We have built a good blogging website so far.
But it is not a great one because:
People usually contact you to get your help, and you can make money by helping them out.
And having a contact form on your site makes it easy for people to contact you.
Similarly, Collecting user emails will help you update them about new posts, products, and services.
And putting a newsletter form on your sidebar or as a popup will help you easily collect emails from your website visitors.
Finally, if you post great stuff on your blog, people would love to share them with their network. You don’t say no to the free publicity, do you?
And adding social sharing icons to the side of the blog post will make it easy for people to share your content on their social media.
But how do we add these pieces of functionality to our site?
WordPress core software doesn’t support creating a contact form out of the box.
It doesn’t let you collect emails out of the box.
And it doesn’t support social media post-sharing either.
Actually, WordPress can’t do a lot of things out of the box.
And we overcome these functionality limitations using WordPress Plugins.
A WordPress plugin allows you to extend the functionality of WordPress core software.
In other words, a WordPress plugin lets you have a piece of functionality that WordPress core software doesn’t support by default.
For example, I previously said that WordPress core software doesn’t support creating a contact form.
We can overcome this limitation by installing a plugin called WPForms.
The “WPForms” plugin extends the functionality of WordPress by helping you create a contact form for your site.
It helps you create any kind of form for your website.
Another example.
By default, there is no way to sell products using WordPress core software.
But we can overcome this limitation by installing the Woocommerce plugin.
The “Woocommerce” plugin enables you to sell physical and digital products using WordPress.
One last example.
The “Novashare” plugin allows you to add social sharing functionality to your blog posts.
This will help the visitors to share your articles on their social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.
That’s the purpose of plugins in WordPress.
In fact, there is a plugin for every need.
Some of them are free, and some of them are premium.
All thanks to the great open-source community behind WordPress.
And in the next lesson, we will learn how to find plugins for your site.
