Tag: WordPress Plugin

One of the main advantages of using the WordPress website publishing platform is the ability to quickly enhance your WordPress website or blog’s functionality using plugins.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

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

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

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

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

A WP plugin is very much like an app. You download and install a software that provides new functionality to your web site …

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

Typically, if you want to expand the functionality of an existing web site, additional cost is involved. Depending on how complex the new feature or enhancement is, this cost can be significant, especially if it involves website development.

This is also applicable to creating a new website. Companies often invest money up-front in additional features and options they probably will never need.

For this reason, we suggest a sustainable strategy when growing a web site and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and with minimal cost involved. Get a basic, professional-looking web presence up and running fast, then …

2) As the need for new features becomes evident, add new software modules with a couple of clicks of the mouse that integrate with your existing website or blog, and give your website a whole new range of features and functionality, and also …

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

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

Benefits And Advantages Of WP Plugins

I started this post by comparing WordPress plugins with ’apps’. Just like some apps are free to download and some cost a little bit of money, the same is true for plugins.

In fact, loads of wonderful plugins are available at no cost to WordPress users.

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 the same functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are priced quite low.

Also, because WordPress makes its code publicly available, anybody can create, edit and customize any part of the WP code. This has allowed many professional software development professionals to enhance the core WordPress software application.

• Plugins let you start off simply with a simple web presence and then add new features and enhancements to your site as necessary.
• WP plugins allow you to add practically endless features to your website easily and inexpensively.
• WordPress plugins give you almost endless expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow ”non-techies” to own a website that they can self-manage.
• 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 instant new capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins provide more extensive options and could require some initial configuration.

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

Like WP themes, thousands of plugins are available to WP users … often at no cost!

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find WP plugins that can do almost everything you could think of.

There are plugins for:

• Web Site Administration
• Content Management
• Traffic
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Sharing
• Media Utilities Automation
• Increasing Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Reporting
• Securing Your

You can expand your website with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Social contests
• Managing banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce stores with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring payments, coupons, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• Instant language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to Spanish)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage management
• Faster page loading
• Managing events
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your site
• Set up appointments and appointment reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and send you reports
• Redirect website links
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Hide specific from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect page content sections
• Migrate data from different publishing platforms
• Search and replace data
• Fight SPAM
• Customize guest discussions (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Inserting scripts and code elements into your posts and pages
• Add formatted tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced content formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map
• Post your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and many others
• Display countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As you can clearly see, WP plugins give you endless possibilities. If you plan to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing web site was not built using WordPress, then consider choosing it in the future.

In case you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let me show you some practical advantages of adding a plugin to your site.

For example, if you want to publish content which is only accessible to some users, you can use plugins to make an area of your post inaccessible, or create a full membership site with personal login details for every member …

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

To extending your site’s reach across social networks and search engines …

You can also add complex features to your site using relatively inexpensive premium WordPress plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that automate processes on your site such as user testimonial and event registration management …

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

Additionally, you can take advantage of native WordPress commenting features and plugins that will allow you to engage even more with your visitors, customers and registered site members …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Leave comments on your site (which can grow into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with added exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on various social sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with other online users through online forums or even set up a private social network on your own site.
• Engage with members of your team via live video chats
• Dial your business directly from their devices when visiting your site
• Get help via a client support helpdesk
• And much more …

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

WP Plugins – Additional Things You Should Know

• There are so many great plugins available. Be careful not to overload your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will begin to affect your site’s resources and site loading times. It also creates more maintenance issues for you resulting from potential conflicts and errors.
• Install only those plugins you really need to use. Delete any plugins you don’t use from your site, as these also consume server resources.
• Many free plugins often receive little to no support from the plugin author. When considering paid WordPress plugins, make sure you check some reviews online and understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to providing support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of our WP plugin reviews for more expert information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two years), then think twice before using it. The WordPress platform is updated on a regular basis and outdated WordPress plugins can cause conflicts.
• Ensure to always keep your plugins up-to-date. Outdated plugin not only can cause errors and conflicts, they could also have vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WP plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most popular content management system available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand without spending thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing on the topic of plugins:

Whatever functionality you need for your web site, you can be sure that a plugin probably exists that will do just what you need it to do, and that it can either be accessed for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the price will be reasonable.

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

And, if by chance this WP plugin does not exist, then it can probably be written for your business for a very reasonable price.

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

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