Tag: WP Plugins

One of the main features of the WordPress web site management platform is that you can quickly and easily expand your WP web site’s functionality using plugins.

Understanding WP Plugins

No doubt, you probably own a cell phone. What happens when you want access to something new on your device like a new game or a tool?

You download and install an app!

An app is a little piece of software that is very easy to install and integrates new functionality into any mobile device.

(Just as there are social sharing apps for mobile phones …)

A plugin is like an app. You simply download and install a little piece of software that provides new functionality to your website …

(… there are also social sharing plugins for WP users!)

Typically, adding new features to a web site involves additional cost. Depending on the complexity of the feature or enhancements, this can become fairly expensive, especially if website developers need to add new code or modify templates or develop programs to integrate with your current site.

This is also applicable to creating a new web site. Businesses often pay up front for extra features or options they probably will never need.

To reduce business costs, we recommend using a sustainable strategy when setting up a web site 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 business web presence up and running quickly, then …

2) As the need arises, simply install new software modules with a few clicks of the mouse directly from your WordPress dashboard panel, and give your web site an entirely new and expanded range of capabilities and functionality, and also …

3) Cost not one cent extra to add to your site?

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

Plugins – Benefits & Advantages

We began this blog post by comparing plugins with ’apps’. Just like many apps are free to download and some may cost a little money, so do WordPress plugins.

In fact, loads of wonderful plugins can be installed and activated on your websites.

Plugins that you have to pay for are referred to as Premium plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the cost of a Premium WP plugin to the price of paying for web development services to add the same functionality on your site, most Premium plugins are generally very inexpensive.

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

• Plugins let you get started with a basic online business presence and add new features and enhancements to your site only if required.
• Plugins let you add practically endless features to any web site easily, quickly and really cheaply.
• Plugins give you virtually unlimited expansion capabilities.
• WordPress plugins allow anyone to own a digital presence that they can self-manage.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require installation and activation to provide your website or blog with instant new capabilities, enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins can be slightly more advanced and may need some configuring.

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

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

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

As mentioned earlier, you will find WP plugins that will do almost anything you can think of.

WordPress plugin categories cover:

• Blog Management
• Content Syndication
• Driving Site Visitors
• Visitor Interactivity
• Social Engagement
• Inserting Media – Videocasts, Images, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Biz And Online Sales & Advertising Automation
• Increasing Sales And Opt-In Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data & System Analysis
• Optimizing Your WordPress Site

For example, you can expand your business online presence with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Polls and quizzes
• Surveys
• Display banners
• E-commerce (from setting up single-item ordering with PayPal buttons, to enterprise scale e-commerce stores with online shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Membership sites
• Newsletter opt-in forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s SEO
• Image galleries (with rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• User feedback forms
• Instant language translation (e.g. you can instantly change your site’s content from English to Portuguese)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation menus
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media integration
• Making pages load faster
• Managing events & bookings
• Niche directories
• Automatically sell and manage advertising on your site
• Set appointments and appointment reminders
• Automate reservations and bookings
• Detect broken hyperlinks and email you reports
• Redirect website links
• Monitor what social media users are posting about your business
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Hide pages from displaying on areas of your site (e.g. sitemaps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide post content sections
• Import content from non-WP applications
• Search and replace content
• Prevent SPAM commenting
• Customize guest discussions (e.g. displaying Facebook posts)
• Inserting code and code elements into your pages
• Add and format tables
• Add animated graphics and advanced text formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve Google local search
• Add a map
• Post your posts automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr 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, plugins give you endless possibilities. If you are planning to build a web site for your business, or your existing website wasn’t built with WordPress, then consider using WordPress in the future.

If you’re still wondering just how powerful and flexible plugins are, let’s take a look at how you can benefit by simply adding an inexpensive plugin to your site.

For example, if you want to protect your content, you can use plugins to make a section of your post or page inaccessible, or create a professional paid membership site with personal login details for every user …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to enhance your web presence in lots of different ways. From adding new features that improve your business, your website visitors’ experience and your ability to analyze visitor data …

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

You can also add complex functionality to your website using relatively inexpensive premium plugins. For example, you can install plugins that integrate and automate functionality on your pages such as managing customer testimonials and booking events …

And also run a custom bookings and reservations system online … all for a tiny fraction of the cost of paying programmers to create custom applications for you …

Additionally, you can take advantage of native WordPress commenting features and plugins that can increase visitor engagement …

For example, your web visitors can easily:

• Post comments on your blog posts (which can turn into online discussions) using either the native WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then displayed throughout a visitors’ Facebook pages, giving your site additional exposure).
• Bookmark your posts on various social sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online directly with other members via forums or even set up a private online social network on your own domain.
• Engage with your support team via live web conferencing and chatrooms
• Call your business from their cellphones while visiting your pages
• Get help and support via a dedicated user helpdesk
• And much more …

You can even integrate complex third-party applications using a WordPress “front end”. This allows you to control your business marketing, while your 3rd-party application handles the technical aspects …

Plugins – Additional Things To Know

• There are lots of great WordPress plugins to choose from. Be careful not to overload your site with too many plugins, as this will affect your website’s performance and page loading times. It can also create more maintenance issues for you as a result of possible conflicts and errors.
• Only keep the plugins that you really plan to use. Delete any plugins you don’t use from your site, as these use resources.
• Many free plugins normally receive little to no support from the plugin author. When choosing paid WordPress plugins, make sure you check some reviews online and see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to providing support, updates, new improvements, etc. Be sure to check some of our plugin reviews for more 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 site. WordPress is updated often and outdated WordPress plugins can cause issues.
• Always maintain your plugins upgraded to the most recent version. Older plugin not only can create problems, they may also contain security vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, WP plugins are an important feature of WordPress and contribute to making WordPress the most downloaded content management system in the world. Plugins also provide WordPress users with an easy, simple and inexpensive way to expand without spending thousands of dollars on outsourced web development costs.

One last thing on the topic of WP plugins:

If there is any functionality you want for your web site, you can guarantee that a WordPress plugin probably exists that will do what you want, and that it can either be downloaded 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 this plugin does not exist, then a custom plugin that does just what you want it to do can probably be coded for your business at a reasonable cost.

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

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