As amazing a platform as WordPress is, it is the plugins that truly make it awesome. Once you start researching, it seems that there’s a plugin for everything you may want to do with your WordPress website.
From simple things like adding a form to your website to adding an entire ecommerce store to your website, the right WordPress plugins can help you achieve amazing things with surprisingly little effort.
With that said, there is also a dark side to plugins.
Since most of the plugins that we use on our websites are developed by third-party companies and independent developers, choosing the wrong plugins can cause serious issues. From security breaches to crashes due to a mismatch in compatibility, the wrong plugins can seriously mess with your website’s health and the experience it offers to your visitors and customers.
Thankfully, with a bit of preparation, avoiding such situations is easily possible.
In this article, we will talk about all the WordPress plugin choosing and managing best practices that can help you enjoy the benefits of third party plugins without having to worry about the aforementioned issues.
Regardless of the type of your website or the niche you are operating in, the following WordPress plugin best practices are relevant to you. So, read on:
The Right Number Of Plugins
If you have been using WordPress for some time, you may also have come across the myth that too many plugins will slow down your WordPress website.
However, that’s all it is, a myth. The reality is that there is no direct correlation between the number of plugins on a website and its performance in terms of speed.
So, plugins don’t affect the speed of your website at all?
That is also not entirely true.
I know, it’s a bit confusing. The complete reality is that there are certain plugins that have no effect on the speed of your website. On the other hand, there are certain others that can slow down your website. That’s why, there is actually no “right” number of plugins that you can install on your website, and surveys support this finding. Look at these stats derived from a 2018 survey of WordPress users including bloggers, development agencies and landing page design services, and CEOs:
- 44% of WordPress users have 1-5 plugins installed on their website.
- 30% have 6-10 plugins installed.
- 22% have over 10 plugins installed.
- 4% reported having no plugins installed.
As you can see, there is a lot of parity between the number of plugins used by different users.
Now that we have established that only certain WordPress plugins slow down websites, let’s look at the process of picking the right plugin. This process will help you evaluate WordPress plugins on a number of parameters, including their effect on your websites’ speed.
Let’s begin:
Follow The Consensus
One of the easiest ways to gauge the legitimacy of a WordPress plugin is to look at the number of times it has been downloaded. From WordPress.org to the Envato Marketplace, almost every platform that features WordPress plugins offers this information upfront, and for good reason. It is supposed to be used to inform your purchase/download decision.
Let’s say you are looking for a plugin that performs a specific task or enables a specific function. Chances are that you will find multiple options that can get the job done. In such a scenario, it makes better sense to conduct more research into a plugin that has been downloaded 500,000 times as compared to another that has been downloaded only 5,000 times.
Updates Are Important
The last updated date is a great place to see if the developers of the plugin are still working to improve it and ensure it is compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
That’s why, most plugin marketplaces present this information at an easily visible spot, usually next to the number of times the plugin has been downloaded.
With that said, if a plugin has been downloaded several hundred thousand times, not having it updated in some time is not a bad thing. Sometimes, a plugin ust works perfectly and has no bugs or issues and hence, doesn’t require an “update”.
Since most of us don’t have the technical capabilities to look into the code of the plugin and determine whether it will work perfectly and safely, we should only use the last updated date as one of the factors to decide whether we should download a plugin or not.
The Reviews Don’t Lie
The reviews are perhaps the one thing that gives anyone and every one an unbiased look into how the plugin performs, without having to download it.
Thankfully, most plugin marketplaces understand the importance that reviews hold in the process of selecting the right plugin. They also realize the extent to which a bad plugin can harm a website design.
That’s why most plugin marketplaces offer unrestricted access to third-party reviews for all plugins that they list. Make use of these reviews and find instances that mention the tasks or functions that the plugin should enable. This way, you will be able to find and pinpoint specific issues with the plugin before rejecting or purchasing it.
What’s The Support Like?
This one can only be verified for plugins listed on WordPress.org.
However, checking the responsiveness of the developer and the quality of support is incredibly important, especially if you are planning to download a plugin that solves a complex problem on your website.
The good thing is that checking whether the developer is responsive is not a complex task at all.
On WordPress.org, with each plugin listing, you will see an information bar on the right side of the screen. As you scroll down, you should be able to spot the “Support” section. In this section, you can view the number of user issues the developer has resolved within the last two months.
In some special cases, you may spot plugins that tick all the other boxes but their support appears to be non-existent. If this is the case, it is worth your time to go on the plugin’s website. Some developers only take and resolve queries that come through their website. If everything else seems good with the plugin, it is a good idea to visit its website to see if the developers are offering support there.
