Social Media Courses – What is a Plugin?

Going over WordPress.org plugins and why they are so helpful!

WordPress has emerged as arguably the best blog service in the world, giving users of all experience levels the opportunity to run a great-looking and professional website. One of the features that makes WordPress so outstanding is the plugin. In this Social Media Courses tip, we’ll talk about what a plugin is and how they should be used on your blog.

When used correctly, plugins make life easy

WordPress is fueled by an open community of web developers, and these developers provide thousands of plugins for anyone on WordPress.org to use. In a nutshell, these plugins allow people who don’t know anything about coding to add complex and useful code to their websites with just the click of the button.

For example, SEO plugins are available on WordPress that will help make each of your posts more search-engine friendly. When the plug-in is installed, under each of your posts you will see an SEO menu asking for additional details on your post, such as keywords and a summary. The plugin will take what you enter into these boxes and add that meta-data to your posts, improving your search engine results in the process! And while there is complicated coding at work, all you have to do is install the plugin and provide the details.

And there are plugins for all kinds of things other than just SEO, from style to functionality. If you can think of something you wish you could do on WordPress but can’t figure out how to, chances are there has been a plugin built for it!

Want to add your Instagram images on your sidebar, create lead capture forms, put up icons to your social media networks or add nice looking recipes to your posts…you can do it all through plugins.

To find plugins, it is best to Google what you want, plus add in the words WordPress and Plugin.

Be careful when installing plugins

While plugins are immensely useful, keep in mind that the code used in them can conflict with your blog’s existing code. Whether the version of WordPress is out of sync, or another plug-in doesn’t mesh well, downloading and installing dozens of plugins at once could cause your site to stop working properly!

As a result, your best bet is to install plugins one at a time. Install it, try it out, and make sure it works properly on your page. Once you have confirmed that it does, you can safely add another. This way, if at any point your website starts acting funny, you can trace it back to the plugin that is giving you issues and uninstall it.

Fortunately, uninstalls are just as easy as installs are, with one click of the button in your “Plugins” menu. So feel free to experiment, just do so patiently and safely to avoid mishaps!

Please click through to find more information on how to get started in our proven, Social Media Courses curriculum for entrepreneurs.