Tag: WordPress 101

One of the main benefits of WordPress is the ability to quickly expand your WP website or blog’s functionality using plugins.

About Plugins

Like most of us, you probably use a mobile phone. What do you do when you want access to something new on your phone like a new application, game or a new tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a software that is very easy to install and adds new features to your mobile device.

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

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

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

Almost always, if you want to expand the functionality of an existing site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new feature or enhancement is, this could get fairly expensive, particularly if website developers need to create new code or modify code or develop programs that integrate into your existing set up.

This also applies to starting a website. Companies will often fork out money up-front on bells and whistles they may probably never need.

To reduce unnecessary costs, we suggest using a cost-effective strategy when growing a web site and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As you need new features, install new software modules with only a few mouse clicks directly from within your WP admin section, giving your web site a completely new range of practical capabilities, and …

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

Well, that’s just what WP plugins let you do!

Plugins – Benefits And Advantages

We began this post by comparing plugins with ’apps’. In a similar way that many apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little money, the same is true for WordPress plugins.

In fact, loads of plugins can be downloaded and installed on your sites.

Plugins that cost money are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of investing in professional web development services to get similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins cost very little.

Also, because WordPress makes its code available to everyone, any web developer can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the WordPress code. This has enabled thousands of professional software developers to create more new tools that enhance the WordPress platform than you can possibly imagine.

• Plugins allow you to get started simply with a simple yet professional website and expand as required.
• WordPress plugins let you add practically unlimited functionality to any online business presence easily and quite cheaply.
• Plugins give your site practically unlimited expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow non-technical users to own a digital presence that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins normally work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to provide your web site with immediate capabilities and features.
• Some plugins are slightly more complex and may need some initial configuration.

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

Like many WP themes, tens of thousands of great WordPress plugins are available for WordPress users … for FREE!

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

As previously mentioned, you will find plugins that can do just about anything you can possibly need your web site to do.

There are WordPress plugins for:

• User Administration
• Content Distribution
• Driving Site Traffic
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Sharing
• Managing Media – Video, Graphics, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Biz And Online Sales Automation
• Improving Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Analysis Applications
• Optimizing Your

You can enhance your WordPress site with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Managing banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, discount codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile integration
• Improving your site’s Search Engine Optimization
• 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.
• Media management
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell and manage spots on your website
• Set up client appointments and appointment reminders
• Manage reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and email you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor social conversations
• 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.)
• Protect page content
• Migrate information from non-WP platforms
• Perform bulk data edits
• Prevent SPAM
• Customize guest discussions (e.g. display Facebook discussions)
• Insert HTML and script elements into your posts, pages and sidebars
• Add formatted tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced font display formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add location maps
• Post your content automatically on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and 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, plugins give you limitless business scalability. If you are currently planning to build a web site for your business, or your existing website was not built with WordPress, then consider using WordPress in the future.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WordPress plugins are, let’s take a look at how you can benefit by adding an inexpensive plugin to your web site.

For example, if you need to publish content which is only accessible to some but not all users, you can use plugins to make an area of a post inaccessible, or create a professional paid membership site with personal login details for all users …

As mentioned before, free plugins can be used to enhance your web presence in so many ways. From installing features that can enhance your business, your site’s user experience and your understanding of what is taking place on your site …

To increasing your site’s reach across social networks and search engines …

You can also add advanced functionality to your site using relatively inexpensive paid plugins. For example, you can install plugins that automate tasks on your website like customer feedback and event registration management …

And even run a complete bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of hiring software developers to design custom applications for you …

You can also take advantage of built-in WP commenting features and plugins that can increase your site’s interactivity …

For example, your visitors can:

• Post comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with added exposure).
• Share your posts with other online visitors on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with your team through forums or even set up a private online community on your own domain.
• Engage with members of your team through live webcam conferencing and chatroom facilities
• Dial your business directly from their smart phones when browsing your website
• Open support tickets
• And much more …

Finally you, can also integrate complex 3rd-party solutions with a WordPress “front end”. This lets you control the content that your visitors will see on your website, while the third-party application handles the technical aspects …

Plugins – Some Useful Things You Should Know

• There are lots of WordPress plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will affect your site’s performance and site loading times. It also creates more maintenance issues for you resulting from potential conflicts.
• Only keep those plugins you really use. Delete any plugins you don’t need from your site, as these use server resources.
• Many free plugins often receive very little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing premium WP plugins, we recommend that you check around a little and see what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of the plugin reviews we publish here for additional 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. The WordPress software changes on a frequent basis and older plugins that have not been updated can create issues.
• Ensure to always upgrade your plugins to their most recent software version. Outdated plugin not only can create problems, they may also have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WP plugins are an important part of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most downloaded content management system in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to expand without having to spend thousands of dollars on web developers.

One last thing about WP plugins:

Whatever functionality you want for your web presence, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already developed one that will do what you need it to do, and that it can either be downloaded for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that it will be fairly inexpensive.

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

And, if by chance this WP plugin does not exist, then it can most certainly be written for you at a reasonable cost.

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

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