WordPress Plugins Explained

This tutorial explains what WordPress plugins are, how plugins work and how plugins help WordPress users extend their website’s functionality. 

WordPress Plugins - Enhance Your Site's FeaturesOne of the main features of WordPress is the ability to easily increase your WP website’s functionality using applications called plugins.

Understanding WP Plugins

Like most of us, you most likely own a device like a smart phone. What happens when you want to access something new on your device like a new application, game or tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a software that is easy to install and integrates new features into your smart device.

A Guide To WP Plugins

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

A WordPress plugin is very much like an app. You simply install an application that provides new functionality to your WordPress web site …

A Guide To Understanding WordPress Plugins

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

Almost always, if you want to expand the functionality of an existing site, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the features or enhancements, things could become fairly expensive, particularly if it requires website development.

This also applies to developing a new website. Organizations tend to invest money in added features they probably will never need.

As part of sound strategic business planning, we suggest a modular approach to developing a online presence presence and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get a basic, professional website up and running quickly, then …

2) As new features are needed, add new software modules with a couple of mouse clicks that integrate seamlessly with your existing website, giving your site an entirely new range of possibilities, and …

3) Cost not a single cent more to add to your website?

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

Benefits And Advantages Of Using Plugins

Earlier, we compared plugins with ’apps’. In the same way that many apps are free to download and some apps cost a little money, so do plugins.

In fact, many great plugins can be downloaded to your site for free.

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

Also, because WordPress makes its code available to everyone, any web developer can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the code. This has allowed many third-party web development companies to build more plugins that work seamlessly with the WordPress platform than you can imagine.

  • WP plugins allow you to get started with a simple site and then add new features and enhancements to your site if required.
  • WordPress plugins allow you to add almost endless functionality to any web site quickly, easily and quite cheaply.
  • Plugins give you almost endless expanding capabilities.
  • WP plugins allow ”non-techies” to have a digital presence that they can manage themselves.
  • Most plugins will normally work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your web site with new capabilities and functionality.
  • Some plugins provide more advanced features and may require some initial configuration.

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

Just like themes, tens of thousands of plugins are currently available for WordPress users … often at no cost!

You can access thousands of plugins from the Free WordPress Plugin Repository

A Beginner's Guide To Understanding WP Plugins

As mentioned earlier, you can find WP plugins that will do just about anything you could possibly need a web site to do.

There are plugins for:

  • User Management
  • Content Syndication
  • Traffic
  • User Interactivity
  • Social Monitoring
  • Adding Media Files – Videos, Graphics, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
  • e-Biz And Online Sales And Advertising Automation
  • Increasing Sales & Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
  • Data And System Analysis
  • Securing Your WordPress Blog

For example, you can expand your website with plugins like:

  • Contact forms
  • Polls and quizzes
  • Surveys
  • Rotating banners
  • E-commerce (from setting up single sales with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce stores with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring payments, coupon codes, etc …)
  • Social sharing buttons
  • Private Membership sites
  • List-building subscription forms
  • Sales workflow
  • Mobile integration
  • Improving your site’s SEO
  • Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
  • User feedback forms
  • Automatic language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your site from English to German)
  • Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
  • Custom navigation
  • Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
  • Cloud storage integration
  • Making pages load faster
  • Managing events
  • Niche directories
  • Automatically sell spots on your blog
  • Set up appointments and appointment reminders
  • Set up reservations and bookings
  • Detect broken hyperlinks and send you reports
  • Redirect URLs
  • Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
  • Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
  • Add a site map
  • Exclude specific from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
  • Protect content on your pages and posts
  • Migrate content from different CMS platforms
  • Perform bulk data edits
  • Fight SPAM
  • Customize visitor comment displays (e.g. display Facebook posts)
  • Insert code and script elements into your posts and pages
  • Add tables
  • Display animated graphics and advanced content formatting options
  • Create and manage QR codes
  • Improve Google search listings
  • Add a map of your business location
  • Distribute your content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and many others
  • Display countdown timers (for special offers, discount coupons, etc …)
  • Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
  • And so much more!

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

If you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using WP plugins, let’s take a look at some practical advantages of adding a plugin to your website.

For example, if you want to protect your content, you can install plugins to make a section of your page inaccessible, or create a professional membership site with customized login details for all users …

A Newbie's Guide To Understanding WP Plugins

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

A Guide To WP Plugins

To increasing your business reach across social sites and search engines …

A Guide To Understanding WP Plugins

You can also add complex functionality to your site using inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can download plugins that integrate and automate functionality on your website such as user testimonial and event registration management …

A Beginner's Guide To Understanding WordPress Plugins

And even set up a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying programmers to code custom applications for you …

A Guide To Understanding WP Plugins

Additionally, you can take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that can enhance visitor engagement …

A Basic Guide To WP Plugins

For example, your visitors can:

  • Post comments on your site (which can grow into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
  • Share your posts with other web visitors on various social sites.
  • Contact you via contact forms
  • Engage online directly with other members via forums or even set up an online community on your domain.
  • Engage with your team using live video chats
  • Call your business from their mobile phones when browsing your website
  • Open support tickets
  • And much more …

A Guide To Understanding WordPress Plugins

You can also integrate sophisticated “back end” solutions using a WP “front end”. This enables you to control your business marketing, while your third-party application handles the technical side of things …

A Guide To Understanding WordPress Plugins

Useful Information About WP Plugins

  • There are many plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will affect your site’s resources and page loading speed. It can also create more maintenance issues for you resulting from potential conflicts and errors.
  • Only keep those plugins you really need. Delete any plugins you don’t need from your site, as these utilize additional server resources.
  • Many free plugins often come with very little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing premium WordPress plugins, make sure 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 some of the plugin reviews we provide here for additional helpful information.
  • If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two or more years), then think twice before using it on your website. WordPress changes frequently and outdated WP plugins can create errors.
  • Make sure that you always keep your plugins up-to-date. Older plugins not only can create errors, they could also have vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

A Practical Guide To WordPress Plugins

As you can see, WordPress plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most powerful, flexible and scalable digital content publishing solution in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add instant features to their website without spending thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing about WP plugins:

If there is any feature you want for your web site, you can be sure that a someone has probably already created one that will do just what you need it to do, and that this plugin will either be available for FREE, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the cost will be minimal.

Whatever you need done, there's a WordPress plugin for that!

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

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

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

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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group

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