The Ultimate Guide to WordPress Plugins: 19 Examples & How They Work

From blogs to complex portals and enterprise websites, millions of sites are powered by WordPress. In fact, 40.2% of all websites are built on the open-source content management system (CMS).

Driving the platform’s popularity is its combined ease of use and flexibility. WordPress provides standard functionality to allow any user to get a site up and running in no time.

You can create posts and pages, manage and schedule content, assign user roles, upload and insert images and other media, and moderate comments right out-of-the-box.

Let’s say you do all that and want to continue building your site by customizing your login page or adding social proof to your posts and pages, for example. Since WordPress is open-source, you could extend or modify the source code to create nearly any functionality your site needs. Such flexibility is a huge appeal for WordPress developers.

But what if you’re not a developer and don’t have much experience coding? In that case, you can use a plugin.

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WordPress plugins are like apps on your phone. You can download or purchase them to add or enhance the functionality of your WordPress website.

Plugins allow WordPress users to create powerful sites without touching a single line of code. As content management systems continue to democratize web design and abate the dependency on web developers and designers, plugins are an increasingly integral part of how we create and consume content on the internet.

This post will give you an overview of what WordPress plugins are, how they work, and some of the most popular examples.