What Do They Do?
Why should you care about your website theme or plugins? And I’m not just talking about WordPress, but those for any platform, including Joomla. At any point when a plugin or a new theme is called for, they all do just one thing:
They Solve A ProblemThe gist of it is that when you want a type of layout, or certain functions in your website, or ease of custom features, you will (eventually) Â look for a theme that will give you what you are looking for…
Some of these themes will include the plugins built-in (sliders, anyone?) More and more, these problem solvers will simply be plugins.
Do you wish to have a recipe that can be indexed and printed? There are plugins for that,
Would you like to reduce the size of your photos automatically? Plugins will accomplish that task.
Need help with the mysteries of SEO? Plugins can solve this problem.
In fact, this is why there are so very many of them available, and they are both free and premium in just about every blogging platform: they do all sorts of coding and create answers to your need for everything from an ecommerce site to adding easy ways to post to social media.
Just.About. Everything.
The difficulty is choosing the best ones to add style or function to your own blog.
Quickly, what to look for?
- Ratings. Â See what users think about the themes and plugins you are considering.
- Updates. Plugins can have vulnerabilities, and need to be kept updated if at all possible.
- Support. If there is good support from a community or developer, it can help trouble shoot when not working right with your site. What good is a plugin that doesn’t work or causes problems… or becomes unusable after platform updates?
- Function. It does what you need without unnecessary bloat. Plugins, too big or too many, can slow your site.
So basically that is what your theme, with its built-in plugins and setup, and the plugins themselves will do… they are meant to solve your problems and meet your needs. Blogwise, anyway.
