Tag: WP Plugins

One of the most powerful benefits of WordPress is that you can quickly enhance your WordPress site’s functionality using plugins.

Understanding Plugins

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

You download and install an app!

An app is a little software application that is very simple and easy to install and instantly adds new features to any smart phone.

(Just as you can find social sharing apps …)

A plugin is very much like an app. You install and activate a software that provides new functionality to your website or blog …

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

Typically, if you want to add new features to a web site, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the new features or enhancement, things could get fairly expensive, particularly if web developers need to add new code or modify programs or develop programs to integrate into your current site.

This also applies when setting up a web site. Business owners often spend up-front on features they may not ever need.

To save money and keep costs down, we recommend a sustainable approach to growing a digital presence presence and WordPress plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As the need for new capabilities and functionality arises, install new software modules with only a couple of mouse clicks directly from your WordPress dashboard panel, giving your site a completely new range of capabilities and functionality, and also …

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

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

Plugins – Benefits

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

In fact, many wonderful plugins can be installed and activated on your sites.

Plugins that cost money are referred to as ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the price of a Premium plugin to the price of hiring a professional web developer to get similar features and functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are typically quite inexpensive.

Also, because WordPress makes its source code available to everyone, any web developer can create, modify and customize any part of the WordPress code. This has allowed many professional software developers to create more new tools that plug seamlessly into WordPress than you can possibly imagine.

• Plugins allow you to get started with just a simple site and then expand only if necessary.
• WordPress plugins let you add almost unlimited functionality to your web site quickly, easily and very cheaply.
• WordPress plugins give your website practically endless expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow anyone to have a website that they can manage.
• Most plugins will work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your website new capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins provide more extensive features and require some configuration.

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

Just like themes, tens of thousands of great plugins are available for WordPress users … often at no cost!

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

As mentioned earlier, you can find plugins that can do just about anything you can possibly need your site to do.

There are WP plugins for:

• Blog Management
• Content Distribution
• Driving Web Traffic
• User Interactivity
• Social Connectivity
• Adding Media – Videos, Graphics, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Biz And Online Sales & Marketing Automation
• Increasing Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Monitoring & Reporting Applications
• Blog Optimization

You can expand your business online presence with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• User Surveys
• Managing banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to full e-commerce with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupons, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile integration
• Improving your site’s SEO
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonial forms
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to Norwegian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer engagement – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Offline storage management
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Business directories
• Automatically sell spots on your blog
• Set client appointments and appointment reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and email you reports
• Redirect visitors from broken pages to other pages on your site or other websites
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages available for printing or downloading as PDF
• Add sitemaps
• Exclude specific from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect post content
• Import data from non-WordPress applications
• Perform bulk content edits
• Block SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor commenting (e.g. displaying Facebook discussions)
• Inserting scripts and script elements into your website’s header and footer
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced content formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google search results
• Add location maps
• Publish your posts automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and many others
• Display countdown timers (for expiring offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you endless possibilities. If you are planning to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing website isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider getting one built on your domain, or you could 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 how you can benefit instantly by simply installing an inexpensive plugin on your website.

For example, if you need content protection, you can use plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on a post inaccessible, or create a professional paid membership site with separate login details for each user …

As mentioned before, free plugins can be used to improve your website in lots of ways. From installing functionality that will improve your business, your website visitors’ experience and your understanding of what is happening on your site …

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

You can also add complex features to your website using inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can download plugins that integrate and automate tasks on your pages like displaying customer testimonials and event registration details …

And even run a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying web developers to create similar functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of native WordPress commenting features and plugins that can make your site even more interactive …

For example, your visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WP commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then displayed throughout your visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with added exposure).
• Bookmark your content on bookmarking sites.
• Contact you using contact forms
• Engage in online discussions with other members through forums or even set up a private online social network on your own domain.
• Engage with members of your team through live video chats
• Dial your business directly from their mobile phones when visiting your website
• Get help and support via a customer helpdesk
• And so much more …

Finally you, can also integrate complex “back end” applications using a WP “front end”. This lets you control the content that your visitors see on your website, while your third-party application handles the technological areas …

Useful Things You Should Know About Plugins

• There are so many WordPress plugins available. Be careful not to overload your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this can invariably affect your site’s resources and site loading times. It also creates more maintenance issues for you resulting from potential conflicts.
• Install only the plugins you really use. Delete all unnecessary plugins from your site, as these use server resources.
• Many free plugins often come with very little to no support from the plugin author. When considering premium WP plugins, ensure that you check some reviews online and understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to offering support, updates, new features, etc. Be sure to check some of the plugin reviews we provide on this site for more expert information.
• If you see that an unsupported plugin has not been updated for a while (e.g. two or more years), then think carefully before using it on your website or blog. WordPress updates on a frequent basis and out-of-date plugins can cause conflicts.
• Always upgrade your plugins. Older plugin not only can cause errors, they could also contain security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an integral part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most popular content management platform in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to add instant features to their web presence without having to spend thousands of dollars on outsourced web development.

One last thing on the subject of plugins:

Whatever feature you need for your website, you can be sure that a someone has probably already created one that will do just what you need, and that it will either be available at no cost, or if it’s a premium plugin, that the price will be quite reasonable.

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

And, if by any chance such a WordPress plugin has not been created yet, then a custom plugin that does precisely what you need it to do can probably be developed for you at a reasonable cost.

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

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