If you go to a social media training class or a website marketing class, the term “WordPress Plug Ins” will most likely come up.

What are plug ins and what do they do?  Why are they important?

In the video below we take a look at what role they play on your WordPress website and how they can benefit your website.

 

Plugins are known software that extends the functionality of WordPress features.  It offers features and functions that enables the users to design their website easily. Most Plugins can be downloaded online and uploaded inside your WordPress account in order to expand your site’s functionality.

Plugins can either be free or paid. If you are looking for free plugins, all you have to do is to search online for free plugins and you will have tons of them with various functionalities and features that you can use in order to customize your site.

Some plug ins are not compatible with every theme, so if you install a plug in and something goes wrong – it is best to uninstall and try something else.

When you consider getting free plugins, you need to understand that they may not be able to suffice all of the things that you need such as customer support when you need them. Here are the most important reasons why most people still go for the premium ones.

• Often compatible with the majority of themes
• Paid plugins offers the best security
• Premium plugins have full customer support who answers your query or concern within the day or within 24 hours.
• They have developers who can help you with the plugin installation or work-around. They can also help in troubleshooting if there are any problem on the plugin.

When you log in to your WordPress account for the first time, you will see that there are default plugins installed in your account, such as Jet Pack, Akismet and Hello Dolly.

Jet Pack is actually a suite of plug ins that are quite amazing.

Akismet helps with spam and as far as I know Hello Dolly doesn’t do anything.

Here are the things that you can do to your site with the help of Plugins.

• Make it easy for your readers to share your blog posts
• Make it easy for your visitors to comment on your blog articles
• Add security to your website
• Make your site load faster
• Optimize your site for better SEO
• Install Google Analytics
• Automatically back up your site

There are endless possibilities that you can do with the help of plugins.