Tag: WordPress 101

One of the most powerful advantages of choosing the WordPress content publishing software is that you can easily enhance your WordPress website’s functionality using inexpensive (even completely free) applications called plugins.

Understanding Plugins

Like most of us, you probably have a cell phone. What happens when you would like access to something new on your phone like a new game or a new business tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a little software application that is really simple and easy to install and adds new features to your smart device.

(Just like there are social sharing apps for smart phones …)

A WP plugin is similar to an app. You install and activate a software that provides new functionality to your website …

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

Typically, expanding the functionality of an existing web site involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the feature or enhancements, this could become fairly expensive, particularly if web developers have to add new code or modify programs or develop scripts to integrate with your existing site.

This is also applicable when creating a website. Many companies often invest money up-front for extra features and customizations they may not ever need.

For this reason, we recommend using a cost-effective approach to growing your presence online presence and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply with minimal expense involved. Get a basic, professional-looking web presence up and running fast, then …

2) As the need becomes apparent, install new applications with only a couple of mouse clicks directly from your WP dashboard area, to give your web site an entirely new range of features and functionality, and also …

3) Cost not one cent extra to download and install on your site?

Well, that’s just what WordPress plugins allow you to do!

Plugins – Benefits & Advantages

We started this article by comparing WordPress plugins with mobile apps. In a similar way that many apps are free to download and some apps may cost a little bit of money, the same applies to WordPress plugins.

In fact, loads of plugins are available at no cost to users.

WordPress plugins that you buy are called Premium plugins. The good news, is that when you compare it to the cost of paying for professional web development services to get the same features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are typically very inexpensive.

Also, since WordPress makes its code available to everyone, any person can create, modify and customize any part of the WP code. This has enabled thousands of third-party software development professionals to create more new tools that plug seamlessly into WordPress than you can probably imagine.

• WP plugins allow you to start simply with just a simple web site and then expand only when required.
• WordPress plugins allow you to add practically endless functionality to your web presence easily, quickly and cheaply.
• WP plugins give you practically unlimited expansion capabilities.
• WP plugins allow ”non-techies” to have a website that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins will work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to provide your website with new capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins are a little more advanced and may require some initial configuration.

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

Like many themes, thousands of plugins are available to WP users … for FREE!

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

As previously mentioned, you can find plugins that will do just about anything you could think of.

Plugin categories cover:

• User Management
• Content Management
• Web Traffic Generation
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Monitoring
• Media Management Automation
• Increasing Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Monitoring & Reporting Tools
• Optimizing Your WordPress Web Site

You can enhance your website with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• User Surveys
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to enterprise scale e-commerce with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, coupons, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer 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
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events
• Business directories
• Automatically sell and manage spots on your website
• Set client appointments and appointment reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and send you reports
• Redirect web links
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Hide pages from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your posts and pages
• Import content from different publishing platforms
• Search and replace content
• Block SPAM
• Customize guest comment displays (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Insert code and code elements into your posts
• Add tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add location maps
• Distribute your content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and others
• Show countdown timers (for scarcity offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you endless possibilities. If you are planning to build a website or blog, or your existing site was not built with WordPress, then consider getting a WordPress site or blog added to your domain, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

In case you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let me show you how you can benefit instantly by simply installing a plugin on your web site.

For example, if you need content protection, you can use plugins to make an area of your post or page inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a full paid membership site with customized login details for every user …

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

To increasing your site’s reach across a number of social sites and search engines …

You can also add complex functionality to your site using inexpensive paid plugins. For example, you can buy plugins that integrate and automate processes on your site such as displaying customer testimonials and booking events …

And also set up a custom bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying programmers to design similar functionality for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of built-in WordPress commenting features and plugins that can make your site even more interactive …

For example, your visitors can:

• Leave comments on your blog posts (which can grow into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site added exposure).
• Bookmark your content on social networking sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with your team using online forums or even set up an online social network on your own domain.
• Engage with your team using live video chats
• Call your business from their smart phones when browsing your site
• Open a support ticket
• And much more …

You can even integrate sophisticated enterprise solutions using a WordPress “front end”. This allows you to control your business sales and marketing, while the 3rd-party application handles the technological side of things …

Some Useful Information About Plugins

• There are loads of amazing plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can affect your site’s performance and page loading speed. It can also create more maintenance issues for you as a consequence of possible conflicts.
• Only keep the plugins you really need. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these utilize extra server resources.
• Many free plugins normally receive little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing paid plugins, we recommend that you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check our WP plugin reviews 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. WordPress is updated regularly and older plugins that have not been updated can create issues.
• Always maintain your plugins upgraded to their latest version. Older plugin not only can create errors, they could also have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most popular CMS in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand without having to spend thousands of dollars on outsourced web development.

One last thing on the subject of plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you want for your web presence, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already authored one that will do what you need, and that this plugin will either be available for FREE, or if it’s a paid plugin, that it will be fairly affordable.

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

And, if by chance this WordPress plugin is not available, then one can probably be coded for your business for a reasonable price.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what plugins are and how they can significantly to improve your blog. See our related posts section to learn more about usingplugins.

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