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add business location maps
• Publish your posts automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and others
• Display countdown timers (for scarcity offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As you can clearly see, plugins give you practically limitless business flexibility. If you plan to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing site was not built with WordPress, then consider choosing WordPress in the future.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let me show you some practical uses of installing a plugin on your website.

For example, if you need to publish private content, you can install plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on your page inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a professional paid membership site with customized login details for users …

As mentioned previously, you can use free plugins to improve your business site in lots of ways. From installing new features that can improve your business, your visitors’ experience and your ability to analyze website data …

To extending your site’s reach across multiple social media and search engines …

You can also add complex features to your website using inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can install plugins that integrate and automate processes on your website such as displaying customer testimonials and booking events …

And even set up a custom-branded bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying web developers to design similar applications for you …

You can also take advantage of built-in WP commenting features and plugins that can enhance user engagement …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site increased exposure).
• Share your posts with other online users on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online directly with other users via online forums or even set up a private social network on your site.
• Engage with your team through live chats
• Dial your business directly from their cellphones when browsing your site
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

Finally you, can even integrate complex third-party solutions with a WP “front end”. This allows you to manage the content that your visitors see on your site, while your 3rd-party application handles the technological aspects …

Additional Tips About WP Plugins

• There are many fantastic plugins available. Be careful not to overload your site with too many plugins, as this can inevitably affect your website’s performance and site loading speed. It also means more maintenance work for you resulting from possible errors.
• Install only those plugins that you really use. Delete any plugins you don’t use from your site, as these utilize additional resources.
• Many free plugins typically come with little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing paid plugins, we recommend that you check some reviews online and understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of the plugin reviews we provide on this site 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 installing it on your website or blog. The WordPress software updates often and older plugins that have not been updated can create issues.
• Always maintain all plugins up-to-date. Older plugins not only can create problems, they could also have security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

As you can see, WP plugins are an important aspect of WordPress and contribute to making it the most downloaded web publishing application in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to add instant features to their website without spending thousands of dollars on outsourced web development.

One last thing regarding plugins:

If there is any feature or functionality you need for your website, you can guarantee that a plugin currently exists that will do what you need it to do, and that this plugin will either be available for FREE, or if it’s a paid plugin, that it will be reasonably inexpensive.

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

And, if by any chance this plugin is not available, then it can probably be coded for you for a reasonable price.

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

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