How to choose the best Wordpress Plugins?

Lynne Level 1

August 25, 2016, 11:39 am

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Choosing Wordpress plugins is not something I do often. I find it quite tricky really and often download a plugin, try it out and find that it is not what I am needing after all.

There are a few things I look at when trying to choose a plugin and these are:

The amount of active installs
The star rating (I only go for 4+ stars)
I check all the features to make sure I like what I will be getting
I check to see if it is compatible with my version of Wordpress and when it was last updated
Then I read the reviews and see what people are saying about the plugin

What do you look out for when choosing a Wordpress plugin? Can you give me any tips and guidance that can help me make the best choice possibly?

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TommyCarey

TommyCarey

I normally do what you mentioned above.

I'll look at the reviews
I'll look at the amount of active installs
I'll look at the compatibility

But one thing I do that you did not mention is that I will ask the community if a certain plugin is worth downloading and configuring for what I need. I'll also post in a few skype groups that I'm in to see if anyone has used the plugin I'm looking at. Normally someone will have used what I want and they will give me an honest review because there is not gain in it for them lol

One of the skype groups I've been a member of for years and the people in there bounce ideas off of each other like we all own the same business and we're a part of the research and development team lol. But I know that not everyone has something like that to bounce questions off of.

I'll also look to see if the plugin has it's own website. Normally if a plugin becomes more popular the designer will put up a website in order to pull in more downloads because now they can target the search engines better to pull in traffic from different keywords than just their plugin name. The reviews and testimonials on those websites I avoid like the plague because they're always good. Because who would post a bad review about their service or plugin on their own website lol

10 years ago

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Lynne

Lynne

Thanks Razzy,I appreciate these tips. Yes I totally agree with you about asking other people in the industry whether they have used that plugin and what they recommend for my needs.

I really like to ask other people to, that is what I was doing in one of my previous posts because I am looking for a good plugin so that users can add guest posts. I have never done this before and there is a lot for me to think about. Fortunately it seems a good number of the members here have tried some plugins and recommended a few to me to check out.

I will put a lot of weight into these recommendations and yes I know what you mean by reviews and recommendations on their website. I can only imagine no negative comments will make it live LOL

10 years ago

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Cristian

Cristian

When I look for a plugin it means I need a new functionality, so in I don't search for the plugin, I search for a way to implement that functionality, in most cases this leads me to a certain kind of plugin for which I quickly make a top and figure out what the most popular is and install that.
If it doesn't work I try the second most popular and so on until I have my functionality wordpress up and running.

10 years ago

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Lynne

Lynne

Yeah I've done it that way, but I have often had to work through a number of plugins to get to where I want to be!

10 years ago

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Everett

Everett

When I had a wordpress blog, and this was many many moons ago, i choose plugins by the amount of installs, reviews, and star ratings. However, I also tried new plugins that weren't used that often just to help the developers. I often found out that new plugins were so much better than the more common plugins because they had the features of the popular plugins but also new innovative features that the popular ones didn't. However, since a lot of people rather use the more popular plugins these plugins never got to be developed further and a lot of them just died out, or were removed. So if I ever have a Wordpress blog in the future I would probably go for the unpopular plugins, and support them and offer feature advice, etc.

10 years ago

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vinaya

vinaya

I always choose a plugin that is updated regularly and has many reviews and installs. One of my most used plugins is remove footer credits. Since I use free themes and do not now programming, I am always bothered by the footer credits, therefore, I use this plugin to remove footer credits and add my own footer links.
I also use site origin plugin. This is a site builder plugin that is free to use.

9 years ago

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