Tag: WordPress Plugin Directory

One of the main benefits of the WordPress platform is the ability to easily enhance your WP site’s functionality using inexpensive (and often 100% free) applications called ’plugins’.

About WordPress Plugins

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

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a little software application that is easy to install and immediately integrates new functionality into a smart device.

(Just like you can find social sharing apps …)

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

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

Typically, if you plan to expand the functionality of an existing site, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the new features or enhancements, this cost can be fairly significant, particularly if website developers have to add new code or modify code or install scripts that integrate with your current site.

This also applies when creating a website. Business owners tend to fork out money in advance on features they may not ever need.

As part of sound strategic business planning, we suggest considering a cost-effective approach to developing your online presence presence and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As you need new features and functionality, add new applications with a couple of mouse clicks directly from within your WordPress dashboard panel, giving your site an entirely new and expanded range of useful features, and …

3) Cost not one cent more to install on your website?

Well, this is exactly what plugins allow you to do!

Benefits & Advantages Of Using Plugins

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

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

WordPress plugins that you buy are called “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the cost of buying a Premium plugin to the price of hiring a professional web developer to add the same functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. ”paid”) plugins are typically quite inexpensive.

Also, since WordPress makes its code available to everyone, any web developer can create, edit and customize any portion of the WP code. This has allowed many professional software development professionals to enhance and contribute to the WPsoftware.

• Plugins let you start off simply with a basic yet professional online business presence and then expand only if necessary.
• Plugins allow you to add practically unlimited features to your website quickly, easily and very inexpensively.
• Plugins give your web site almost unlimited expansion capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow ”non-techies” to have a digital presence that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to provide your website or blog with new capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins provide more extensive features and could require some initial configuration.

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

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

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find plugins that will do almost anything you could possibly want a web site to do.

There are WP plugins for:

• Blog Management
• Content Distribution
• Driving Site Visitors
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Monitoring
• Media Utilities Automation
• Improving Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data & System Reporting Applications
• Optimizing Your WordPress Web Site

You can add features to your business online presence with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Surveys
• Managing advertising banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single ordering with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, discount codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile integration
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to German)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage integration
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your blog
• Set up appointments and appointment reminders
• Manage reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks on your pages and email you reports
• Redirect web links
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add a site map
• Hide pages from showing on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide page content
• Migrate data from non-WP platforms
• Perform bulk data edits
• Fight SPAM
• Customize guest commenting (e.g. display Facebook comments)
• Insert HTML and script elements into your posts
• Add tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search listings
• Add a map of your business location
• Publicize your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and others
• Display countdown timers (for special offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As you can clearly see, plugins give you practically limitless business flexibility. If you are planning to build a website or blog, or your existing web site was not built with WordPress, then consider getting a WordPress site or blog in the future, or you could be missing out on some serious functionality.

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

For example, if you need to publish private content, you can install plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on a post or page inaccessible, or create a full membership site with customized login details for users …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to enhance your site in so many ways. From adding features that enhance your business, your visitors’ experience and your ability to review site metrics …

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

You can also add sophisticated features to your website using inexpensive paid plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that integrate and automate functionality on your pages like managing customer testimonials and event registration details …

And also run a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of hiring software developers to design these functionality for you …

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

For example, your visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the native WordPress commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site additional exposure).
• Share your posts with other web users on social networks.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with your team members via online forums or even set up a private online community on your domain.
• Engage with your staff through live video chats
• Dial your business directly from their laptops while browsing your site
• Get help and support via a dedicated customer support helpdesk
• And so much more …

Finally you, can even integrate complex 3rd-party solutions within a WP “front end”. This lets you manage the content that your visitors will see on your web site, while the third-party application handles the technological side of things …

Plugins – Useful Tips

• There are loads of plugins to choose from. Be careful of overloading your site with too many plugins, as this will invariably begin to affect your site’s resources and page loading times. It also means more maintenance work for you as a result of potential errors.
• Install only the plugins that you really use. Delete all unnecessary plugins from your site, as these use extra server resources.
• Many free plugins often receive very little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing premium plugins, make sure you do a little research first to understand what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, updates, new features, etc. Be sure to check some of our plugin reviews for additional 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 installing it. WordPress is updated frequently and older plugins that have not been updated can create errors.
• Make sure that you always keep your plugins up-to-date. Older plugins not only can create problems, they may also contain security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most used CMS available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to expand without spending thousands of dollars on web development.

One last thing regarding WP plugins:

Whatever functionality you need for your web site, you can be sure that a plugin currently exists that will do just what you want, 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!)

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

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

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