Tag: What Is A Plugin

One of the main benefits of the WordPress web site publishing software is the ability to quickly increase your WP site’s functionality using plugins.

About Plugins

Like most people, you most likely own a mobile phone. What do you do when you want to access something new on your phone like a new software or a new tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software application that is really simple and easy to install and instantly integrates new features and functionality into your mobile phone.

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

A WordPress plugin is really similar to an app. You simply install and activate a software that adds new functionality to your WordPress web site …

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

Generally, expanding the functionality of your site involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the feature or enhancement is, this can become fairly expensive, particularly if it requires website development.

This also applies when creating a website or business blog. Organizations often fork out money up-front for added features they probably will never need.

For this reason, we suggest a modular approach to setting up a 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 professional business website up and running fast, then …

2) As the need for new capabilities arises, install new software modules with only a few mouse clicks that integrate seamlessly with your website and blog, giving your site an entirely new range of useful features, and …

3) Cost not a single dollar extra to add to your website?

Well, that’s precisely what WP plugins allow you to do!

Benefits & Advantages Of Plugins

We started this article by comparing plugins with apps. Just like many apps are free to download and some cost a little money, the same applies with plugins.

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

WordPress plugins that you have to pay for are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the cost of paying for web development services to add the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are priced quite cheaply.

Also, as WordPress makes its source code available to everyone, anyone can create, modify and customize any part of the code. This has allowed thousands of third-party web development companies to enhance and contribute to the WordPresssoftware.

• Plugins let you get started simply with just a basic web site and then expand as required.
• Plugins allow you to add almost unlimited features to your online business presence easily, quickly and inexpensively.
• Plugins give you practically unlimited expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow business owners to have a site that they can fully manage.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your website immediate capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins are a little more advanced and could require some initial configuring.

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

Like themes, loads of great WordPress plugins are available for WP users … and many of these great plugins are 100% FREE!

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

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

There are plugins for:

• Blog Management
• Content Syndication
• Online Traffic Generation
• User Engagement
• Social Media
• Uploading Media – Video, Graphics & Images, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales Automation
• Increasing Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Analysis
• Securing Your WP Blog

You can add features to your website with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Social contests
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from managing single sales with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• List-building opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User feedback forms
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your website from English to Spanish)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media integration
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell and manage spots on your blog
• Set client appointments and reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and send you reports
• Redirect users from specific pages to other pages on your site or other websites
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add a site map
• Exclude specific from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide page content sections
• Import data from other CMS platforms
• Perform bulk content edits
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Insert HTML and script elements into your posts
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map
• Distribute your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many others
• Show countdown timers (for special offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

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

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WP plugins are, let me show you how you can benefit by adding a plugin to your site.

For example, if you want to protect your content, you can install plugins to make an area of a post or page inaccessible, or create a professional paid membership site with personal login details for users …

As mentioned before, free plugins can be used to improve your site in so many ways. From installing functionality that enhance your business, your web users’ experience and your ability to review website metrics …

To increasing your business reach across multiple social media and search engines …

You can also add sophisticated functionality to your site using relatively inexpensive premium WP plugins. For example, you can buy plugins that integrate and automate functions on your pages such as displaying customer testimonials and booking events …

And even run a custom bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying programmers to design similar applications for you …

You can also take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that will allow you to engage better with web visitors, customers and registered site users …

For example, your visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can grow into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
• Share your posts with other web visitors on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with other customers via online forums or even set up an online social network on your domain.
• Engage with your support staff using live web conferencing and chatroom facilities
• Dial your business directly from their laptops while browsing your website
• Open a support ticket
• And much more …

You can also integrate complex enterprise-level solutions with a WP “front end”. This lets you manage the content that your visitors see on your website, while the 3rd-party application handles the technical side of things …

WordPress Plugins – Useful Information

• There are lots of WordPress plugins available. Be careful of overloading your server with too many plugins, as this can inevitably affect your site’s performance and page loading speed. It also creates more maintenance issues for you resulting from potential errors.
• Install only those plugins that you really plan to use. Delete any plugins you don’t use from your site, as these also consume server resources.
• Many free plugins often receive very little to no support from the plugin developer. When considering premium plugins, ensure that you check around a little and see what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check some of our plugin reviews for additional useful information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two years), then think carefully before using it on your website or blog. The WordPress application updates frequently and older plugins that have not been updated can create errors.
• Always update your plugins. Older plugin not only can create problems, they may also contain vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

As you can see, plugins are an important component of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most powerful, flexible and scalable content management software available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add new functionality to their web presence without having to spend thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing about WordPress plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you want for your web presence, you can guarantee that a plugin currently exists that will do exactly what you need, and that this plugin will either be available for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the price will be minimal.

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

And, if by chance this WP plugin has not been created yet, then a custom plugin that does precisely what you would like it to do can certainly be created for you for a reasonable price.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what they are and how they can expand your blog. See our published posts to learn more about using WordPress plugins.

***

***