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Do you have a WordPress site? Do you feel like it is limiting your creative abilities or preventing potentially useful business beneficial tools? Integrity’s web development team uses plugins to expand the capabilities of your WordPress website design.
WordPress plugins are incredibly useful to WordPress websites because they allow extra functionality and add new features when installed on WordPress based web designs. For instance, some plugins can also be used to add strength to a website’s security while other plugins extend the capabilities of WordPress. Additionally, plugins save time by allowing developers to jump steps in the process towards the end goal without omitting anything.
WordPress plugins extend a website’s functionality and add new features for a website’s users. These small pre-coded software applications can be installed within a WordPress website design. Some plug-ins can really add great value to websites, but some plugins can slow downloading speed or interfere with pre-coded or pre-installed plugins.
It’s important to understand how to identify useful plugins and properly integrate them. Here are our top 5 favorite and most useful plugins we incorporate into our clients’ WordPress website designs to make their projects successful and their websites stand out online.
WordPress native custom fields interface is not very user-friendly for the website admin. Advanced Customs Fields Pro allows the website developer to create content fields to pull and display content on the front end of the website.
Integrity’s web developers create flex fields using this plugin to allow a user to add blocks of content and arrange the text blocks anywhere on a page. As the admin of the website, the text is editable in a display view that mirrors users, so admins can see how character count or word choice variables appear to a user.
One challenge for WordPress website developers is pushing and pulling databases like media library files. During a migration to a new website design, Migrate DB Pro syncs the databases between sites, so a web developer doesn’t have to. It’s an automated process that saves time during a website redesign, which may be needed more often than many think.
Gravity Forms is the highest used form plugin on the WordPress market. It allows web developers to build forms as well as quizzes or surveys and store the entries into databases. These form submissions allow for information to be gathered to determine if marketing methods are working or if call-to-action phrases are powerful. It can also help identify users’ needs and opportunities that may be missing.
Forms can be extremely vulnerable to spammers or cold call submissions, but Gravity Forms is secure and easy to use which is why our WordPress web designs incorporate this plugin option.
WPMU Dev Plugin Stack is a plugin dashboard that gives access to a lot of different premium plugins to help web developers with different capabilities. The plugins we use from their dashboard optimize and secure a WordPress web design. The 3 different plugins we use include
These plugins cover the basics and ensure optimization and security are not overlooked to enhance website performance.
Yoast SEO also enhances website performance and is the most powerful plugin that is used for SEO. This WordPress website design plugin optimizes a website for search engines. It takes the website design’s headlines and supporting content and runs it through Google’s algorithms to measure accuracy and relevancy.
Yoast recognizes anything that should be changed in the content for SEO to be more successful against the competition. It can help identify how website content can be more relevant to specific users in niche markets.
While plugins can be incredibly useful and appealing as a quick fix, using plugins can limit some design elements as well as cause website issues. For example, if a plugin is installed like a calendar for events, you can only work with and add the content they allow through that plugin. If you want to show a date range and the plugin doesn’t have that functionality, you can’t.
If you add a plugin every time you need a new feature, this can cause slow site speeds which will hurt your website’s performance. Plugins may also interact but may not properly do so, which could cause major errors to your website.
It’s always best to leave WordPress web design and WordPress plugins to the experts. If WordPress updates, your plugins may require an update or a configuration change in order to work properly. Leave the maintenance to us. It’s always best to leave WordPress web design and WordPress plugins to the experts.
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If you’re looking to optimize your website design with WordPress plugins, contact Integrity’s St. Louis web development team.
