How to Choose Credible WordPress Plugins

Ajay Prasad

WordPress plugins can be a wonderful asset for bloggers, web developers and business owners. There are a wide range of plugins available that can expand the functionality of a website, from speeding up the pages to improving SEO and social media integration.

 

While there are a lot of advantages to these plugins, they also come with risks. It is important to be able to identify trustworthy plugins in order to ensure that your website code is both high quality and safe.

The following tips will help you with this process:

Trust the WordPress directory. There are a large number of WordPress plugins available in the WordPress directory. This directory is maintained and monitored by a stellar group of contributors. As such, untrustworthy content almost always gets reported quickly and the staffs take unsafe plugins out of the directory in a timely manner.

Check the reviews and counts. Typically plugins with higher download counts and better ratings are safer plugins. While a great new plugin may have a low count, you can just about always count on a plugin with over 100,000 downloads being a sure bet. Don't forget to look at the reviews, too. Sometimes people give good plugins low ratings because they simply aren't applicable to them, but often reviews are an accurate reflection of a plugin's overall performance.

Check the most recent update. Before you download a new plugin, check when it was most recently updated and/or when the author last posted information in the support section. Typically you can't trust a plugin that has been updated in two years or more. WordPress frequently add new functions and processes that developers must adopt in order to ensure that plugins are stay up to date.

Avoid free plugins online. Free plugins listed in the WordPress directory are fine, but plugins available elsewhere should not be trusted. The code can include any number of different harmful components that can compromise both the security and performance of a website. For example, a person can write a code that allows your complete website installation to be emailed to him.

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Ajay Prasad

Ajay Prasad is the Founder and President of GMR Web Team, a leading healthcare digital marketing agency. He guides small and medium size healthcare practices/businesses in customizing their online marketing strategy, focused on building a loyal base of patients and improving their patient acquisition. Ajay believes in an improved patient experience as the key to successful healthcare business, which can be accomplished with the right marketing plan in place.


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