Teachers: 5 Remarkably Useful WordPress Features You Might Have Missed out on

Thursday, February 12, 2015

5 Remarkably Useful WordPress Features You Might Have Missed out on

The herd of CMSes out there is either impressive or interestingly mediocre, but it surely is quite a big and an ever expanding herd that keeps getting crowded by the hour. And Wordpress has remain unscathed till know by purely riding on the consistent self-reinventions and an approach that is unswervingly innovation-driven.

If Wordpress continues on its present trajectory, it is going to be nearly impossible to displace it from its Numero Uno place in the realm of content management systems.

5 Remarkably Useful WordPress Features You Might Have Missed out on

Now, as someone who has been using Wordpress for his/her website from quite a while now, you are probably aware of a truckload of in-built features and the whole ensemble of plugins that Wordpress tosses at you for your consideration. But be it as it may, there is still no dearth of features which still go relatively unnoticed and unheard. And we arent talking about the puny plugins and functionalities that hardly serve a purpose, but certain set of capabilities that Wordpress can vest you up with when you wish to make it seriously count as a web publisher. Here is a bunch of them:

Also Read: How to Find the Websites or Blogs that are Copying your Content?

1. Private Social Circle (To Let the Like-Minded Individuals Within Your Audience Come Under One Roof)

You might pin it on the digitalization of the world, but we, as social animals, manage to make more interpersonal connections over the web than we do in the real, physical world. Its easier to met like-minded people over the Internet and thats what the Private Social Circle feature of Wordpress is aimed to make use of fir boosting the user engagement on your website.

Wordpress offers us the P2 theme that gives your visitors some control over how they engage with your portal. It embeds a feature that facilitates creating user-generated networks wherein every user can stay connected to a bunch of people that share the same interests and tastes.

Lets say, you are running a blog on leisure, entertainment, humor and poetry. Now, you have a huge audience for people who relish the poetry on your site. Imagine how awesome it would be when instead of just commenting (a practise they wont follow repeatedly), your website offers them a platform over which they interact with each other.

Now, they may not be reciting homilies only about your poems and instead they are sharing their own works. What eventually matters is the fact that they are doing so while they are on your website. Every activity happening in that social circle is happening on your domain and this is boosting some metrics like “Total number of visits”, and “Avg. time spent per visit”. Apparently, there are the two stats which matter the most to any webmaster and when P2 makes achieving so effortlessly, there is no reason why you should not grab it right away.

2. SupportDynamo by Plugin Dynamo

This one is the ideal plugin for businesses that are looking to create a Help Desk on their Wordpress websites. Support Dynamo is a high performance plugin that works in perfect unison with most Wordpress themes. It facilitates email piping (a feature much in demand off-late), helps you create a knowledge base on the site for your audience to refer, integrates the method of signing up for membership, helps save comments and replies, simplifies the process of creating user ticket notes, etc.

Also Read: Pros and Cons of Interviewing Bloggers on your Blog

3. Wordpress Wiki

User generated content has always been a trump card for smart publishers. For bloggers who scramble to update the content on their blog frequently, the Wordpress Wiki is a gift. Facilitating an interface that is user-friendly and lets your visitors update the posts on your website (aka Wikipedia) and also submit their own, Wordpress Wiki makes sure you are never short of content and that your visitors have one more reason to stay around: they have a better interface than an unnoticeable comment box below the posts to voice their opinions about a certain post. Of course, the challenge for you is to audit the content comprehensively and with a lot of care to ensure that no inappropriate language or controversial phrases make their way to the live posts.

4. Comment Redirect

When increasing the average time spent per visit and boosting the overall engagement is on your agenda, Comment Redirect is among the very best things you can get your hands on. When a visitor on your website is commenting on a post, most likely, they have found that piece of content engaging enough (even if they dont particularly like it), so it wont be a bad idea to engage them a little more. Comment Redirect lets you redirect your sites visitors on a page of your choice as soon as they hit the Submit button under the comments section. Now that page may just just be another post or it can be the page suggesting the comment to sign up as a subscriber to your site or any of the zillion other things you want them to do.

5. WP Mingle Plugin

Close on the heels of the Private Social Circle, but one with the scope of creating more unexclusive circles. The WP Mingle plugin transforms your website into a social media portal that gives your visitors the wherewithal to facilitate social media activities like tagging friends to the posts, uploading personalized avatars, private messaging within the websites circle, posting their own content and much more. This plugin thus gives your websites traffic a major push in the terms of quantity and the quality visits.

The adaptability of Wordpress to the rapidly changing digital environment is what serves as its differentiator, and also the fact that it has not just remained glued to trends, but has also been the sole proprieter of certain trends that have altered the whole landscape of Internet.

Author Bio

Maria is an expert in web technologies and loves to dole out sermon around the same. She works for Wordprax, a HTML to Wordpress Service company. If you plan to hire services for Convert Magento to Wordpress , you can count on Wordprax.

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