Tag: WP Plugins

One of the main benefits of the WordPress platform is the ability to easily enhance your WP website’s functionality using plugins.

Understanding Plugins

Like most people, you most likely have a device like a smart phone. What do you do when you want to access something new on your device like a new software or a new tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a software application that is easy to install and immediately adds new features and functionality to your mobile phone.

(Just as you will find social sharing apps for smart phones …)

A plugin is very much like an app. You install a little piece of software that adds new functionality to your site …

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

Almost always, expanding the functionality of a site involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the feature or enhancement, the cost can be significant, especially if it requires website development.

This also applies when developing a web site. Organizations often spend up-front on components they probably will never need.

As part of sound strategic business planning, we recommend a sustainable approach to setting up a website and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As the need for new capabilities arises, add new applications with only a few clicks of the mouse directly from your dashboard section, giving your website or blog a whole new range of capabilities and functionality, and also …

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

Well, this is precisely what a WP plugin enables you to do!

Plugins – Benefits

Earlier, we compared plugins with ’apps’. In a similar way that some apps are free to download and some apps cost a little money, so do WordPress plugins.

In fact, thousands of plugins can be downloaded to your site at no cost.

WordPress 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 functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. paid) plugins are priced quite low.

Also, since WordPress makes its source code available to everyone, any person can create, rewrite and customize any portion of the WP code. This has allowed thousands of professional web development companies to enhance the core software application.

• WordPress plugins allow you to start off with a simple web site and add new features and enhancements to your site only as required.
• WordPress plugins let you add almost endless functionality to any web site easily and quite inexpensively.
• WP plugins give your website virtually endless expansion capabilities.
• Plugins allow non-technical users to own a website that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins will work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to provide your site with new capabilities and enhancements.
• Some plugins are slightly more complex and may require some configuration.

WP Plugins – Powerful, Flexible … And (Many Of Them Are) Completely FREE!

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

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

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

WordPress plugin categories cover:

• Site Management
• Content Syndication
• Increasing Web Traffic
• User Interactivity
• Social Media
• Media Utilities Automation
• Improving Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data Monitoring & Reporting Tools
• WP SEO

You can add features to your website with plugins like the following:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Social contests
• Managing advertising banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to full scale e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupons, etc …)
• Social media integration
• Private Membership sites
• List-building opt-in forms
• Sales workflow
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer testimonial forms
• Language translation plugins (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your pages from English to Norwegian)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Cloud storage integration
• Faster page loading
• Managing events
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell advertising on your blog
• Set up client appointments and reminders
• Manage reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks on your pages and email you reports
• Redirect URLs
• Monitor social signals
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add a site map
• Exclude certain from showing on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide content on your posts and pages
• Import information from non-WordPress applications
• Perform bulk content edits
• Prevent SPAM commenting
• Customize visitor discussions (e.g. display Facebook comments)
• Insert HTML and script elements into your pages
• Add formatted tables
• Display animated graphics and advanced content formatting options
• Create and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add location maps
• Syndicate your posts automatically on social pages like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many others
• Show countdown timers (for scarcity offers, coupons, etc …)
• Display personal greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so much more!

As you can clearly see, WP plugins give you virtually limitless business scalability. If you are planning to build a website or blog for your business, or your existing website wasn’t built with WordPress, then consider getting a WP site or blog in the future, or you will be missing out on some serious features.

In case you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using WP plugins, let’s take a look at how you can benefit by simply installing an inexpensive plugin on your website.

For example, if you want to publish private content, you can use plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on your post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a professional membership site with separate login details for every member …

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

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

You can also add complex features to your website using relatively inexpensive paid WordPress plugins. For example, you can purchase plugins that integrate and automate processes on your website like customer 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 programmers to code custom functionality for you …

You can also take advantage of built-in WordPress commenting features and plugins that can allow you to engage better with your visitors, customers 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 built-in WordPress commenting feature, or integrated Facebook comments (which then get displayed throughout a 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 online forums or even set up an online social network on your own site.
• Engage with members of your team via live web conferencing and chatroom facilities
• Call your business from their laptops while browsing your website
• Open a support ticket
• And much more …

Finally you, can also integrate sophisticated enterprise solutions within a WordPress “front end”. This lets you manage the content that your visitors will see on your web site, while the third-party application handles the technical functions …

Plugins – Some Useful Information

• There are many plugins available. Be careful of overloading your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will affect your website’s performance and site loading times. It can also mean more maintenance work for you resulting from potential conflicts.
• Install only those plugins you really plan to use. Delete any plugins from your site, as these also consume server resources.
• Many free plugins typically receive little to no support from the plugin developer. When choosing paid plugins, ensure that you check around a little and understand what kind of reputation the plugin developer has when it comes to providing support, updates, new improvements, 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 while (e.g. two or more years), then think carefully before installing it on your website. WordPress changes on a frequent basis and older plugins that have not been updated can create problems.
• Make sure to always keep your plugins updated. Older plugin not only can cause errors and conflicts, they could also have security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an important aspect of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most preferred content management system in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with easy, simple and inexpensive ways to add instant functionality to their web presence without having to spend thousands of dollars on web development costs.

One last thing regarding plugins:

Whatever functionality you need for your web presence, you can be sure that a someone has probably already developed one that will do just what you need, and that this plugin can either be downloaded at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that it will be reasonably affordable.

(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 exactly what you would like it to do can probably be coded for your business at a reasonable cost.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of WordPress plugins – what they are and how they can help expand your blog. See our related posts section to learn about more useful plugins that we recommend using.

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