How to chose the right plugin for your WordPress site

I wouldn’t have thought of doing an article on the subject, because it seems simple and almost obvious.

But in many cases people the problems often derive from a bad choice of plugin and could have been avoided. This can be easily avoided by choosing the right plugin directly.

I will try to give you some advice in this direction, what are you doing to chose the best plugins for your sites and your customers ?

1. Have a strategy

I say it very often, if you want to have a site that is well done and works well in the long term you have to have a strategy. That is, deciding in advance what you want to do and how you are going to do it.

Once you know why you have your website, what you want to offer and how you will deliver it, it will be much easier to choose the plugin you need. You should even have a list of the features you are looking for before looking for the plugin.
When you have found several plugins that meet your criteria, you can compare them to choose the best one.

2. Check the reliability of the developer
In the catalog of WordPress plugins you can directly see who the developer is and go to his page to find out a little more.

Then I advise you to look at the following which will let you know if the developer is reliable:

• Since when the developer is registered on WordPress
• The number of plugins he offers, and the ratings received for his plugins
• The description of plugins: a developer who describes correctly, puts visuals will probably be more used to providing detailed and detailed explanations in the documentation and the support
• Go to the “support” tab of the plugin to see if the developer answers the questions
• When buying premium themes and plugins from a third part such as Envato e.g https://codecanyon.net always be observant and check the plugin s last update and also how many are using it. Some items on Envato can be really old and installing old code can lead to both severe security issues and compatibility issues with both WordPress itself, themes and of course other plugins. It can easily be avoided.
• Also try avoid over bloated plugins with loads of unnecessary functions with will both use excess server resources as memory etc. which will slow down your website and have higher risk of causing incompatibility issues.

3. Check the reliability of the extension
There are several ways to easily ensure the reliability of a plugin. These criteria usually give you a good idea of ​​what to expect:

• The number of installations: There are +60 million sites running on WordPress. If an extension doesn’t have several thousand active installs, it’s probably for some reason …
• Look at the date of the last extension update. This is very important because it tells you whether the extension is maintained by the developer or not.
  For an extension to be reliable over the long term, the developer must regularly fix problems, add security patches and new features. If the extension has not been updated for more than 6 months, go away.
• Look at customer reviews. There must be a lot and globally positive. If they are not positive try to understand why.
  Also remember to see if the developer responds to negative reviews, this is a good indicator of the importance of customer satisfaction for him / them

4. Don’t make small savings

This is the mistake I see almost all the time and understandable, you want to save money. This is normal, but always keep in mind that choosing the cheapest or even free extension does not mean saving money, far from it!

Indeed, developing and maintaining a plugin is very time consuming and therefore expensive, which is why plugins are billed by monthly or annual subscription. Developers who have the money thanks to the number of users and the price will be able to continue working on the plugin by patching security, resolving bugs and conflicts with other plugins. In addition to providing quality support.

Extensions for which this is not done may not only make your site vulnerable but more importantly cause many problems, especially conflicts with other plugins.
This will not only make you lose visitors / customers because of the bugs but force you to regularly debug the site, which will cost you much more in the end.

My advice, if you want to have a site that performs well in the long run, to avoid stress and hassles, choose the best plugins, no matter the price.
You will save time to devote yourself to your core business and will be able to develop serenely.