Use The P3 Plugin To Test Speed
The Plugin Performance Profiler or P3 is a plugin that tells you how other plugins perform.
While the plugin hasn’t been updated in several years, it performs its function with great efficiency and is incredibly user-friendly. All you need to do is install the plugin on your website and run the test. P3 will automatically detect all the plugins that are running on your website and give you an easy-to-understand overview of how each plugin influences the performance of your website.
You can use this plugin to find out which of your plugins are affecting the load times of your website the most and (hopefully) find alternatives.
Test Your Plugins In A Sandbox
There are a ton of sandbox tools available online but my personal favorite is the oddly named Poopy. Life (yes, it’s really called that).
The tool, besides having a name with some excellent and admirable wordplay, allows you to create a blank sandbox where you will be required to install your plugin manually.
This will enable you to do a ‘test run’ before you install the plugin on your staging site or even better, your main website.
That’s it! Those were all the steps involved in picking the right plugin. Now, let’s talk about managing plugins and safely updating them.
Updating WordPress Plugins: The Correct Method
Updating plugins may not seem like an important task, especially when you have already installed the plugin on your website and forgotten about it.
However, outdated plugins are like an invitation for hackers to come and screw with your website. Don’t take my word for it, the numbers have been supporting this notion for years.
In a 2016 survey of WordPress users whose website was hacked and who knew how the hacker gained entry, over 55% of respondents blamed outdated plugins on their websites.
Now that we have established why a timely update of WordPress plugins is important, let’s look at the correct method of updating said plugins:
Read The Changelog
Whenever you see an update prompt in your WordPress dashboard, instead of to going straight to the update, make sure you look at the changelog.
For those of you who did not already know, the changelog, as the name suggests, is a log of all the changes made to the plugin. In the case of an update, the developer adds information about the issues that have been fixed in that update.
By going through the changelog yourself, you can learn more about these areas and then test specific relevant functions after the update is complete.
How do you check the changelog of a plugin? It’s incredibly simple. Whenever you see an update prompt, you will see something like “view version X details” where X is the number associated with the updated version of the plugin. As soon as you click on this to view the details, you will have access to the changelog.
Make Use Of A Staging Website
A staging website does exactly what it sounds like. It can be used to test new changes before you make them live on your actual website.
In the case of plugin updates, a staging website can come in handy in ensuring that the updated plugin is working perfectly before you update the actual plugin on your website.
Getting access to a staging website is also quite easy. In most cases, your hosting provider should offer this feature if you have a managed hosting plan. However, if that isn’t the case, believe it or not, there is a WordPress plugin that will allow you to build a staging website that is independent of your hosting provider. The plugin is called WP Staging Plugin.
Bonus Point: Get Rid Of Unused Plugins
We’ve spoken about the right way to choose plugins for your website and about their upkeep. This section, however, is dedicated to keeping the plugin directory of your website clean.
Why is this important? Well, for starters, there might be a few plugins that you currently don’t use but they are still affecting the performance of your website.
Secondly, a lot of malicious attacks on websites are targeted towards specific PHP codes within the plugins. This means, as long as a plugin is sitting on your website, it is exposed to such attacks.
So, the lesson here is simple, if you are not using a plugin and don’t have any plans of using it in the future, delete it. Don’t deactivate it and forget about it, delete it. This can happen for a number of reasons. For instance, you may have been using Yoast for ensuring your website is optimized for the search engines. However, once you get an SEO tool like RankWatch, you will not require Yoast. In this case, getting rid of Yoast completely is the best way forward.
In fact, don’t stop with just deleting the plugin, make sure you also delete the left-behind database tables as well. In order to delete the plugin, all you have to do is find it in your WordPress dashboard and then hit the delete button.
To delete the left-behind database files, however, you will need to have some knowledge of operating phpMyAdmin.
However, if you don’t have that knowledge, don’t worry. It only means you cannot manually delete the database by yourself. In this case, all you need to do is download a database cleaner plugin for your website.
When deleting files, make sure you look for and delete files associated with the Orphan Tables or Orphan Options.
Conclusion
Managing plugins on a WordPress website should not be a complex undertaking, as long as you keep your knowledge updated and take proactive actions to keep your website secure and functioning smoothly.
Failure to do so can expose your website to the risk of a hack or a malicious attack, or even a complete and sudden shutdown. The tips shared in this article, when implemented religiously, will help you avoid such a situation and ensure that you can use as many plugins as you need, without putting your website at risk.
Still, got questions? Shoot them in the comment section below and I promise to be prompt with my replies!
