Tag: WP Plugins

One of the main advantages of building a website with WordPress is the ability to quickly and easily expand your WP web site’s functionality using applications called plugins.

What Are WP Plugins?

No doubt, you most likely use a cell phone. What happens when you would like to access something new on your device like a new application, software or a business productivity tool?

You download and install an app!

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

(Just like you can find social sharing apps for mobile devices …)

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

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

Typically, expanding the functionality of an already-built website involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the feature or enhancements, the cost can be significant, especially if web developers have to add new code or modify templates or install scripts to integrate with your existing site.

This is also applicable to starting a website or business blog. Business owners often invest money on features they probably will never need.

As part of sound strategic business planning, we suggest a sustainable approach when setting up a web site and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could:

1) Start simply and inexpensively. Get your web presence up and running fast, then …

2) As more features are needed, add new applications with a few mouse clicks that integrate seamlessly with your current website, giving your website or blog a completely new and expanded range of features and functionality, and …

3) Cost not a single dollar more to add to your website?

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

Benefits Of Plugins

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

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

Plugins that you have to buy are called ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when you compare these to the price of paying for web development services to get similar functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are typically quite inexpensive.

Also, because WordPress is an Open Source application, any web developer can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the WP code. This has allowed thousands of professional web developers to build more new applications that enhance WordPress than you can probably imagine.

• WP plugins allow you to start simply with a simple online business presence and then expand as necessary.
• Plugins allow you to add practically unlimited functionality to your site easily and cheaply.
• WP plugins give you almost unlimited expanding capabilities.
• WP plugins allow ”non-techies” to have a site that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins will typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to give your website or blog immediate enhancements and features.
• Some plugins provide more extensive options and require some initial configuring.

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

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

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

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

There are WordPress plugins for:

• Site Administration
• Content Management
• Online Traffic Generation
• User Engagement
• Social Connectivity
• Inserting Media – Videos, Images, Audio, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Commerce And Online Sales Automation
• Improving Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Analysis
• Securing Your

You can expand your business online presence with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• User Surveys
• Rotating ad banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce stores with shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, coupons, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• Newsletter subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonials
• 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
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Cloud storage management
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your blog
• Set client appointments and reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks on your pages and email you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor what social media users are posting about your business
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add a site map
• Hide pages from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your posts and pages
• Migrate content from non-WordPress platforms
• Perform bulk content edits
• Prevent SPAM
• Customize guest discussions (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Inserting scripts and code elements into your posts
• Add formatted tables
• Display animated graphic elements and advanced font display formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map of your business location
• Post your posts automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and others
• Show countdown timers (for special offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As you can clearly see, WP plugins give you practically limitless possibilities. If you plan to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing site isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider choosing WordPress in the future.

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

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 or page inaccessible, or create a professional paid membership site with customized login details for users …

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

To extending your business reach across various social networks and search engines …

You can also add sophisticated functionality to your website using inexpensive paid WordPress plugins. For example, you can download plugins that automate functions on your site such as displaying customer testimonials and event bookings …

And even set up a custom-branded bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of hiring software developers to design custom functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of native WP commenting features and plugins that will allow you to engage better with visitors, clients and registered site members …

For example, your web visitors can:

• Leave comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the native WordPress commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with additional exposure).
• Bookmark your content on social networks.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage online directly with your team via forums or even set up a private online social network on your own domain.
• Engage with members of your team using live chats
• Call your business directly from their mobile phones while browsing your site
• Open a support ticket
• And so much more …

You can even integrate sophisticated enterprise solutions within a WP “front end”. This enables you to manage the content that your visitors will see on your web site, while your third-party application handles the technical functions …

Plugins – Useful Things You Should Know

• There are loads of plugins to choose from. Be careful not to overload your site with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will begin to affect your site’s performance and page loading speed. It can also mean more maintenance work for you as a consequence of potential conflicts.
• Install only those plugins you really need. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these utilize server resources.
• Many free plugins normally receive little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing premium WordPress plugins, make sure you check some reviews online and see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we publish here for additional helpful information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two or more years), then think twice before using it. The WordPress software changes regularly and older plugins that have not been updated can create errors.
• Make sure that you always maintain all plugins updated. Outdated plugins not only can create problems, they could also contain security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malicious software.

As you can see, WP plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most preferred CMS 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 feature or functionality you need for your web site, you can be sure that a someone has probably already created one that will do what you want it to do, and that it will either be available for FREE, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the cost will be surprisingly reasonable.

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

And, if by chance this WordPress plugin does not exist, then a custom plugin that does precisely what you would like it to do can probably be developed for your business for a very reasonable price.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of WP 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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