WordPress Plugins – What They Do, Where To Get Them

Where To Get Plugins

There are thousands of plugins you can download and install with a couple of clicks. Some examples of how plugins can be utilized on your site are for ecommerce, contact forms, affiliate link cloaking, tables, menus, image sliders, cookies notification and the list goes on.

You can search for, and install plugins right from your dashboard. To do that:

– Go to “Plugins” on your dashboard navigation then “Add New”.

Enter a search term in the search box such as “contact form” and a list of available plugins will appear with descriptions, rating etc.

– You can install a plugin, try it, and if it is not what you are looking for, you can delete it and try another one.

Note Only install the plugins you will use on a regular basis and update them as soon as you get notifications. Having too many plugins, and not updating your plugins, could lead to issues with the performance of your website. Having said that, do install the plugins that gives your site the best interactivity for your visitors, or plugins that makes your day to day site management more efficient.

How Many Plugins Do You Need?

Some plugins I use on a regular basis, which are free to download, and do have PRO versions:

Thirsty Affiliates A great plugin to cloak affiliate links.

NextGen for organizing all of your image galleries.

All In One SEO for all of your website promotion needs.

Other examples of plugins I have used or recommended are:

Slider
Email designer
Woo Template Builder
Galleries
Related Content
Simple Share
Page transitions
Custom Fonts
Recaptcha
Slider
Pricing table

If you want to try any of the above plugins there are two ways to do so:

Option 1

– Download the plugin to your computer.

– Log into to your WordPress dashboard. Click on “Plugins” and then “Add New”.

– Click on “Upload Plugin” at he top of the page, click on “Choose File”, then click “Install Now”, then click on “Activate Plugin”.

– The download will be in a ZIP format but WordPress will unzip and install all of the files automatically for you.

Option 2

– Log into to your WordPress dashboard. Click on “Plugins” and then “Add New”.

– Scroll down a bit and you will see options to search such as “Featured”, “Popular”, “Recommended”, “Favorites”.

– As well you can search by typing in either the name of the plugin or a search term of the type of plugin in the “search Plugins” field.

– Enter search term such as “forms”, “email”, “affiliates”, etc. As well you can set the filter to search for the “Author”, “Keyword” and “Tag”, if you know them. I normally just type in the search term and it brings up all of the plugins related to that search term.

– The list of plugins that show on a search are taken from WordPress.org’s database.