Tag: WordPress 101

One of the main advantages of building an online business presence with the WordPress platform is that you can quickly and easily expand your WP web site’s functionality using plugins.

Understanding WP Plugins

No doubt, you probably own a device like a mobile phone. What do you do when you want access to something new on your device like a new game or a new productivity tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

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

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

A WordPress plugin is very similar to an app. You install an application that adds new functionality to your website or blog …

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

Typically, if you decide to expand the functionality of your site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new feature or enhancement is, the cost can be significant, especially if website developers have to create new code or edit templates or develop scripts to integrate with your current set up.

This also applies to starting a new website. Business owners sometimes fork out money up front on components they may never need.

For this reason, we recommend using a cost-effective strategy to setting up your digital presence presence and WordPress plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply with minimal expense involved. Get a professional web site up and running quickly, then …

2) As you need new features, install new applications with a couple of clicks of the mouse directly from within your administration area, giving your website or blog a whole new range of useful features, and also …

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

Well, this is just what WordPress plugins let you do!

Benefits Of WP Plugins

Earlier, we compared WordPress plugins with ’apps’. In a similar way that some apps are free to download and some cost a little money, the same is true for WordPress plugins.

In fact, loads of plugins can be downloaded to your website for free.

WP plugins that you purchase are referred to as ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when you compare it to the cost of hiring a professional web developer to add similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are generally very inexpensive.

Also, since WordPress makes its source code publicly available, anybody can create, rewrite and customize any part of the code. This has enabled many professional software developers to build more new applications that plug seamlessly into the WordPress application than you can possibly imagine.

• WordPress plugins let you start off simply with a simple yet professional online business presence and then add new features and enhancements to your site when necessary.
• WP plugins let you add practically unlimited features to any web presence quickly, easily and cheaply.
• WP plugins give your website almost endless expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow business owners to own a site that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins normally work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website or blog instant new capabilities and enhancements.
• Some plugins are slightly more complex and could require some configuring.

WordPress Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Often) 100% FREE!

Like many themes, loads of WP plugins are made available for WordPress users … often at $0 cost!

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

As mentioned earlier, you can find plugins that can do almost everything you want done.

WP plugin categories cover:

• Blog Administration
• Content Management
• Traffic
• User Interactivity
• Social Connectivity
• Media Utilities Automation
• Increasing Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data & System Monitoring & Reporting Tools
• Securing Your WordPress Web Site

For example, you can expand a business online presence with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Surveys
• Rotating ad banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to enterprise scale e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your site’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 Spanish)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Cloud storage management
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your blog
• Set up appointments and appointment reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and send you reports
• Redirect affiliate pages
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add a site map
• Exclude pages from showing on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect post content
• Import information from other publishing applications
• Search and replace content
• Prevent SPAM
• Customize guest commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Insert code and code elements into your posts, pages and sidebars
• Add formatted tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add location maps
• Publish your content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and others
• Show countdown timers (for special offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As you can clearly see, plugins give you practically limitless business flexibility. If you plan to build a web site, or your existing web site isn’t built with WordPress, then consider getting one added to your domain, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

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

For example, if you need content protection, you can install plugins to make a section of a post or page inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a professional membership site with separate login details for each member …

As mentioned before, you can use free plugins to improve your web presence in lots of different ways. From installing features that enhance your business, your visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is taking place on your site …

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

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

And also set up a custom-branded bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring software developers to code the same functionality for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of built-in WordPress commenting features and plugins that can increase your site’s interactivity …

For example, your visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with increased exposure).
• Share your content with other online visitors on various social sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with your team through online forums or even set up a private social network on your site.
• Engage with your staff using live chats
• Call your business directly from their devices while visiting your site
• Open a support ticket
• And so much more …

You can even integrate complex enterprise-level solutions with a WordPress “front end”. This lets you manage the content that your visitors will see on your web site, while your third-party application handles the technical areas …

Useful Information About Plugins

• There are loads of plugins available. Be careful of overloading your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can inevitably begin to affect your site’s resources and page loading times. It also creates more maintenance work for you as a consequence of possible errors.
• Only keep those plugins you really need. Delete all deactivated plugins from your site, as these use additional server resources.
• Many free plugins typically come with little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing premium plugins, we recommend that you check some reviews online and understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we provide here for more useful information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two or more years), then think carefully before using it. WordPress updates regularly and older plugins that have not been updated can cause errors.
• Make sure that you always keep all plugins up-to-date. Older plugin not only can cause errors, they may also have security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an important element of WordPress and contribute to making it the most powerful, flexible and scalable website publishing solution available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to expand quickly without having to spend thousands of dollars on outsourced web development.

One last thing on the subject of WP plugins:

Whatever functionality you need for your website, you can guarantee that a plugin probably exists that will do what you want, and that it can either be accessed for FREE, 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 WP plugin has not been created yet, then a custom plugin that does precisely what you need it to do can probably be written for your business at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what plugins are and how they can help to improve your business blog. See our published posts to learn about more useful plugins that we recommend using.

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