WordPress is the most popular CMS system covering over 75 million websites from all over the world. Plugins are the extended features of WordPress which provide functionality to your WordPress website. In this article, you’ll learn how to choose a perfect WordPress plugin for your website.
With over thousands of free plugins in the WordPress directory and premium plugins built by WordPress Plugin Development Company on various platforms, choosing the right and required plugin for your website becomes extremely confusing.
This article will suggest certain aspects to consider while choosing a perfect WordPress plugin for your site.
What is a WordPress Plugin
WordPress Plugins are a piece of software written in PHP that can be considered the added functionality feature of your website. Over thousands of plugins are available from the WordPress directory covering most of the website requirements. Though a developed core, WordPress itself can’t do anything. It needs plugins for various tasks to get accomplished.
Plugins certainly make a website load faster and improve the performance of the website. However, it is a myth that numerous plugins can degrade the site loading speed. Some websites use more than 50 plugins at a time and still have an optimized loading time.
Where Will You Search To Choose A Perfect WordPress Plugin?
Getting the right plugin needs you to write down your website requirements. Sorting down the requirements will allow you to find your required plugin. Once you know the requirements, you can search for your free plugin from WordPress.
The search bar of WordPress does not give accurate results when searching the keyword. Hence it is advisable to use the google search bar to search long-tail keywords related to plugins for getting the relevant results.
Installing numerous unnecessary plugins can sometimes make your site heavy and not necessarily perform as expected. But a single plugin with qualities required is the goal to choose the WordPress plugin.
Many premium plugins are available, developed by various enterprises on multiple marketplaces like Envato – Code Canyon, Pickplugins, or from the Mojo marketplace. In addition, you can customize your WordPress plugins according to your needs, but you have to think about how much does it cost to develop a custom WordPress plugin.
How To Choose A Perfect Plugin
Choosing the right plugin is not a difficult journey. But, the functionality of the plugin is not guaranteed as it is an open-source platform. To choose the right WordPress plugin, you can follow the below steps:
1. Compare Plugins
When you decide on the plugin’s functionalities, you will get a list of related plugins in the directory. Comparing the plugins while looking through ratings, plugins, sales, and launching date is advisable. By comparing, you are ultimately filtering out the important plugins from a list of relatable plugins. In addition, you can compare the plugin by seeing the product’s description, its version, and when it is last updated.
Also, check the active installations of the plugins. This shows the current number of installations of the plugins. The plugin must be recently updated to its latest WordPress and PHP versions.
2. Ratings and Reviews To Choose A Perfect WordPress Plugin
Ratings are the primary thing to check every time you look for any WordPress plugin. The five-star plugin is the best one and the one that starts depicts the low functionality of the plugin. Plugins should be chosen on the basis of an average rating. If plugin rates are lower than the average rating, it may not be considered a good one and creates issues while in function.
Make sure to know the number of people reviewing and rating it. If the plugin ratings show 5 stars but that occurs only with two or ten customers, that doesn’t make any impact.
3. Support Overview
There is a section of the WordPress directory or any marketplace where you can see the number of issues solved. If the problems are solved out of the registered issues, then it can be considered to have a great support response.
However, a less issue resolved does not imply an inefficient plugin, rather any issue must be given at least 2 months to get solved. If it takes more than that it can be considered unreliable to choose that plugin.
If a plugin shows only a few support threads for a fix. So, it may consider that the author does not frequently respond to the user when asked for support. This does not imply the plugin’s non-functionality, but it may not be for a long tenure.
4. Check Screen-Shots To Choose A Perfect WordPress Plugin
Every plugin has a demo or screenshot to have an idea of the functionality of the plugin. You can get a clear idea of how the user interface works in the plugin and the flexibility it offers while installing and launching it. Also, read the documentation to know the compatibility of the plugin with any other plugin.
5. Check FAQs
The plugin section contains almost all the useful information about its features, ratings and support. If you are unable to find your answer, you can quickly search for FAQs. FAQs sometimes have interesting questions that can provide you some hack or additional info regarding the plugin.
Not every plugin has a FAQ section still, it is commendable to read this section so that you can successfully configure your plugins to your site by pre-reading the issues.
6. Testing To Choose A Perfect WordPress Plugin
When the plugin is installing, you can add some time to your site’s loading time. If so happens, you can look for a better plugin. For this, you can check your website’s speed using a speed optimization tool like Pingdom and Google Page Speed Insights.
Check your site speed before you install the plugin. Then, again check the site speed after installing the plugin. If your plugins take a significant time, you should look to some other plugin.
7. Regular Updates
You can get the information on the last version of the plugin in the plugin description. If the updates are not regular, they may create issues while functioning on your website to choose the perfect WordPress plugin.
Also, while looking for an update, check for its compatibility with any other plugin or to a different screen. If your plugin is not compatible, it may crash your entire website.
What to do if a plugin doesn’t work?
If anytime you face an issue regarding the working of your plugin, and you want to fix it, follow the below steps:
- Check whether the issue is regarding compatibility
- If yes, then deactivate all other plugins and themes except the default features.
- Check the working of the plugin again
- Check if you still find the issue
- If yes, contact the support form of WordPress.
Some Of The Best Plugins
Among 58000+ free plugins and numerous premium plugins, here is the list of some of the best plugins to choose for your business:
- Classic editor
- Social Auto Poster
- Akismet Spam Protection
- Jetpack
- WooCommerce PDF Vouchers
- Yoast SEO
- Contact Form 7
- Elementor Page Builder
WordPress Plugin Development: Tools & Set-up
So, by now, you have known how to choose the right plugin for you. If you are not satisfied with the available plugins, you can hire a WordPress Plugin Development company who can help you to develop a WordPress Plugin from scratch as per your requirements. Developing your own plugin is not a difficult process to choose WordPress plugin.
After choosing the perfect plugin for you, you will need to install it on your website to make the plugin work. Your WordPress plugin installation can be done even in 5 simple steps. Follow the below steps to install a free as well as a premium plugin:
Installing Free Plugin:
Here are the following steps to install a Free WordPress Plugin:
1: Download the zip files
2: Click the ‘Add new’ tab in the admin panel following the plugin option, and click upload plugin
3: From the ‘Choose file’ option to upload the zip file of your plugin
4: Click ‘Install Now’
5: Activate your plugin
Installing Premium Plugin:
You can manually set up your premium plugin in the following steps:
1: Download the plugin source zip files
2: Extract your zip folder and upload it to your website through an FTP client like FileZilla
3: Use FTP username and password and access through the FTP manager
4: Connect your FTP client to your website using the credentials
Step 5: Access /wp-content/plugins/ folder on your website
6 Upload the zip folder to /wp-content/plugins/ folder on your webserver
7: Visit the WordPress Admin area following the plugins section to see your plugin addition
8: Activate the plugin
9: Configure your plugin settings with WordPress default settings
Conclusion
Now that you have a deep understanding of choosing the plugins. Install an outstanding plugin for your website. It would help if you kept in mind that WordPress has no warranty as WordPress is open-source. Every plugin author will not necessarily answer your questions, but as they care for their product and services, they try their level best to support their product.
You can hire a WordPress plugin development company to provide you with the best WordPress Plugin development services.
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