WordPress Plug-ins can impart additional functionalities to your WordPress site. Let’s understand what these plug-ins are and which are some of the most important plug-ins you can use for your website!
What is a WordPress Plug-in?
A plug-in is a portion of software added to enhance a current piece of software – and that’s what the various WordPress plugins do – they enhance the actual WordPress website.
A WordPress plug-in is a snippet of code that extends the functionality of the WordPress development platform further than what the original developers of the platform have decided upon. It is for this reason that the CMS is quite raw, and offers only basic functionality such as creating posts, pages, and editing basic code.
A plug-in is generally installed via the plug-in administration area in WordPress. It can be done –
· Automatically from the plugins directory hosted by WordPress
· Manually via FTP
· Via an upload in the back end of WordPress
In most of the cases, one will never need to install a plug-in manually; however, as the availability of premium plugins is rising significantly, this is happening more and more.
Which are some of the most important WordPress Plug-ins?
This is an anti-spam Plug-in which identifies, blocks comment and tracks back spam on blogs. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. It lets you review the spam it catches or automatically delete spam. Once you install WordPress, this plug-in will come automatically. However you need to create an account to get an API key.
One can quickly and easily add a contact form to blogs with the help of this plug-in. It allows you to flexibly design the form and mail. One can manage multiple contact forms as well. In addition, it supports many features including AJAX submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, file uploading, etc.
This is a great plug-in for encouraging your readers to retweet your blog posts into the twitter verse. The button shows a live count of the number of times your webpage or blog post has been tweeted.
With this plug-in you can turn your WordPress site into a fully customizable membership platform. One can keep an area of your website for the general public to see and have access to, and then you can create an area of your website that only paid members have access to. This works well for creating a private client area for your website or creating a paid e-course or program that members have access to and go in and download their lessons.
Thesis Theme
It allows you to change the look and feel of your blog. The best thing about this plug-in is that it can change the look and feel of your blog with just a few simple clicks of mouse. You can change the font, color, background color, number of columns, and page navigation within seconds.
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