Tag: WP Plugins

One of the most useful benefits of WordPress is the ability to quickly and easily increase your WP web site’s functionality using plugins.

Understanding WP Plugins

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

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a little piece of software that is easy to install and immediately adds new functionality to any mobile phone.

(Just as there are social sharing apps …)

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

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

Normally, if you decide to add a new feature to your web site, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the features or enhancements, things could get fairly expensive, particularly if website developers need to add new code or edit code or develop scripts to integrate with your current site.

This also applies to developing a website or business blog. Organizations will often pay for components they probably will never need.

To save money and keep your business costs low, we suggest a sustainable approach when growing your web presence presence and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

1) Start simply and with minimal expense involved. Get a professional-looking web site up and running quickly, then …

2) As you need new features and functionality, simply install new applications with a few clicks of the mouse that integrate seamlessly with your website, giving your website a completely new range of possibilities, and …

3) Cost not one dollar more to download and install on your site?

Well, that’s exactly what plugins allow you to do!

WP Plugins – Benefits And Advantages

We started this article by comparing plugins with mobile apps. Just like many apps are free to download and some may cost a little bit of money, so do plugins.

In fact, loads of plugins can be downloaded and installed on your sites.

WordPress plugins that you have to pay for are called “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare these to the cost of investing in professional web development services to add similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium plugins cost very little.

Also, because WordPress makes its source code publicly available, anyone can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the WordPress code. This has allowed thousands of professional web development professionals to enhance and contribute to the core software application.

• WP plugins let you start off simply with only a simple yet professional online business presence and then add new features and enhancements to your site if necessary.
• WordPress plugins allow you to add almost unlimited features to any web presence easily and quite inexpensively.
• WP plugins give you almost unlimited expanding capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow non-technical website owners to have a digital presence that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins normally work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to provide your site with new enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins offer more extensive features and may need some initial configuring.

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

Like themes, loads of great WordPress plugins are available for WP users … for FREE!

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

As previously mentioned, you can find WordPress plugins that will do almost everything you can imagine.

There are plugins for:

• Web Site Administration
• Content Management
• Increasing Site Traffic
• User Engagement
• Social Sharing
• Adding Media Files – Video, Images, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Biz And Online Sales Automation
• Improving Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Analysis Tools
• Securing Your WP Web Site

You can enhance your business online presence with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Rotating ad banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to complete e-commerce stores with online shopping carts, payment processing, recurring payments, discount codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer feedback forms
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change your site’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.
• Offline storage management
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Business directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your blog
• Set appointments and appointment reminders
• Manage reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and send you reports
• Redirect visitors from broken pages to other pages on your site or other websites
• Monitor what other sites are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add a site map
• Exclude certain from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect page content sections
• Migrate information from non-WP applications
• Perform bulk data edits
• Block SPAM
• Customize visitor discussions (e.g. displaying Facebook posts)
• Inserting HTML and script elements into your content
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphic elements and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add a map
• Post your content automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and many others
• Show countdown timers (for expiring offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, WP plugins give you practically endless possibilities. If you are currently planning to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing website isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider getting one added to your domain, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

If you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using plugins, let’s take a look at some practical advantages of adding an inexpensive plugin to your website.

For example, if you want to protect your content, you can install plugins to make a section of your post inaccessible, or create a complete membership site with separate login details for users …

As mentioned before, you can use free plugins to improve your site in so many different ways. From installing features that will enhance your business, your web users’ experience and your ability to review site metrics …

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

You can also add sophisticated functionality to your website using relatively inexpensive paid plugins. For example, you can install plugins that automate functions on your pages like user 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 hiring web developers to code these applications 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:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can grow into online discussions) using either the native WordPress commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with increased exposure).
• Share your posts with other online visitors on various social sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with other customers through forums or even set up a private social network on your domain.
• Engage with members of your team via live chats
• Dial your business directly from their smart phones while browsing your site
• Open support tickets
• And so much more …

Finally you, can even integrate sophisticated “back end” solutions with a WP “front end”. This enables you to manage the content that your visitors will see on your website, while your third-party application handles the technical functions …

Useful Information About WP Plugins

• There are loads of terrific plugins available. Be careful not to overload your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will begin to affect your website’s resources and page loading speed. It also means more maintenance issues for you resulting from possible errors.
• Only keep the plugins you really need. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these also utilize resources.
• Many free plugins normally come with very little to no support from the plugin author. When considering premium plugins, ensure that you do a little research first to see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check the plugin reviews we publish on this site for additional expert information.
• If you see that a plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two or more years), then think twice before installing it on your website or blog. WordPress updates often and older plugins can cause issues.
• Always upgrade your plugins. Outdated plugin not only can create issues, they may also have security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WordPress plugins are an important feature of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most preferred CMS available. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand quickly without having to spend thousands of dollars on outsourced web development costs.

One last thing regarding plugins:

Whatever feature or functionality you need for your website, you can guarantee that a plugin currently exists that will do just what you want it to do, and that this plugin can either be downloaded for FREE, or if it’s a paid plugin, that the cost will be minimal.

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

And, if by chance this WP plugin has not been created yet, then a custom plugin that does exactly what you need it to do can probably be created for you at a reasonable cost.

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

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