WordPress plugins are the basis of your WordPress site. They provide extremely important functions to any website built using WordPress.
They improve the site’s SEO, increase site speed, create an online store, or offer email opt-ins. Whatever you need on your website, you can do it with the help of plugins.
Plugins are written in the PHP programming language, which runs on your website’s hosting server. This is why you must choose a good hosting company. It gives you easy tools to manage plugins and run your website properly.
Behind the worldwide popularity of WordPress, its plugins play the most important role. They are widely responsible for making WordPress the most popular website builder. There are more than 59,000 free plugins for WordPress in the official plugin directory. They are growing day by day as websites are growing and the need for them is increasing. Apart from these free plugins, there are also thousands of premium WordPress plugins sold by third-party companies and developers.
For WordPress’s untechy users, there is a misconception that more plugins on WordPress sites harm websites a lot. But this is not a fact. You can install dozens of good WordPress plugins, and your website can run without any issues or errors. But if you are installing a single poorly coded plugin, your website will slow down and start showing errors and issues. So, there is no need to get worried about the performance, security, and reliability of the website while installing one or more plugins.
Use of plugins
The purpose of the plugin is to extend WordPress to do almost anything with your website that reaches your imagination. But before installing plugins, we should go through the security and reliability of the plugin because the quality of plugins harms the website more than the quantity.
There are many different types of WordPress plugins, and each of them differently impacts your website’s performance. Some of them are in the front end, and some of them are in the back-end or admin area. Some of them are in the front end, including the admin area.
Plugins that are performing background processes like broken link checking, 404 monitoring, etc. can also slow down your website performance and speed. which creates trouble while ranking sites on browsers.
Plugins can mainly impact your site’s performance through these three processes:
- Making additional HTTP requests
- Additional database queries
- Background Processes & Database Writes
Just because your website lies on plugins we should make clear about few things before installing it:
- You should see a plugin’s rating and reviews provided by other WordPress users.
- You should also see when the plugin was last updated and how many websites have it installed.
- Make sure that the plugins you are installing are from a well-reputed WordPress company or developer.
