Plugins of WordPress

Me: Oh WordPress, there are so many plugins available to you ...

WP: lol, get use to it ...

Yep, there are dozens, hundreds of plugins. Some are born and die of young age. Some are old af, get the job done but man ... not exciting.

And what about addons?!

Yep, there are dozens of addons. Addons that "add" something to plugins. We could say plugins for plugins.

Amazing! And a nightmare to manage.

Here's an incomplete not ordered list of points you should take in consideration when picking plugins for your project:

  • If it is free, it is free. No complaints. There are many great free plugins (and amazing devs who create them) but there are also a few that don't age well and that is a problem. We can end up with a hacked website or at least more work to replace it. Sometimes it might be wise just to get a premium plugin with more long term guarantee. Always chose your plugins with that in mind.
  • If it is paid, it is not perfect. You can complain but ... at the end the potato is on your side. Check the developer history and reviews of the plugin. The longer he is on the market better chances he will support it and stay for the long run. If he gets good reviews, that is nice too (obviously, dahhh).
  • Do you really need a plugin for that? Many times nocoders need a simple thing that a coder would do with "5 lines" of code. It might be a good idea to search for that solution. Just google your problem and you will end up in stackoverflow or some other coding site. Get the code, take the opportunity to learn, and push it to your functions.php child theme.
  • "I just found a site that has hundreds of premium plugins for free / $5 a month". Yes, there are many like that. Some are just good GPL sites that you can use for testing - it is always a good idea to buy from the original developer despite of the GPL license. Others are just devil traps. You download a plugin, install it on your site, or even worse, you install it on a client site ... and boommmm, "who let the dogs out?", monday morning you receive a message from your client: "google is saying my site was hacked. what a #%$# is going on?" NOT good!
  • ...

And that is it for now. I'll update this list if I remember another point to add to the list.

Be nice to feel nice!

António

Top cross linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram