Exploring the Internet feels like discovering a whole new world every time!
You hear hundreds of web-related buzz words every day. Some of these technical terms can be quite confusing to grasp. But instead of ignoring them, why not learn about them to make your lives easier? Knowledge of the tools available on the Internet enables you to have a power-packed digital presence.
Let’s discuss plugins, one of the most crucial web tools today. By the end of this blog, you will know what plugins are, why to use them, and five upgraded plugins worth trying out in 2022.
Let’s start without any further ado.
What is a Plugin?
You might have heard about plugins in the context of computing, web browsing, and content creation. But this word is often confused with other web elements, like extensions and add-ons. Therefore, you should first know the exact definition of plugins.
Simply put, plugins are small pieces of software built to add additional features to a program. People can install them on their websites or browsers to enhance their capabilities.
Why Do We Need Plugins?
Imagine that you want to use a computer. Now, what are the basic parts that a computer needs to run? A monitor, CPU, mouse, and a keyboard, right? Apparently, these parts make a computer complete. However, what if you want to listen to music? You will need to add speakers to the mix! What if you want to print something? You will need to buy a printer separately.
This example portrays the need for plugins perfectly. Developers program their browsers and websites with all the basic features they want to offer. But what if they want to add more? This is where the plugins help. Without having to code from the scratch, developers can add extra functionality to their browsers and websites by integrating them with a plugin.
How Do They Work?
Earlier, the older versions of HTML couldn’t support all the stuff like videos, music, and images. You could only use the built-in features of a browser unless you downloaded plugins for extra functionality. Precisely, you needed different plugins to perform different online activities, like watching a movie and viewing a PDF.
However, plugins have been deprecated by most browsers as of 2021. Why? Because we have advanced versions of HTML available now. Also, they are being replaced by browser extensions.
Extensions and plugins work for the same purpose; to add extra functionality. However, there is a major difference between them. plugins only attach to particular web pages and do not interfere with the whole browser. They operate only in the space (web page) allotted to them. On the other hand, browser extensions become a part of the browser itself. Google Chrome provides over 100,000 extensions, but no longer supports plugins.
plugins are now more commonly used on websites that are built with content management systems – like Bigcommerce, WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal.
So let’s check 5 Upgraded Plugins Worth a Try in 2022:
Yoast SEO
A highly popular plugin for all WordPress sites!
Want to see your website on the top? Install Yoast SEO immediately to optimize your site’s content! Once installed, this plugin shows up on all your web pages and posts. It analyzes every piece of your site’s content and helps you improve in the following three ways:
- Provides an SEO score to your site’s content
- Shows you the problems in your content
- Suggests ways to improve your content
This tool is definitely a fun way to learn SEO! It shows colorful dots to rate your content for SEO: green (good), orange (OK), and red (need improvement). This tool is definitely worth a try to improve your website’s rankings on search engines!
Imagify
What makes a website look fresh and lively? Images! However, images consume a lot of space on a web page. Therefore, they take the longest time to load. The larger a picture is, the more will its load time be.
Now, imagine how slow your site will be if you plan to use a lot of pictures. This is why Imagify is a must-have plugin for you. It optimizes the size of your pictures so that they load quickly on your site. The best part is that the pictures are compressed without any effects on their quality.
Social Warfare
Websites are important, but so are other digital platforms. To reach more people, you need to be active everywhere! However, it’s highly inconvenient to share a piece of content on multiple platforms separately.
With Social Warfare, you can share your content simultaneously on different social media sites. Plus, it also offers numerous customization options. This way, managing social media accounts becomes easy and leads to more traffic for your website.
Akismet
All website owners know how annoying spam comments are! These spam comments are either generated by spambots or submitted manually. It’s not possible to filter them by yourself. Try Akismet to do that for you.
This plugin filters spam from your comment sections, trackbacks, and contact form messages. But how does it know which ones are spam? Well, Akismet collects information about spam on all participating sites. This way, they have a huge global database of spam which they use to identify and block future spam.
UpdraftPlus
Losing your website content is a nightmare. It takes immense hard work to create content. But unfortunately, you are always in danger of losing it in seconds due to hacks, bugs, and crashes. Hence, it’s crucial to have a secure backup at all times.
UpdraftPlus is one of the best backup plugins available in WordPress. It restores all your content immediately. You can repeat your files and databases to the cloud on services like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon S3.
Conclusion
Choose the right plugins to make your website feature-rich! You can search the WordPress plugin library by names or keywords to find what you need. Check out the functionality, support tickets, and other technical information there to see if it fits your website.
