Introduction to Plugins for WordPress Beginners

What are plugins?

If you are a WordPress beginner and have been reading about the CMS platform, we are pretty sure that by now you have come across the term ‘plugin’ a gazillion times. Now if you are a tech native, we are pretty sure you already have a vague idea about what it is. For the un-initiated, here’s how we would define plugins:

Plugins are bits of software that can be added to your WordPress website so as to enhance its functionality.

So essentially, like WordPress gives you the option of themes to beautify or make your website visually appealing, the same way it gives you plugin options to help you define what all your website can do. WordPress boasts of 45,835 plugins with 1,350,927,806 total downloads at your fingertips.

Now that we fairly understand what plugins are, and why we use them, let’s come to the concept of free and premium plugins.

Free vs Premium Plugins

Though there are over 30,000 free plugins, you still may feel the need to buy some. There are several situations of why that might be necessary.

Paid plugins offer a full time support staff and developers that work on maintaining security and compatibility of plugins with the latest version of WordPress as well as with other themes and plugins.

Plugins play nicely with WordPress and with other plugins, but sometimes a plugin’s code may cause compatibility issues with other plugins.

It is important that you are absolutely clear about why you need a plugin to your website and thus be careful while choosing plugins for your website.

Picking the right plugins

There are some questions that you might need to ask yourself in order to choose the best plugins for your website.

• Is it compatible with your version of WordPress?
• Is the support for the plugin good enough?
• What are other people saying about it?
• When was it last updated?

Keeping these questions as a check list may help you avoid from choosing the wrong plugins for your website.

Are you looking to get a website created for a business? Or do you want a new functionality added to your website?  Discuss your plans with us at http://www.capitalnumbers.com/contact_us.php