What is a WordPress Plugin?
A plugin is a piece of software that extends and expands the functionality of your WordPress site. It enhances adding or changing features in WordPress.
There are many plugins with useful niche solutions available for WordPress Users. They range from simple ones, like adding automatic light-box displays for image galleries, to complex ones like turning WordPress into an e-commerce platform or a social network. What makes plugins so useful and so popular is that they live alongside WordPress and you can add, activate, deactivate, and remove them whenever you want. Once installed, a plugin can be activated and used or deactivated without any serious consequences to the site.
How do WordPress Plugins work?
Every WordPress plugin you use is registered in the database of your site. What makes plugins so useful and so popular is that they live alongside WordPress and you can add, activate, deactivate, and remove them whenever you want. It acts as an add-on to your browser. It gives additional functionality to your browser. Once installed, a plugin can be activated and used or deactivated without any serious consequences to the site.
Finding, vetting, and selecting plugins
Similar to themes, you can browse and install all the plugins hosted in the official WordPress Plugin Directory directly from the admin panel. People are often confused regarding what plugins they should install. This usually leads them to the Plugin Directory where they start searching for the most popular plugins. Finding plugins is not a matter of following a list of recommendations. It’s about figuring out what your site needs and finding the best solution.
Let’s say you want to add a contact form to your site. If you search “contact” in the Plugin Directory, you’ll see hundreds of options. As a new user, how would you know which one to choose? Well, there are some tools, built into the Plugin Directory, both on the web and in WordPress Admin that can help you out. All plugins are listed with their name, logo, author, and metadata. In the metadata, you will find how many active installations of this plugin exist, what the average rating is, and how many people have rated it. And even a link to the plugin reviews.
Using this information, you can examine the plugins to make sure they are as good as they all claim to be. A plugin with thousands of active downloads, and only one good review, is probably not as good as one with only a hundred active downloads, but 30 good reviews. Likewise, a plugin with a five-star rating, but only 500 users is probably not as good as an equivalent plugin with four stars, but 50,000 active users. Here you have to use your judgment and do some critical thinking to find the best solution. Once you find a plugin you think you want to use, go on the web, and look for some reviews. People often write reviews or tutorials about plugins.
If you are still not sure whether it is the right option, you can take it for a test drive on your site. You can test four or five or even ten plugins before choosing the final option. And even if you have already chosen a plugin, you can always swap it with another one. It is better that you only keep the plugins you use. If you test a plugin, and it doesn’t work, delete it. If you deactivate a plugin, because you no longer need it, delete it. You can always download a new version later. Leaving inactive plugins in your installation takes up space and can lead to security issues.
Installing, activating, and upgrading plugins
Plugins are managed from the WordPress Admin Panel. Plugins play such a vital role in WordPress itself; they have their main menu item and subsection where you can view installed plugins and add new plugins. To extend the functionality of WordPress, you can install new plugins. You can either go to the Add New function from the Plugins page on the button up here or from the main menu under Plugins and Add New. We get the same information as we would from the Plugin Directory. The only difference is that it is displayed inside the WordPress Admin panel, and you can install plugins directly from this page into your WordPress site. To navigate between the different plugins, you can either look at Featured plugins, the Most Popular plugins, or Recommended plugins, and you can also set up your plugin Favorites by creating an account on WordPress.org and then marking the plugins you use the most as your favorite plugins.
Each of the plugins is displayed with its icon and other information like the title and description, the creator, ratings, how many active installs exist, when it was last updated, and whether or not it’s tested with your current version of WordPress. If you want more information, you can also click More Details which opens the full page of information from the WordPress Plugin directory. Once you’re satisfied with your choice, you can either click Install Now from the dialogue itself or click Install Now directly on the Plugins page. If you want to find a specific plugin with a specific feature, you can search by Keyword or by Author, or bag.
You can also deactivate the plugin, go up to Settings for the plugin, also edit the plugin if you want to, and get more information. If you want to delete the plugin, you have to deactivate it first, and then you can delete it directly, and if you want to reactivate it, you simply click Activate.
Once you have themes and plugins installed on your site, it’s vitally important that you keep them up to date. If you have plugins or themes that are not up to date, WordPress will tell you. If there is an update, you can see a recycling icon in the WordPress toolbar with a number beside it. It can also be seen in the Dashboard, under Updates or you can see it directly in Installed Plugins under the plugin that has an update saying, “There’s a new version available”. And if there is an update, you can simply click Update Now, which would update the plugin, or you can go to Dashboard, go to Updates, and update it directly from there, or follow the link in the WordPress toolbar that takes you directly to run the update. As you can see, the update process is incredibly simple. You just go to the page, and click Update, everything happens behind the scenes, you don’t have to do anything. But any time you see that update mark on your toolbar or in the dashboard, make sure you go in and update your themes and your plugins right away.
Some useful plugin types to start with
You can get thousands of free plugins in the official WordPress Plugin directory. There are also many commercial plugins you can buy from third parties and developers. There are some useful plugins you could start with. This depends on what are the requirements for your website in particular.
As your WordPress site grows, so does the amount of text, images, code, and other media files. A bigger website means that it will take longer to load. So, to avoid slow response time in WordPress, you should also invest some time in optimization.
Google XML Sitemaps is a plugin that will automatically generate XML sitemaps for better search engine optimization. It will ensure that your pages load quickly and efficiently, thus, leaving your visitors happy.
A cache is a temporary data storage. In most cases, active data is cached which results in reduced loading times. For example, when you access a frequently visited site, your browser will have a portion of the site’s static content located in its cache. As a result, the browser needs to request fewer files and information from the server which ultimately leads to quicker loading. The most popular WordPress caching plugins are: WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, and WP Fastest Cache
Yoast SEO is probably the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. It will help you improve search engine optimization. From meta tags to writing suggestions – The oast SEO plugin has it all.
Most WordPress admins don’t know they’re vulnerable, but iThemes Security works to lock down WordPress, fix common holes, stop automated attacks, and strengthen user credentials.
Another useful plugin is Contact Form 7. It can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, reCAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, and so on.
This chapter is explained more in detail in our tutorial videos. You can find below, the link to our WordPress Tutorial Part 6: Extending WordPress with Plugins
Tutorial in English
Tutorial in Nepali
We shall talk more about WordPress in our next tutorials and blogs. For our video tutorials, please subscribe to our Youtube Channel TrilogyDigital Pathshala