Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the most powerful benefits of the WordPress platform is the ability to quickly increase your WordPress website’s functionality using inexpensive called plugins.

What Are Plugins?

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

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a little piece of software that is really easy to install and adds new features to any mobile device.

(Just like you can find social sharing apps for mobile phones …)

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

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

Almost always, if you need to expand the functionality of a site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new features or enhancements are, things can get fairly expensive, particularly if it involves website development.

This also applies when starting a new web site. Businesses sometimes spend money in advance on features and options they probably will never need.

As part of sound strategic business planning, we suggest a modular approach when growing a presence online presence and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine if you could:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get a website up and running fast, then …

2) As new features are needed, just install new software modules with a couple of mouse clicks that integrate seamlessly with your existing site, giving your website a whole new and expanded range of possibilities, and …

3) Cost not a single cent more to add to your web site?

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

Plugins – Benefits

I started this article by comparing WP plugins with smartphone apps. In a similar way that some apps are free to download and some cost a little money, so do plugins.

In fact, many fantastic plugins are freely available for WP users.

WordPress plugins that you purchase are referred to as Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of hiring a professional web developer to add the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. ”paid”) plugins are generally very inexpensive.

Also, as WordPress makes its source code available to everyone, anybody can create, modify and customize any part of the WordPress code. This has enabled many professional web developers to create more applications that work seamlessly with WordPress than you can probably imagine.

• Plugins allow you to get started with just a simple website and add new features and enhancements to your site only if required.
• WordPress plugins allow you to add almost endless functionality to any website easily, quickly and really cheaply.
• Plugins give you almost unlimited expansion capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow non-technical website owners to have a web presence that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website immediate capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins offer more extensive options and could require some configuring.

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

Just like WordPress themes, tens of thousands of great plugins are available for WordPress users … and many of these great plugins are 100% FREE!

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find WordPress plugins that will do just about anything you could possibly need your site to do.

There are WP plugins for:

• User Management
• Content Syndication
• Driving Site Visitors
• User Engagement
• Social Sharing
• Media Utilities Automation
• Improving Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Analysis Tools
• Web Site SEO

You can enhance a WP site with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Surveys
• Managing ad banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single ordering with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile integration
• 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 your website’s content from English to Italian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media integration
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell and manage spots on your site
• Set appointments and reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links on your pages and send you reports
• Redirect visitors from specified pages to other pages on your site or other sites
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Hide specific from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect page content
• Migrate content from non-WordPress applications
• Perform bulk content replacements
• Prevent SPAM commenting
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. display Facebook discussions)
• Insert code and script elements into your posts and pages
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google local search
• Add location maps
• Post your content automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and many others
• Show countdown timers (for scarcity offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, WordPress plugins give you practically limitless business flexibility. If you are currently planning to build a website for your business, or your existing website wasn’t built with WordPress, then consider choosing WordPress in the future.

If you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using WP plugins, let me show you some practical uses of adding a plugin to your website.

For example, if you need to protect your content, you can use plugins to make an area of a page inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a complete membership site with personal login details for all users …

As mentioned previously, you can use free plugins to improve your site in so many different ways. From adding new features that enhance your business, your website visitors’ experience and your ability to review visitor data …

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

You can also add sophisticated features to your site using inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that integrate and automate functions on your website like managing customer testimonials and booking events …

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

You can also take advantage of native WordPress commenting features and plugins that can make your site even more interactive …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can grow into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with added exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on various social sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online directly with your support team via online forums or even set up a private online community on your own site.
• Engage with your support staff through live chats
• Call your business from their devices when visiting your website
• Open a support ticket
• And much more …

Finally you, can even integrate sophisticated third-party applications with a WP “front end”. This lets you control the content that your visitors see on your web site, while the third-party application handles the technological functions …

Plugins – Additional Information

• There are lots of great plugins available. Be careful not to overload your site with too many plugins, as this can start to affect your site’s resources and site loading times. It also creates more maintenance work for you resulting from possible errors.
• Only keep those plugins that you really need to use. Delete all deactivated plugins from your site, as these also consume server resources.
• Many free plugins often receive very little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing premium plugins, ensure that you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we provide on this site for additional helpful information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two or more years), then think twice before using it. The WordPress platform is updated often and older plugins that have not been updated can cause errors.
• Ensure to always upgrade your plugins to the most recent version. Older plugins not only can cause errors, they may also have security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

As you can see, WP plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most powerful, flexible and scalable content management system in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to expand quickly without spending thousands of dollars on web development.

One last thing regarding WordPress plugins:

If there is any functionality you need for your web site, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already developed one that will do what you need it to do, and that this plugin will either be available 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 WP plugin has not been created yet, then it can certainly be created for you at a reasonable cost.

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

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