Hello, this is Rob coven. Here I'm going to talk about plugins in WordPress. So what are plugins, plugins or little bits of code that add extra functionality to your WordPress site. Now we're going to go into the plugins section. And you'll see we have two plugins and these are the two plugins that come with WordPress on the default installation. The first one is a Kismet and the second one is Hello, Dolly.
The first one Kismet is to stop you getting spam comments on your WordPress blog posts. Hello Dolly isn't so useful. Neither of them are activated at the moment and that means that they're not doing anything. And if you have plugins that are not doing anything, it's really good idea to delete them. In fact, I'm going to delete Hello Dolly now because it's not a pretty Again, that I think either of us will find useful. And it's saying you're about to remove the following plugin.
Are you sure you want to delete the files? Yes, delete these files. So there you go. That's how you delete a plugin. And in order to get the plugin to work, you just click Activate, and then it will ask you to activate your akismet account. This will only happen with a Kismet by the way.
And in order to do that, you need a wordpress.com login. And you'll be able to use akismet to stop spam comments on your WordPress blog posts. So those are the plugins we have at the moment. We don't have many of them. But as I say, there are 10s or hundreds of thousands of them both free and paid again, and you can search the free ones here at plugins wordpress.org. You may be looking for something that you've heard about, like jetpack for example, or WP Super Cache, something that will speed up your website buddypress that's adding a forum to your WordPress website.
Or maybe you just want to search for some sort of functionality that you want. So let's search for contact form. And then you'll have a baffling array of plugins that give you a contact form. Contact Form with PayPal, for example. Now, the way you narrow these down is to look at the store rating that they're given. And look how recently it was updated.
Remember, we've just had an update of WordPress to 4.5. And there's a couple here that have been updated. And there's many here that have been updated in the last week. Not to say that something that's been updated a few months ago is a poorly maintained plugin. There may have been nothing wrong with it, you don't know. But you do know what people think about it by having a look at the star rating.
So we've Got 110 good ratings and 80,000 activist installs on on that one called Contact Form Builder. There are a lot of great plugins there that are useful, but you usually find yourself looking for plugins. If you want something done to your website that you're unable to do with WordPress and you're looking for a little bit of extra functionality. That would be when you use a plugin back to the plugins page. Now, very important that you don't use too many plugins you can get a bit sort of plugin happy and installed 30 or 40 or more. Some plugins will slow you down.
For example, jetpack is famous for slowing down WordPress installs, depending on their complexity, so you have to be quite careful with plugins and keep an eye on your site speed to see if it's not slowing you down. If you want to add a plug in Just simply go to add new here or add new there. And here you'll see a page. It's exactly the same as the WordPress plug in repro@wordpress.org slash plugins. So I'm going to search for a plug in called contact form seven. And that's because I know that this is a plugin I've used many times, and I know it's very good.
As you can see, it's got over a million that isn't bad. It's been used over a million times over 900 people have given it a usually very good rating. It's been updated recently. So it's all looking good for contact form seven, so I'm going to install that one. Now. One thing you've got to do after you install a plug in is activated, it won't do anything unless you activate the plug in.
So now we have two activated plugins akismet and contact form seven. Okay, I hope you enjoyed that introduction to plugins on WordPress. My name is Rob carbon. I'll see you in the next video.