Tag: WordPress Plugin

One of the main benefits of building a digital business presence with WordPress is that you can quickly enhance your WordPress site’s functionality using applications called plugins.

About Plugins

Like most people, you most likely use a cell phone. What do you do when you would like access to something new on your device like a new game or productivity tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a little software that is easy to install and instantly adds new features and functionality to any mobile device.

(Just like you will find social sharing apps …)

A plugin is really similar to an app. You simply download and install a software that provides new functionality to your WordPress site …

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

Generally, expanding the functionality of a website involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the features or enhancements, things can become fairly expensive, especially if website developers have to add new code or modify programs or install programs to integrate with your current set up.

This is also applicable when setting up a new website or business blog. Businesses will often invest money in bells and whistles they probably will never need.

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

Imagine if you could:

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

2) As new features are required, simply add new applications with just a few clicks of the mouse directly from your WP admin section, and give your web site an entirely new and expanded range of useful functionality, and …

3) Cost not a single cent extra to install on your site?

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

Benefits Of Using WordPress Plugins

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

In fact, loads of plugins can be installed and activated on your websites.

Plugins that you buy are referred to as Premium plugins. The good news, is that when compared to the cost of paying for web development services to get the same functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. ”paid”) plugins cost very little.

Also, since WordPress is an Open Source application, anyone can create, edit and customize any part of the WP code. This has allowed thousands of professional web development professionals to enhance and contribute to the WordPresssoftware.

• WP plugins let you start off with a basic online business presence and then expand as required.
• Plugins let you add almost endless functionality to any web site quickly and inexpensively.
• WP plugins give your site practically unlimited expanding capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow anyone to have a site that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins will work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your site instant new capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins can be a little more advanced and could require some initial configuring.

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

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

You can access thousands of WordPress plugins from the Free WordPress Plugin Directory …

As mentioned earlier, you can find WordPress plugins that will do just about anything you need done.

There are plugins for:

• User Management
• Content Syndication
• Web Traffic Generation
• Visitor Engagement
• Social Sharing
• Media Management Automation
• Improving Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Analysis Tools
• Securing Your WordPress Blog

For example, you can enhance a website with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Managing ad banners
• E-commerce (from managing single sales with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring payments, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User feedback forms
• Automatic language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your website’s content from English to French)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media integration
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell spots on your website
• Set client appointments and reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and email you reports
• Redirect users from old pages to other areas on your site or other websites
• Monitor what social media users are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add a site map
• Hide pages from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect content on your posts and pages
• Import information from different publishing applications
• Search and replace content
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize guest discussions (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Insert code and code elements into your site’s header or footer
• Add tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search results
• Add a map of your business location
• Publicize your content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and others
• Display countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display custom greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As it’s clear to see, WP plugins give you endless business scalability. If you are currently planning to build a web site, or your existing site was not built with WordPress, then consider choosing WordPress in the future.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible WP plugins are, let me show you how you can benefit instantly by simply adding an inexpensive plugin to your website.

For example, if you need content protection, you can install plugins to make a section of your page inaccessible, or create a professional paid membership site with personal login details for users …

As mentioned before, you can use free plugins to enhance your website in lots of ways. From adding functionality that enhance your business, your site’s user experience and your ability to analyze site data …

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

You can also add sophisticated features to your website using relatively inexpensive paid WP plugins. For example, you can install plugins that integrate and automate processes on your website like customer feedback and event bookings management …

And also set up a custom-branded bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying programmers to design similar functionality for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that can enhance your site’s interactivity …

For example, your web visitors can:

• Post comments on your site (which can grow into online discussions) using either the native WordPress commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
• Share your content with other web visitors on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online with your team members using forums or even set up a private community on your site.
• Engage with members of your team through live webcam conferencing and chatroom facilities
• Dial your business directly from their smart phones when visiting your pages
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

You can also integrate sophisticated third-party applications within a WordPress “front end”. This lets you control the content that your visitors will see on your website, while the third-party application handles the technical aspects …

Useful Information About WP Plugins

• There are many WordPress plugins available. Be careful of overloading your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will invariably affect your site’s performance and page loading speed. It also creates more maintenance work for you as a consequence of potential conflicts.
• Install only the plugins you really need to use. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these utilize extra resources.
• Many free plugins typically receive very little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing paid plugins, make sure you check around a little and see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we publish here for more information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two years), then think twice before installing it. WordPress updates regularly and older WordPress plugins can create problems.
• Always update your plugins to their latest software version. Outdated plugin not only can cause issues, they could also have security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WP plugins are an important aspect of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most used digital content publishing solution 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.

One last thing on the subject of plugins:

Whatever functionality you need for your website, you can guarantee that a WP plugin probably exists that will do what you want, and that this plugin will either be available for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the cost will be very reasonable.

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

And, if by any chance this WP plugin does not exist, then it can most certainly be developed for your business at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of WP plugins – what plugins are and how they can enhance the functionality of your business blog. See our published posts to learn about more great WP plugins that we recommend using.

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