Beginner’s guide to WordPress plugins and themes

So you read somewhere that it is possible to use a blog to start a profitable business. Armed with this information, you have now made the decision to create said blog. You get excited and cannot wait to tell the world your story and promote it through a self created brand, which is the story you have heard for a long time now.

You have dozens, if not hundreds of ideas for the articles you want to write, as well as have a clear idea of what kind of niche you want to market to. For a few shining moments, you reclaim the innocent, pure curiosity that you likely had when you were a child.

Then, seconds after beginning this journey, something happens. You have come to realize that making a blog is a lot more difficult than you thought it could be.

After acquiring your hosting and domains (or multiple domains depending on how much you have spent), it’s starting to dawn on you: Creating a blog is going to require quite a bit more effort, knowledge, and creativity on your part.

Fortunately, we are here to help. There are a smattering of WordPress plugins and themes that are designed to make your blog do its job of making sure you acquire a dedicated audience. There are also some things involving these plugins and themes that you may want to avoid, seeing as they can affect how fast your blog acts.

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

First of all, a major distinction must be made. There are two WordPress “entities” that exist. The first is WordPress.com. Being completely self hosted, WordPress.com provides a blog that you can write articles for that is completely hosted by WordPress itself. While this is one method of blogging, it is not the method of blogging that we are mentioning.p

The method of blog creation that we are talking about utilizes WordPress.org. When you have made the decision to create a blog, sales page, or any kind of website with your own hosted domain, many turn to using WordPress.org. WordPress.org is a program that gets installed onto your PC, as well as onto your new website, and it contains a set of plugins and themes that you can use to enhance your new website’s aesthetics and functions.

WordPress plugins affect how a website operates and functions. These can allow you to place ads on your blog, create email lists, provide tutorials and guides on other WordPress plugins to install, among other things. WordPress themes pertain to the appearance and aesthetics of a website and they can also be downloaded and installed.

So to summarize, WordPress plugins and themes are the lifeblood of any given website that was built by installing WordPress.org. How does this pertain to internet speeds and how fast your website will load?

What WordPress themes and plugins affect

The first thing anybody needs to know is that anything downloaded to be installed from the internet takes up some semblance of memory in your hard drive. WordPress themes and plugins are similar to this in that they require memory to download and install, but are different in that they only affect the speeds of the particular website that the plugins and themes are installed on.

However, sometimes this can affect your internet speeds. Consider the fact that it is possible to place ads on websites, which do function as a WordPress plugin. Ads on websites can slow down internet speeds not only on the website itself (as noticed on digital nomad blog Go Curry Cracker and money blog Financial Samurai), but also speeds in general, as it is a well known fact that ads collect information which can affect internet speeds.

Creating websites with WordPress plugins and themes are like any other form of web browsing in that they also collect information and create temporary internet files in the form of cookies. While these are negligible, they can slightly affect internet speeds.

The final word

Creating websites with WordPress plugins and themes is absolutely essential to anybody who wants to run a business online, and it is also essential for those who just want to create a nice blog that points them to their sales pages and email lists. This cannot be denied, and is absolutely necessary for anybody who wants to utilize a blog or website with their own domain name.

One thing to be aware of is that while it is good to have these plugins and themes to enhance the effectiveness and aesthetics of your blog or website, they can affect internet speeds. This is especially true if you decide to place advertising on these pages, utilize a lot of plugins, or download a theme that makes your website or blog very sophisticated and professional looking.

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