Tag: WP Plugins

One of the main advantages of building an online business presence with the WordPress web content management software is the ability to quickly expand your WP site’s functionality using inexpensive (even completely free) applications called plugins.

What Are WordPress Plugins?

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

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a piece of software that is very easy to install and adds new features to any mobile phone.

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

A WordPress plugin is like an app. You download and install a software application that provides new functionality to your WP website …

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

Normally, adding a new feature to your site involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the feature or enhancement is, this could become fairly expensive, especially if it involves website development.

This is also applicable to developing a website. Many organizations tend to pay for bells and whistles they may not ever need.

As part of sound strategic business planning, we suggest using a sustainable strategy to setting up your website and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply with minimal cost involved. Get a website up and running fast, then …

2) As you need new features, simply add new applications with a couple of mouse clicks that integrate seamlessly with your current website or blog, giving your website or blog an entirely new range of capabilities and functionality, and also …

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

Well, this is precisely what a WordPress plugin lets you do!

Benefits Of Plugins

Earlier, we compared WordPress plugins with apps. Just like some apps are free to download and some apps cost a little bit of money, the same is true with WordPress plugins.

In fact, many plugins can be downloaded to your website at no cost.

Plugins that you purchase are called ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the price of a Premium WordPress plugin to the price of investing in professional web development services to add similar functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins cost very little.

Also, because WordPress is an Open Source application, anyone can create, edit and customize any part of the WP code. This has enabled many professional software development companies to enhance and contribute to the core software application.

• WP plugins let you get started with a basic website and add new features and enhancements to your site if required.
• Plugins let you add almost unlimited features to any site easily and very inexpensively.
• WP plugins give your web site virtually unlimited expansion capabilities.
• WP plugins allow anyone to own a web presence that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins will normally work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your website or blog instant new capabilities and enhancements.
• Some plugins offer more advanced options and may require some configuring.

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

Just like themes, tens of thousands of great plugins are available for WordPress users … often at $0 cost!

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

As previously mentioned, you will find plugins that will do just about everything you need done.

WordPress plugin categories cover:

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

You can expand a website with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Display ad banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring payments, discount codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonials
• Language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your website’s content from English to German)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Cloud storage integration
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your website
• Set up client appointments and appointment reminders
• Set up reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and email you reports
• Redirect users from certain pages to other areas on your site or other sites
• Monitor what social media users are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude pages from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect content on your posts and pages
• Migrate content from other CMS platforms
• Perform bulk data replacements
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor commenting (e.g. display Facebook comments)
• Insert HTML and script elements into your website’s header and footer
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced font display formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add location maps
• Post your posts automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and many others
• Display countdown timers (for special offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As you can clearly see, plugins give you virtually limitless business flexibility. If you are currently planning to build a web site for your business, or your existing site was not built with WordPress, then consider getting a WP site or blog built on your domain, or you will be missing out on some serious functionality.

In case you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let’s take a look at some practical advantages of installing a plugin on your site.

For example, if you want to protect your content, you can install plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on your post inaccessible, or create a professional membership site with customized login details for all users …

As mentioned before, free plugins can be used to improve your web site in lots of different ways. From installing features that enhance your business, your site’s user experience and your ability to review visitor metrics …

To extending your business reach and visibility across social sites and search engines …

You can also add sophisticated features to your site using relatively inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can install plugins that integrate and automate functions on your website like user feedback and event registrations management …

And also set up a custom-branded bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny 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 make your site even more interactive …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the native WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site added exposure).
• Share your content with other online visitors on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online directly with other members via online forums or even set up a private community on your own domain.
• Engage with your support team using live video chats
• Dial your business directly from their mobile phones when visiting your site
• Open a support ticket
• And much more …

Finally you, can also integrate complex enterprise-level applications using a WordPress “front end”. This enables you to manage your business sales and marketing, while the third-party application handles the technological functions …

Plugins – Useful Information

• There are so many good plugins available. Be careful not to overload your server with too many plugins, as this will inevitably affect your site’s performance and page loading times. It also means more maintenance work for you as a consequence of possible conflicts and errors.
• Only keep those plugins you really need to use. Delete all deactivated plugins from your site, as these utilize additional server resources.
• Many free plugins often come with little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing premium plugins, make sure you check around a little and understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, updates, new features, etc. Be sure to check our WP plugin recommendations for additional information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a very long time (e.g. two or more years), then think twice before installing it. The WordPress platform changes frequently and older plugins that have not been updated can create conflicts.
• Always maintain your plugins updated to the latest version. Outdated plugins not only can cause issues, they may also contain security vulnerabilities that could 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 used digital content management tool in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand quickly without spending thousands of dollars on outsourced web development.

One last thing regarding WP plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you need for your web site, you can guarantee that a plugin currently exists that will do what you need, and that it can either be accessed for FREE, or if it’s a premium plugin, that it will be surprisingly inexpensive.

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

And, if by chance such a WP plugin has not been created yet, then a custom plugin that does just what you want it to do can certainly be created for you at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of WP plugins – what they are and how they can significantly to improve your WP web site. See our related posts section to learn about more great WP plugins that we recommend using.

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