Webifiable

Are you using WordPress and looking to expand your website’s functionality? Fortunately, WordPress had thousands of plugins available. Unfortunately, it can be hard to separate out the good from the bad. Let’s take a look at some guidelines that can help.

WordPress’s own website has a massive quantity of plugins available. Just under 15,000 as of the writing of this article. And it’s a great place to look for whatever functionality you want. Just don’t count on their search to do you much good.

Instead, I highly suggest using Google’s own search. If you enter in site:wordpress.org/extend seo, you’ll be searching the WordPress site for SEO plugins.

But then how can you tell if the plugin you find is any good or not? I use a combination of five different factors, and these are roughly in the order that I consider them:

Downloads

The number of times a plugin has been downloaded has a direct impact on how likely I am to download it. If it’s only been downloaded two times, I’m probably not going to waste my time.

Of course, I do balance this with how narrow of a niche this plugin was made to support. If it’s a plugin for ostrich websites run by clowns, I may be more forgiving if it only has three downloads. But if it’s something with wide appeal like SEO, I’m going to look for thousands or millions of downloads.

Date Last Updated

If the plugin hasn’t been updated in the past six months, you can forget it. The only exception to this is if I know the technology involved, and I know specifically that there’s no reason this plugin needed to be updated recently.

WordPress Version Compatibility

This one’s pretty simple. If it hasn’t been tested with my version of WordPress, I’m far less likely to try it out. However, if it’s been downloaded a lot and has been updated recently, I might make exceptions to this rule.

Average Rating & Number of Ratings

A five star rating is great, but if it’s based on just one rating, it may just be the developer’s mom rating his plugin. Not that there’s anything wrong with proud moms (hi, mom!), but could he really not convince his dad to rate it as well?

By the same token, once a plugin is rated by dozens, but is rated poorly, I’m far less likely to try it out. If everyone hates it, there’s probably a reason.

Documentation in English

I admit it, I’m really only fluent in English. I speak a little Spanish (very little), some Pig Latin, and one word in Klingon. But unless you use English in your plugin’s documentation, I’m up a creek without a paddle.

Hopefully this will help you when checking out plugins. So do a quick WordPress plugin search on Google to get started!