The world of building a website has a lot of terms you probably don’t understand when you see them for the first time. Plugins might be one of those words, but this is a word you will see and use a lot on your wordpress website! Once you know what those words mean and what they do you probably won’t want to do without them anymore.
So what is a plugin?
Well plugins are small apps which you can download and activate and which will make you website more efficiently. WordPress has thousands and thousands of different plugins, most of them are free and some of them are paid. The biggest difference between these two is, with the paid ones you also get some support and maintenance if you ever have any questions.
If your are thinking of something that you are missing when you are building your site, you can probably search that thing and find a plugin for it. That is how easy it is.
As you can see in the picture below, only in the popular are alone there are already 53,218 thousand plugins.
Where can I find plugins on wordpress?
so let me guide you to the place where you can find the plugin, search for them, install them and last but not least activate them! The last one is something a lot of people forget, but if you don’t activate the plugin you won’t be able to use it and then it is just taking up space on your website.
Step 1: Go to your dashboard and look at the left bar for the word plugin.
When you see the word plugin, you can click it, which is going to take you to your already installed plugins.
Step 2: Go to add new.
You can do this by hovering over the word plugin in the side bar, or if you clicked plugin already you can see the add new above in the left corner.
Step 3: Search for a plugin you want
when you have clicked add new, it is going to take you to the following page. On this page you can search for you plugins, install them and you could straight away activate them. For now I’m going to show the search and the install part. In the search area you can either look for a keyword, an author or a tag.
Step 4: Activate the plugin
There are two ways to activate your plugin, once you have installed a plugin, the install button will be replaced with activate. If you have left the page already you can go to your installed plugins and activate it over there. On the page with your installed plugins you can also do a bulk action and activate them all at once.
These are the simple steps to find a plugin, install them and then activate and use them!
How do I know what a good plugin is?
Because there are so many plugins it is hard to choose a good plugin. You can choose to buy a plugin, this gives you a little more security of the product. Most of the time when you buy a plugin they also offer support and maintenance with the plugin, so if you are ever stuck you could just ask them.
With the free plugins I usually check for a few things.
- First I read the details if the plugin does what I want I to do
- Second I check when if it is compatible with my wordpress
- Third is I check when it is last updated
- Fourth thing I do is check how many active users the plugin has
- And last thing is going to be how the people rate the plugin
These steps give me a good insight in the plugin and if it is worth the install (not that installing is a big deal, you can deactivate en delete the plugin with two clicks).
Let’s download all the plugins and get started!
I do recommend just to download the plugins you need and will use, else you get a lot of plugins on your site and if there are a lot, it is just going to make your website slower. For now, just try to install some plugins and check out how they work.
Have fun creating and building your website! If you don’t have a website yet, read my posts on how to create one for free.
Hope this post was useful and if you have any questions just leave a comment.
Wish u all the best,
Kind regards,
Eelco
MyWebsiteAcademy 