Security. Money. Longevity.
With nearing 50K plugins available for WordPress out right now, how do you know if this is the plugin that will solve all your website woes. Is it worth the money? Will this work with the site? What about the theme? Are the popular plugins really going to be helpful or do they just get hyped for no reason?
Time is money, and if a plugin isn’t going to save me time, then it’s not worth my money. As a beginner, I didn’t know what to look for. I got plugin happy, and could always find a new plugin that I thought could meet my needs; however, I was impulsive and not methodical.
My sites were full of code bloat, security issues, and eventually so much time was lost fixing plugins or finding a replacement for what was supposed to be the magic solution.
Code-Jedi, my coding mentor, taught me how to stop and evaluate. He showed me how to look at the following key things:
- Support
- Is there code snippets/developer documentation through them or readily accessible on other coding forums?
- Helpful, active, recently updated support forums / easy to find answers.
- Easy to work with pre-sales
- Reviews/Installs/Compatibility
- A high number of active installations is good. A generally well reviewed plugin combined with a high number of active installations is better. I also read the review, and weigh what the reviewer found issue with vs what their technical prowess seems to be. I’ll go into this more in-depth if it’s requested: “review literacy” is important.
- Features testing
- Lite version available for download?
- Usable demo site to test specific features is even better!
- Clean code
- Won’t somebody please think of the Site Speed!?
- Updates
- How often is it updated?
- Have they handled a security breach before?
- Was it timely?
- Personal preference
- How’s their website?
- Is it well maintained?
- Do they utilize their own plugin on their site?
