Tag: WordPress 101

One of the main benefits of building a website with the WordPress content publishing software is the ability to easily increase your WP website or blog’s functionality using plugins.

About Plugins

No doubt, you most likely own a smart phone. What happens when you want to access something new on your device like a new software or a business tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a software application that is easy to install and instantly adds new functionality to a mobile device.

(Just as there are social sharing apps for mobile devices …)

A plugin is very much like an app. You simply install a little software application that adds new functionality to your site …

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

Typically, if you decide to expand the functionality of a web site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new feature or enhancement is, this could get fairly expensive, especially if it involves website development.

This is also applicable to setting up a new web site. Businesses will often spend money for extra features or options they may never need.

For this reason, we suggest using a modular approach to setting up your presence online presence and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As the need for new features or functionality arises, just install new applications with a couple of mouse clicks directly from your dashboard section, to give your website a completely new range of possibilities, and …

3) Cost not a single dollar more to install on your web site?

Well, this is precisely what WordPress plugins allow you to do!

Benefits Of Plugins

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

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

Plugins that you buy are called “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of paying for web development services to add similar functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are typically very inexpensive.

Also, as WordPress is an Open Source application, anyone can create, edit and customize any part of the code. This has enabled thousands of professional web development professionals to enhance and contribute to the WPsoftware.

• WordPress plugins let you start off with a simple site and add new features and enhancements to your site only when necessary.
• Plugins let you add almost unlimited functionality to any web presence easily, quickly and inexpensively.
• Plugins give you practically unlimited expanding capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow non-technical website owners to own 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 instant new capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins are a little more advanced and require some configuration.

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

Just like WP themes, loads of plugins are made available to WordPress users … often at no cost!

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

As mentioned earlier, you can find WP plugins that will do just about everything you want done.

WP plugin categories cover:

• Website Administration
• Content Distribution
• Increasing Site Traffic
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Engagement
• Inserting Media – Video, Images, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales & Marketing Automation
• Improving Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data & System Reporting
• WP SEO

For example, you can expand your WordPress site with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Social contests
• Rotating ad banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single sales with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your site’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to Norwegian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Cloud storage management
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events & bookings
• Business directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your site
• Set up client appointments and appointment reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links on your pages and email you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add a site map
• Hide specific from showing on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect content on your posts and pages
• Migrate content from different CMS platforms
• Perform bulk data edits
• Fight SPAM
• Customize visitor discussions (e.g. displaying Facebook posts)
• Inserting code and code elements into your site’s header or footer
• Add formatted tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map
• Post your posts automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many others
• Show countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As it’s clear to see, WP plugins give you virtually endless possibilities. If you are planning to build a web site, or your existing site isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider getting a WP site or blog added to your domain, or you will be missing out on some serious functionality.

In case you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using plugins, let me show you how you can benefit instantly by simply adding a plugin to your site.

For example, if you need to publish private content, you can use plugins to make a section of your page inaccessible, or create a professional paid membership site with customized login details for users …

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

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

You can also add advanced features to your website using relatively inexpensive paid WP plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that integrate and automate tasks on your site like customer feedback and event bookings management …

And also set up a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying software developers to build 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 web visitors can:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with added exposure).
• Share your content with other online users on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with other online users using forums or even set up an online social network on your domain.
• Engage with your team using live webcam conferencing and chatrooms
• Dial your business from their laptops while browsing your pages
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

Finally you, can even integrate sophisticated “back end” applications within a WP “front end”. This lets you manage your business sales and marketing, while your 3rd-party application handles the technological areas …

Useful Tips About Plugins

• There are lots of plugins available. Be careful of overloading your site with too many plugins, as this can start to affect your website’s resources and site loading speed. It also means more maintenance work for you resulting from possible conflicts.
• Only keep those plugins that you really use. Delete any plugins you don’t need from your site, as these use server resources.
• Many free plugins typically receive little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing premium plugins, ensure that you check some reviews online and see what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of our plugin reviews for additional helpful 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 installing it. WordPress is updated frequently and out-of-date WordPress plugins can cause errors.
• Always keep your plugins up-to-date. Outdated plugin not only can create errors, they could also have security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WP plugins are an important aspect of WordPress and contribute to making it the most preferred content management system in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add instant features to their website without having to spend thousands of dollars on web development.

One last thing on the topic of plugins:

If there is a feature you need for your web presence, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already developed one that will do exactly what you need it to do, and that this plugin will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that it will be reasonably inexpensive.

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

And, if by chance such a plugin has not been created yet, then a custom plugin that does just what you would like it to do can most certainly be written for you for a very reasonable price.

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

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