we’re, going to be adding in the plugins needed to finish up our site’s content. At this point, you should have a hosted WordPress site set up with a number of pages and a theme selected, if not check out the earlier videos in this tutorial series.
Before we get started with searching for installing and activating plugins on our site, it makes sense to take a couple of minutes to explain what WordPress plugins are. One was first created. WordPress was designed as a blogging platform, meaning that by default, WordPress comes with almost everything.
You need to run a simple blog over time. WordPress has become the most popular online platform to build a wide variety of websites, plugins or tools, many of which are available for free that add functionality to websites beyond just posting, updating and removing content.
They come in all different shapes and sizes, from small things like adding a contact form to your website, all the way up to adding an e-commerce store to your site. We’ve, gotten an entire tutorial series on what a plugin is the right tool for the job and how to know which plug-in to choose.
We’ll go over the basics here. If there’s, something that you want to, let visitors do on your website other than just read your content and leave comments. A plugin is probably the way to go when you’re choosing, which plugin in particular to go with for your site.
You can browse the plugins details to look for a number of things similar to what you look for when hunting for a theme. First off does the plug and do what you want it to do. For example, if you need an FAQ section, make sure that the plugin can actually add fa cues to your site.
This one seems intuitive, but a lot of people waste time. Thinking that a plugin is broken, what actually it’s working perfectly? It’s, just not made to do what you want it to do next check to see how many installs the plug-in has and whether it’s well reviewed or not pretty straightforward.
It’s. Also, a good idea to see if their support for the plug-in by checking its support form and seeing if questions are being answered. Finally, take a look at the screenshots to see if the plugin looks like it’s, a good fit for your site and if it can be customized, a lot of plugins will also have a demo site.
So checking that out can be a good idea as well. Now that we’ve got an idea. What we’re. Looking for, let’s, add a few plugins that will be important to running our freelance website. Visitors often have questions they want answered when browsing a freelancers website, so we’ll help to answer those questions in two ways.
First, we’re, going to add an FAQ plugin, so that visitors can find answers to their questions quickly and without any effort on your part. Second, we ‘ Ll add a contact form so that any questions missing from your FAQ can be asked directly.
Finally, we’ll, add in a status tracking plugin, which can be useful for allowing customers to check the status of the work you’re. Doing for them without having to contact you directly, we’ll. Add one plug-in at a time and set up each plugin as we go to get started, adding those plugins head to the WordPress admin area and go to plugins.
Add new for our contact form we’ll use, WP forms it’s, well reviewed, so type WP forms into the search box, click Install Now and then, once it’s installed press activate. You should see a helpful installation screen come up which we’ll use to create our first form, click the create your first form button and select simple contact form as a template.
This form has most of the fields that we want for our contact form name, email and message, but it could be good to add in a subject field as well click on single line text and drag it to just below email click on it and change.
The title to subject: let’s, also make sure that the contact form you had sent to the right email once it’s, submitted click on settings, notifications and change; admin email to the email address where you’d, like To receive your contact form once that’s done click the Save button at the top of the page.
Next click embed and copy the line of text. The text inside of the brackets is called a shortcode short codes. Let you embed content from a plug-in into your desired page click. The X, at the top of the page, then navigate to the pages menu click on the contact us page.
We created earlier and paste the shortcode that we just copied into the page open the contact page in a new tab, and you should now see a contact form on the page. We can try submitting the form, and hopefully you should receive an email with a new contact form submission, if not check out our video on installing WP male SMTP by WP forms which can help to prevent problems with emails being caught in spam filters.
For our FAQ S will use the ultimate fa. Q’s plugin. Once it’s installed, go through the installation. Wizard again, we use the installation screen to create a couple of FAQ categories as well as a few fa.
Q’s, we leave most of the settings alone for now and end the installation screen without creating a new FAQ page. Next, go to the pages section open. The frequently asked questions page and add in a new FAQ block to the page update the page, and you should see that your fa Q ‘
S are displayed when you open it in a new tab. Next, let’s, add in a status tracking plugin, so that customers are able to see the status of their assignments at the status and order tracking plug-in and then go through the installation screens.
We already have a status tracking page, but we’ll, create a test item so that we can make sure that the form is working correctly. Next go to the pages menu and let’s. Add the status tracking form to the page itself once that’s, done open up the page in a new tab and enter the order number for the order that you just created the last type of plugin to consider adding to your site as a Security, helper plugin, two popular choices for that are wordfence and I theme security.
We’ve, linked to a helpful post on installing both of those in the video description below that’s. It through the plugins were going to be adding in this video. It probably makes sense to spend a bit of time setting up your.
I think, use at this point before moving on to the next video in our series, finishing touches for your site. We’ve, also added links to some extra tutorials. In case you’d, like to familiarize yourself a bit more with the plugins.