WordPress is a powerful software platform for website development. Over time it has evolved from a simple blogging platform to a website design solution and Content Management System, or CMS. More than 75 million websites are built on WordPress, and many are very large commercial sites that you wouldn’t recognize as WordPress-based without checking the coding.
Perhaps the most valuable feature of the software is that it is open source. This allows third-party developers to create add-ons and plugins that enhance the base WordPress features for site owners, marketers, businesses, and their website visitors. New users of the software often find themselves wanting to do something specific to their business goals, and they can’t see a way to do it with the basic WordPress software. This is where plugins come into play.
WordPress Plugins for Site Looks and Design
Though you start with a theme that has various colour and layout templates, you often want to do more or modify some of those settings. There are plugins that allow you to assign looks, fonts, colours, and styles to different parts of the site or different content types. You can usually find a plugin that will help you change just about anything about the look and layout of your website.
WordPress Plugins for Website Management
There are hundreds of tasks the business website owner or manager must handle to keep the site operating smoothly, avoid crashes, speed up page loads, and more. Plugins are available to handle or improve these tasks, though WordPress software does well on its own. You often want to speed up a process or some task, or you want to make it more efficient or save you time.
WordPress Plugins for Online Sales
The freelance writer, photographer, consultant or other online professional can find plugins specific to their needs that will arrange content and even offer it for sale. Some plugins protect the content you specify, keeping it behind a paywall for access only after the visitor has paid for the privilege.
WordPress Plugins for E-Commerce and Stores
If you’re selling goods or services, an e-commerce plugin can create a full online store with individual products, a shopping basket and a payment system to take orders and ship products. Thousands of items aren’t a problem, as some plugins allow the import of a file with the product specifics and images.
WordPress Plugins for Marketing
Website visitors can be offered popups on-screen to offer incentives to sign up for offers or follow-up marketing. Several very popular email marketing systems have created WordPress plugins to create forms, accept visitor contact information entry, and place them automatically into a follow-up email marketing campaign.
WordPress Plugins for Traffic Analysis
Solent Statistics is our preferred website statistics reporting system instead of Google Analytics due to the latters gross privacy invasion. There are multiple plugins to allow you to integrate the reports into the backend management system of WordPress. You do not need to leave your site and go to the analytics website, as the results and tracking of visitor actions will show up on your website backend. If you want something simpler for site stats, there are plugins that gather the information you want without having to set up an analytics account.
WordPress Plugins for SEO, Search Engine Optimization
As you’re writing posts or articles for your site, there are plugins that analyse “as you go,” scoring your content for its SEO value. You can get suggestions for improvement, and even have keywords and phrases suggested for the content you’re creating.
WordPress Plugins for Sharing & Re-Posting to Social Sites
Some of the most valuable plugins for promoting your website content are those that allow you to connect with your social site profiles and pages. You can then have your new content, or excerpts from it, posted automatically to the social sites when you publish it live on your site.
WordPress is free software. With the low cost of premium business website hosting, you can have an efficient website for your small business. Plugins are the add-ons that allow you to do almost anything you want to make your site better and grow your business.