Tag: WP Plugins

One of the main benefits of choosing WordPress is that you can easily expand your WP website’s functionality using plugins.

About WP Plugins

Like most people, you most likely use a device like a cell 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?

You download and install an app!

An app is a software that is really simple and easy to install and instantly adds new features to any smart device.

(Just as there are social sharing apps …)

A plugin is similar to an app. You download and install an application that provides new functionality to your web site …

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

Generally, if you want to expand the functionality of your web site, additional cost is involved. Depending on the complexity of the features or enhancements, things can become fairly expensive, especially if website developers need to create new code or edit programs or develop programs that integrate into your current set up.

This is also applicable when setting up a web site. Business owners often fork out money up-front on added features they probably will never need.

To save money and keep your business expenses low, we recommend considering a sustainable approach to setting up a web site and WP plugins are ideal for doing this.

Imagine if you could:

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

2) As the need for new features and functionality arises, just install new applications with a couple of clicks of the mouse directly from your WP admin section, to give your website or blog a completely new and expanded range of useful functionality, and also …

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

Well, that’s just what WP plugins let you do!

WordPress Plugins – Benefits & Advantages

Earlier, we compared WP plugins with apps. Just like some apps are free to download and some cost a little bit of money, so do plugins.

In fact, many great plugins are available at no cost to WP users.

WP plugins that you purchase are referred to as ’Premium’ plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the cost of purchasing a Premium WP plugin to the cost of paying for professional web development services to add similar functionality on your site, most Premium plugins cost very little.

Also, since WordPress makes its code publicly available, any person can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the WordPress code. This has allowed many third-party software developers to create more new tools that enhance the WordPress software than you can imagine.

• WP plugins allow you to get started with only a basic website and add new features and enhancements to your site when necessary.
• Plugins let you add practically endless features to your site easily and very inexpensively.
• Plugins give you practically endless expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow business owners to have a site 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 instant new capabilities and functionality.
• Some plugins are slightly more advanced and could require some configuring.

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

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

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find WP plugins that can do almost everything you can possibly need a website to do.

There are plugins for:

• Blog Administration
• Content Syndication
• Traffic
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Connectivity
• Media Management Automation
• Improving Website Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Reporting
• Website Security

You can enhance your website with plugins such as:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Rotating ad banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce with online shopping carts, payment processing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User testimonials
• Language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your website 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 integration
• Faster page loading
• Event management
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your website
• Set up client appointments and appointment reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and email you reports
• Redirect visitors from broken pages to other areas on your site or other sites
• Monitor social conversations
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add a site map
• Hide specific from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Protect content on your posts and pages
• Import information from non-WordPress platforms
• Perform bulk data edits
• Fight SPAM commenting
• Customize guest discussions (e.g. displaying Facebook posts)
• Insert scripts and script elements into your content
• Add tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced font display formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add location maps
• Post your content automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many others
• Display countdown timers (for special offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And hundreds of other features!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you practically limitless business scalability. If you plan to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing website wasn’t built using WordPress, then consider using WordPress in the future.

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 adding an inexpensive plugin to your web site.

For example, if you want to publish content which is only accessible to some but not all users, you can use plugins to make an area of a post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a professional membership site with personal login details for every user …

As mentioned previously, you can use free plugins to enhance your web site in lots of different ways. From adding functionality that can improve your business, your web users’ experience and your understanding of what is taking place on your site …

To increasing your site’s reach and visibility across social networks and search engines …

You can also add advanced functionality to your website using inexpensive premium WordPress plugins. For example, you can set up plugins that automate features on your pages like managing customer testimonials and event bookings …

And even run a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a small fraction of the cost of paying software developers to code these functionality for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of native WordPress commenting features and plugins that will allow you to engage in various ways with your visitors, clients and registered site members …

For example, your visitors can:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get shared throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with increased exposure).
• Share your content with other web visitors on social networking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with your team members using online forums or even set up an online community on your own domain.
• Engage with members of your team using live video chats
• Dial your business directly from their laptops when visiting your pages
• Get help and support via a client helpdesk
• And much more …

You can also integrate complex enterprise-level applications using a WP “front end”. This enables you to manage your business marketing, while the third-party application handles the technical side of things …

WordPress Plugins – Some Useful Things You Should Know

• There are so many amazing plugins available. Be careful not to overload your site with too many plugins, as this will affect your site’s resources and page loading speed. It also creates more maintenance work for you resulting from potential errors.
• Only keep those plugins that you really plan to use. Delete inactive plugins from your site, as these use extra resources.
• Many free plugins typically receive little to no support from the plugin author. When considering paid plugins, we recommend that you check some reviews online and understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to providing support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check some of our WordPress plugin recommendations for additional 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 installing it on your website. WordPress updates on a frequent basis and older plugins that have not been updated can create errors.
• Always update your plugins. Outdated plugins not only can cause errors and conflicts, 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 it the most preferred CMS 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 costs.

One last thing about plugins:

Whatever feature you need for your web presence, you can guarantee that a plugin already exists that will do just what you need it to do, and that this plugin can either be accessed at no cost, or if it’s a premium plugin, that it will be surprisingly affordable.

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

And, if by any chance such a WP plugin is not available, then a custom plugin that does precisely what you need it to do can most certainly be created for you for a very reasonable price.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what they are and how they can to improve your blog. See our related posts section to learn about more useful WP plugins that we recommend using.

***

***