WordPress is the most popular and widely used content management system (CMS) of all time. Choosing WordPress for your website provides some additional benefits over other platforms or frameworks. Since, WordPress, as we know, is an open-source – free to use and totally customizable PHP-based framework, it opens doors for a wide range of possibilities and experiments. There are thousands of FREE, ready-to-use plugins that you can simply plug and play with your WordPress website to add different features and functionalities to the website without looking and going through the actual PHP script or code.
Let’s see few examples of the FREE plugins that you can have on your WordPress website to extend its default features without writing a single piece of PHP code.
Better Search and Replace
This plugin is very useful when you’re migrating or moving your website from one host to another. With the use of this plugin, you simply search and replace the old URL with the new URL throughout the WordPress database.
Simple Custom CSS and JS
This plugin provides a backend interface to add custom js or CSS or even HTML to the head part of the HTML, after the start of the body tag and before the closing of the body tag.
Contact Form 7
This plugin is used to collect the form submissions on the website. You can use this plugin to create custom forms and add them to your website. On form submission, this plugin sends the submitted details to the provided email id.
Additionally, this plugin comes with the support of Google reCaptcha which can be easily integrated to protect the forms from the bots.
And, you can use “Contact Form 7 Database Addon – CFDB7” with the contact form 7 to store the submitted data in the database that can be exported to an excel sheet for later use or export to MailChimp or any other platform for sending newsletters.
Advanced Custom Fields
ACF or advanced custom fields is a plugin that provides easy to use interface to add custom fields to the different sections in the WordPress backend like pages, posts, categories, etc., and show it anywhere on the frontend.
Convertkit
ConvertKit is a plugin that can be used to capture leads by easily embedding email capture forms anywhere on your WordPress website. This plugin makes it even easier to automatically append a lead capture form to any post or page.
Additionally, you can use this plugin to create a landing page with opt-in form as well. To be able to use this plugin, download and install this plugin, create your account on https://convertkit.com/.
For further instructions: Read Set up a landing page or an opt-in form with Convertkit to capture emails or leads
