This is the fourth post in Why WordPress—a Brew City Marketing original blog series about what makes WordPress such an outstanding content management system (CMS). Keep an eye out for our next post about how WordPress trumps the competition in terms of design and customization, and head to the blog to read our last post!

If you ask a developer what they like most about WordPress, chances are pretty good that their answer will be plugins. Not only are plugins typically a breeze to upload and maintain, they truly give your website limitless functionality. Best of all, a lot of great plugins are free, with more and more plugins being developed and added to the WordPress database each day. Still need convincing? Read on to learn more about the power of plugins.

What are plugins?

Plugins are bits of software that enable your website to do anything—and we do mean anything—you want it to. Plugins can be easily added to a website in order to expand functionality or to add new features, and contribute to a rich and robust browsing experience for website visitors.

What type of plugins are available?

To date, there are over 29,000 plugins in the WordPress database, with new ones being added every day. Do you want to add a video gallery, Twitter feed, shopping cart, or more to your website? There’s a plugin for all of this and more!

Popular plugin uses include:

  • Social media
  • Spam or traffic management
  • Multilinguality
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Backups and more

What if the plugin I want doesn’t exist?

It’s unlikely, but in the event that the plugin you want does not yet exist, it can be created for you by anyone who is familiar with the PHP programming language. Brew City Marketing ran into this scenario when a client of ours, Real Time Automation, requested an advanced product selector as part of their website redesign. Existing plugins missed the mark, so we custom-built a product selector plugin for them that would allow their clients to choose the best possible connector for their needs.
As with anything, plugins do have their caveats. Still, we think the positives of plugins far outweigh any negatives. Plugins are cost-effective, plentiful, and scalable, and contribute in large part to the excellence of WordPress as a CMS.

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