Tag: WordPress Plugin Directory

One of the main features of the WordPress platform is the ability to easily enhance your WP website’s functionality using inexpensive called plugins.

Understanding WordPress Plugins

Like most of us, you most likely own a cell phone. What happens when you would like access to something new on your device like a new software or tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a piece of software that is simple and easy to install and adds new features and functionality to your smart device.

(Just as you can find social sharing apps …)

A WordPress plugin is very much like an app. You download and install an application that adds new functionality to your WP website or blog …

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

Generally, expanding the functionality of an existing website involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the new feature or enhancement is, this can become fairly expensive, especially if web developers have to create new code or edit code or install programs that integrate with your current set up.

This also applies to starting a web site. Organizations will often fork out money on bells and whistles they may not need.

For sound, strategic business planning reasons, we suggest a sustainable strategy to developing your website and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could:

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

2) As more features and functionality become necessary, install new applications with a few mouse clicks directly from your administration section, to give your website a completely new range of useful capabilities, and also …

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

Well, that’s just what a WordPress plugin lets you do!

WP Plugins – Benefits And Advantages

We began this article by comparing WordPress plugins with apps. In a similar way that many apps are free to download and some apps cost a little money, so do plugins.

In fact, many wonderful plugins can be downloaded and installed on your sites.

WordPress plugins that cost money are referred to as ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the price of hiring a professional web developer to add similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are typically very inexpensive.

Also, since WordPress makes its code available to everyone, anyone can create, rewrite and customize any part of the WP code. This has allowed thousands of professional software developers to create more new applications that expand the WordPress platform than you can imagine.

• Plugins allow you to start off with just a basic online business presence and expand when necessary.
• Plugins let you add almost endless functionality to any website quickly and quite inexpensively.
• Plugins give your online presence virtually unlimited expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow ”non-techies” to have a digital presence that they can fully manage.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your site with immediate capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins offer more advanced features and could require some initial configuring.

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

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

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

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

There are WP plugins for:

• Site Management
• Content Management
• Increasing Site Traffic
• User Engagement
• Social Connectivity
• Media Management Automation
• Improving Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Reporting Applications
• Securing Your

For example, you can enhance your WordPress site with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Rotating banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to enterprise scale e-commerce stores with online shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your pages from English to Norwegian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Cloud storage integration
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Business directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your website
• Set appointments and reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks on your pages and send you reports
• Redirect affiliate pages
• Monitor what social media users are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude specific from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect post content sections
• Import information from non-WordPress applications
• Search and replace data
• Fight SPAM
• Customize visitor commenting (e.g. display Facebook posts)
• Insert HTML and code elements into your pages
• Add tables
• Display animated graphic elements and advanced text formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search
• Add business location maps
• Syndicate your posts automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and many others
• Display countdown timers (for expiring offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

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

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WP plugins are, let’s take a look at how you can benefit instantly by simply installing an inexpensive plugin on your website.

For example, if you need content protection, you can install plugins to make an area of your page or post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a complete membership site with personal login details for all users …

As mentioned previously, you can use free plugins to enhance your business site in lots of ways. From adding functionality that enhance your business, your website visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is happening on your site …

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

You can also add advanced functionality to your site using relatively inexpensive paid WP plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that integrate and automate functions on your website like user testimonial and event bookings management …

And even run a complete bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring web developers to create these applications for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of built-in WordPress commenting features and plugins that can increase user engagement …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site added exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on social networks.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with your team through forums or even set up a private social network on your own domain.
• Engage with members of your team using live video chats
• Call your business from their cellphones while browsing your pages
• Get help via a dedicated user help desk
• And so much more …

Finally you, can even integrate sophisticated enterprise-level solutions within a WordPress “front end”. This enables you to manage the content that your visitors see on your site, while the third-party application handles the technical areas …

Some Useful Tips About Plugins

• There are lots of plugins available. Be careful of overloading your server with too many plugins, as this can inevitably begin to affect your site’s resources and site loading speed. It also means more maintenance issues for you resulting from possible conflicts.
• Only keep the plugins that you really use. Delete any plugins you don’t use from your site, as these utilize server resources.
• Many free plugins normally receive little to no support from the plugin author. When considering paid 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 publish on this site for more expert 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 installing it on your website. The WordPress platform is updated often and outdated plugins can create conflicts.
• Ensure to always upgrade your plugins to the latest version. Older plugin not only can create conflicts, they could also contain security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malicious users.

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

One last thing on the topic of WP plugins:

Whatever functionality you need for your website, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already created one that will do what you want it to do, and that this plugin can either be downloaded at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that it will be surprisingly inexpensive.

(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 need it to do can most certainly be created for you at a reasonable cost.

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

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