What Are WordPress Plugins? Types of WordPress Plugins
WordPress plugins are essential to website design of any WordPress blog or website. If you want to automate or customize some of your website’s functions and pages, plugins can help with this.
There are thousands of WordPress plugins, designed to make life easier for all users. Even a simple WordPress site is estimated to need around 20 plugins, whilst more complicated, commercial endeavors will usually need many more.
The general rule is not to use a plugin if it isn’t needed. As a site owner, you should decide which areas of their site you would like to automate and install the relevant plugins. Some plugins are free, others are paid for.
Depending on the function, some plugins are more complicated to set up and run and therefore may require more support and active involvement from the developers.
So, what can WordPress plugins do? Let’s check some plugin types that can be useful for WordPress web design and WordPress site maintenance.
Types of WordPress Plugins
Page Builders
The drag and drop WordPress page builder plugins provide an easy way to build and customise a website. WordPress page customisation can sometimes get very messy. If you want to design your pages to the finest detail without any coding knowledge, page builder plugins will be a good choice for you. You do just about anything with drag and drop feature. Beaver Builder, Divi and Elementor are some of the popular plugins.
Anti-spam
Because spammers will target any site. Enable comments on any blog post, and the bots and the crazies will inevitably find it and start bothering everyone.
Even the smallest blogs are likely to attract spam comments, so high profile businesses would do well to be best prepared and install a good anti-spam plugin before writing a single word on the blog.
SEO
A website won’t get anywhere without SEO. WordPress SEO plugins can help you with the technical SEO of your website.
To mention the few, you can ensure website indexability and crawlability, create robots.txt and sitemap, fix any errors, manage canonicals and improve site speed with relevant SEO plugins.
Making it more likely that search engine bots and ultimately the potential customers will find you. Also, they can provide assistance with content optimisation.
Forms
Forms are an important part of a website. Having a properly setup and easy to use contact forms is really important to grow your business as they facilitate communication between you and your potential customers.
Besides inquiry forms, payment details, order forms and subscription sign up options can all be handled with a form plugin.
Subscribers
A mailing list is a necessity for any business developing new content or running promotions.
There are several options for webmasters to choose from, depending on whether they’re offering a sign-up service to a regular newsletter or chasing potential customers.
Analytics
While Google Analytics is the most popular free website metrics service there are lots of other options such as Adobe Analytics.
A plugin that allows seamless integration with Google Analytics (or any other service) is essential for anyone tracking users, engagement or revenue.
Website security
Security have to be taken into account during any web design process. A security or firewall plugin should automatically be part of the website building process to fight back against DD0S, spam attacks, hacks, and other cybersecurity issues.
Backups
Maybe not something everyone would think of, but what if your website irretrievably crashed? Or maybe you want to move your site to another hosting provider?
A backup plugin automatically makes backups of the site to a chosen remote (cloud) location so that in the event of a disaster, the content is not completely lost.
There are many other options and use areas of plugins – it’s a big rabbit hole to fall down – but these are the basics that every website likely to need.
