Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the most useful benefits of WordPress is that you can quickly and easily increase your WP website’s functionality using plugins.

Understanding WP Plugins

No doubt, you probably use a mobile phone. What do you do when you want access to something new on your device like a new software or a new productivity tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a little software application that is easy to install and instantly integrates new functionality into your mobile device.

(Just as you will find social sharing apps for mobile phones …)

A plugin is really similar to an app. You simply install and activate an application that provides new functionality to your website …

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

Typically, if you decide to expand the functionality of an existing website, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the features or enhancements are, things can become fairly expensive, particularly if it involves website development.

This also applies to developing a web site. Companies often invest money in advance in added features they probably will never need.

To keep your expenses to a minimum, we suggest considering a cost-effective approach when developing your web site and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and with minimal expense involved. Get a website up and running quickly, then …

2) As the need arises, install new applications with a few mouse clicks that integrate seamlessly with your existing site, giving your website a completely new range of practical features and capabilities, and also …

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

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

WP Plugins – Benefits

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

In fact, thousands of useful plugins can be downloaded and installed on your websites.

Plugins that cost money are referred to as Premium plugins. The good news, is that when you compare these to the price of investing in professional web development services to add the same functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are typically quite inexpensive.

Also, because WordPress makes its source code available to everyone, any person can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the WordPress code. This has allowed thousands of professional software development companies to enhance and contribute to the WPsoftware.

• WP plugins allow you to start off with a simple website and then expand when necessary.
• Plugins let you add practically endless functionality to any web site quickly, easily and really inexpensively.
• WP plugins give you almost unlimited expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow anyone to have a web presence that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins will normally work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your web site immediate capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins provide more extensive features and require some configuration.

WP Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Often) 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 WordPress plugins from the Free WordPress Plugin Repository …

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

WP plugin categories cover:

• Web Site Administration
• Content Distribution
• Web Traffic Generation
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Connectivity
• Media Management Automation
• Improving Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Monitoring & Reporting
• Web Site Security

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

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Social contests
• Rotating banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce stores with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, discount codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonials
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change your website’s content from English to Portuguese)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage integration
• Faster page loading
• Managing events
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your website
• Set appointments and appointment reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links on your pages and send you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude certain from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide post content
• Migrate content from non-WordPress platforms
• Perform bulk data edits
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. display Facebook discussions)
• Inserting HTML and script elements into your site’s header and footer
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced font display formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add a map
• Post your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many others
• Display countdown timers (for expiring offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you virtually endless business scalability. If you are planning to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing website isn’t built with WordPress, then consider using WordPress in the future.

In case you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WordPress plugins are, let’s take a look at how you can benefit instantly by installing an inexpensive plugin on your site.

For example, if you need to publish private content, you can install plugins to make an area of a post inaccessible, or create a professional membership site with customized login details for users …

As mentioned previously, you can use free plugins to enhance your business site in so many different ways. From adding features that improve your business, your web users’ experience and your understanding of what is happening on your site …

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

You can also add advanced features to your website using relatively inexpensive premium WordPress plugins. For example, you can install plugins that integrate and automate features on your site like displaying customer testimonials and event bookings …

And also set up a complete bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying programmers to build custom functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of native WordPress commenting features and plugins that will enhance visitor engagement …

For example, your visitors can:

• Post comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site increased exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on social media.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with other online users using forums or even set up a private online community on your domain.
• Engage with your team using live chats
• Dial your business from their devices while browsing your website
• Open a support ticket
• And so much more …

You can even integrate sophisticated enterprise applications within a WP “front end”. This lets you manage the content that your visitors see on your site, while your third-party application handles the technological areas …

Additional Information About WP Plugins

• There are many plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your server with too many plugins, as this can begin to affect your site’s performance and site loading times. It also creates more maintenance work for you resulting from potential errors.
• Only keep the plugins you really need to use. Delete any plugins from your site, as these utilize resources.
• Many free plugins typically receive very little to no support from the plugin author. 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 providing support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we publish on this site for more useful 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 carefully before using it. WordPress updates often and out-of-date WordPress plugins can create problems.
• Always keep your plugins upgraded to their latest software version. Older plugins not only can create problems, they may also contain security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

As you can see, WP plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most powerful, flexible and scalable content management system in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to add instant functionality to their web presence without having to spend thousands of dollars on outsourced web development costs.

One last thing on the subject of WP plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you need for your web presence, you can be sure that a plugin already exists that will do just what you want, and that this plugin will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the cost to buy it will be surprisingly affordable.

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

And, if by any chance this WP plugin does not exist, then it can probably be developed for your business at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what they are and how they can expand your website. See our related posts to learn about more useful WordPress plugins that we recommend using.

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