Tag: WP Plugins

One of the main benefits of choosing WordPress is the ability to quickly increase your WordPress web site’s functionality using plugins.

About WP Plugins

No doubt, you probably have a mobile phone. What do you do when you want to access something new on your phone like a new game or business tool?

Why, simple … you download and install an app!

An app is a little piece of software that is really simple and easy to install and integrates new features and functionality into any smart phone.

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

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

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

Typically, adding a new feature to an already-built website involves additional cost. Depending on how complex the feature or enhancement is, things can become fairly expensive, particularly if it involves website development.

This is also applicable to setting up a new website or business blog. Business owners often fork out money upfront on extra bells and whistles they may simply not need.

To minimize business costs, we suggest considering a sustainable strategy to setting up your online presence presence and WP plugins are ideal for helping you achieve this.

Imagine being able to:

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

2) As new features and functionality become necessary, add new applications with only a few mouse clicks directly from your admin panel, to give your site an entirely new and expanded range of useful features, and also …

3) Cost not a single cent more to download and install on your site?

Well, this is just what a plugin allows you to do!

Benefits & Advantages Of Using WP Plugins

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

In fact, thousands of plugins can be installed on your websites.

WordPress plugins that cost money are called “Premium” plugins. The good news, is that when you compare the cost of buying a Premium WordPress plugin to the price of hiring a professional web developer to get similar functionality on your site, most Premium (i.e. ”paid”) plugins are generally very inexpensive.

Also, since WordPress makes its code publicly available, anybody can create, modify and customize any portion of the code. This has enabled thousands of third-party web development companies to build more new plugins that work with the WordPress platform than you can probably imagine.

• Plugins let you get started simply with a simple yet professional web presence and add new features and enhancements to your site only if necessary.
• Plugins let you add practically unlimited functionality to your web site quickly, easily and very cheaply.
• WordPress plugins give you virtually unlimited expanding capabilities.
• Plugins allow ”non-techies” to have a site that they can manage themselves.
• Most plugins typically work “right out of the box” and only require to be installed and activated to give your website or blog new enhancements and functionality.
• Some plugins can be a little more complex and may require some configuration.

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

Like many WP themes, thousands of great WordPress plugins are currently available for WP users … for FREE!

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

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

WP plugin categories cover:

• Web Site Administration
• Content Management
• Online Traffic Generation
• User Engagement
• Social Connectivity
• Inserting Media Files – Videocasts, Graphics & Images, Podcasts, Multimedia, etc.
• e-Biz And Online Sales And Marketing Automation
• Increasing Sales Conversions And Lead Generation
• Data And System Monitoring & Reporting
• Blog Security

You can add features to a business online presence with plugins like:

• Contact forms
• Quizzes and polls
• Surveys
• Managing banners
• E-commerce (from managing single-item sales with PayPal buttons, to enterprise scale e-commerce with shopping carts, invoicing, recurring billing, coupon codes, etc …)
• Social sharing buttons
• Private Membership sites
• List-building subscription forms
• Sales funnels
• Mobile conversion
• Improving your website’s Search Engine Optimization
• Image galleries (including rotating images, lightboxes, etc.)
• Customer feedback forms
• Automatic language translation (e.g. you can instantly change all content on your site from English to German)
• Statistical reporting (e.g. number of visitors, pages visited, keywords searched, etc.)
• Custom navigation
• Customer interactivity – contest, live chat, currency conversion, etc.
• Media management
• Making pages load faster
• Event management
• Business listing directories
• Automatically sell spots on your site
• Set appointments and reminders
• Help customers make reservations and bookings
• Detect broken links and email you reports
• Redirect website pages
• Monitor social conversations
• Make your pages printable or downloadable as a PDF file
• Add sitemaps
• Hide specific from showing on areas of your site (e.g. site maps, feeds, etc.)
• Hide post content
• Migrate content from non-WP applications
• Search and replace data
• Fight SPAM
• Customize visitor discussions (e.g. displaying Facebook comments)
• Insert HTML and script elements into your content
• Add formatted tables
• Display animated graphic elements and advanced text formatting options
• Add and manage QR codes
• Improve your local search listings on Google
• Add location maps
• Post your posts automatically on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and many others
• Show countdown timers (for scarcity offers, discount coupons, etc …)
• Display personalized greetings, timed offers, etc …
• And so many other features!

As it’s clear to see, plugins give you virtually endless business scalability. If you plan to build a website or blog, or your existing website isn’t powered by WordPress, then consider getting one added to your domain, or you could be missing out on some serious functionality.

If you’re still wondering about the power and flexibility of using plugins, let me show you how you can benefit instantly by simply installing a plugin on your web site.

For example, if you want content protection, you can install plugins to make just a couple of paragraphs on your page or post inaccessible, or transform your WordPress site into a professional paid membership site with personal login details for every member …

As mentioned previously, free plugins can be used to improve your site in so many different ways. From installing new features that improve your business, your web users’ experience and your understanding of what is happening on your site …

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

You can also add complex functionality to your website using relatively inexpensive premium WordPress plugins. For example, you can download plugins that integrate and automate features on your pages such as user feedback and event registrations management …

And even set up a complete bookings and reservations system on your site … all for a small fraction of the cost of hiring programmers to create custom functionality for you …

You can also 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 site (which can turn into online discussions) using either the built-in WordPress commenting function, or integrated Facebook comments (which are then shared throughout the visitors’ Facebook pages, providing you with increased exposure).
• Share your posts with other web visitors on social networking sites.
• Contact you via contact forms
• Engage online with your team members through online forums or even set up a private community on your own site.
• Engage with your team through live video chats
• Call your business from their smart phones while browsing your website
• Get help via a dedicated client support helpdesk
• And much more …

Finally you, can even integrate complex “back end” applications with a WP “front end”. This lets you manage your business sales and marketing, while the third-party application handles the technical functions …

Plugins – Additional Tips

• There are lots of plugins available. Be careful not to overload your server with an excessive amount of plugins, as this will affect your site’s performance and page loading speed. It also creates more maintenance issues for you resulting from possible errors.
• Only keep those plugins that you really plan to use. Delete any plugins from your site, as these use resources.
• Many free plugins often receive little to no support from the plugin developer. When considering paid WordPress plugins, make sure you check around a little and see what kind of reputation the developer has when it comes to offering support, upgrades, new features, etc. Be sure to check some of the plugin reviews we provide on this site for more 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. The WordPress software is updated regularly and older plugins that have not been updated can create errors.
• Always keep your plugins updated. Older plugin not only can cause problems, they could also contain security vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers and malware.

As you can see, plugins are an important part of WordPress and contribute to making it the most downloaded online open source platform 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 outsourced web developers.

One last thing about WordPress plugins:

Whatever feature you need for your website, you can guarantee that a someone has probably already developed one that will do exactly what you want, and that it can either be downloaded at no cost, or if it’s a paid plugin, that it will be fairly inexpensive.

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

And, if by chance this WP plugin does not exist, then one can probably be developed for your business at a reasonable cost.

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

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