WordPress plugins are a great way to enhance your website saving you thousands of dollars and a lot of work hours but you have to be very careful when using one as most plugins either do it for free so timely support is not expected leaving your website functionality broken and others that are paid either do not cover all your needs or overpromise in hopes to close the sale and recover the costs of building and promoting it.
I want to share my experience hoping to save you headaches and an obscene number of hours wasted troubleshooting tools that are broken and still never worked.
Using WordPress Plugins, a Catch 22
While plugins are of great help adding amazing functionality to your website achieved by just installing it, there is a rule, the more plugins you install the more points of failure and conflict to inspect when things go wrong and the proof is that whenever something fails one of the most solid troubleshooting steps that a specific plugin vendor is going to be ‘deactivate all other plugins, and reactivate one by one until the error replicates.’
When Using WordPress Plugins Less is More
While the use of plugins helps a lot and there are great ones, if what it does is too simple or rather can reasonably be done without it, for example backup plugins, it is relatively easy to access your website files via SFTP compress yoursite.com and download, then go to phpmyadmin select and export the database. While it may seem difficult at first, following the steps is not hard and after the 3rd time you do it, you won’t need to look at the instructions. Having such plugin 24/7, perpetually, I won’t say will bring issues, but will add complexity and as expected when something fails for example a plugin that you really really need and can’t replace by coding it yourself (for example Woocommerce) all plugin vendors will point other ways to look before admitting the issue is in their plugin, this is just human nature.
So whenever you want to solve an issue and are told to use a plugin, I recommend first googling what you are trying to solve followed by the keywords ‘withouth a plugin’ you’d be surprised at how relatively easy can be to just add a line of code in a safe area and that is perfectly safe and standarized, because the plugin route will be to add a whole functionality (more code) to do the same. Bottom line being a bit comfortable editing some files such as functions.php in your child folder pays in the long run. I’m not saying to become a full blown PHP developer, only to be able to edit some areas that are super standarized to do so.
There are more examples of simple edits that are a lot less complicated than the backup example but I couldn’t think of other just now, but do your searches and surprise yourself. If the functionality you are seeking requires a plugin go ahead, install it but keep in mind you just burned one of the few chances you have to use plugins as those chances are limited, is called site governance.
Free WordPress Plugins
As the name implies, these plugins are built by amazing people that give them away to the community, as such you can’t expect much less demand those tools to always work, it could be that your specific setup is causing issues (other plugins) or simply the person who built it and gave it away for free is busy. Sometimes you give up and forget about your issue and plugin, for some reason come back, see that the author fixed it, you download it again install it and now it works, but yes you lost the functionality for months and if applicable your client. Free WordPress plugins are great, some never fail but some do.
Paid WordPress Plugins
Paying for a plugin that does exactly what you need (when your need is too complex for you to build) is an excellent option, as long as the vendor is legitimate and has good reputation, here are some guidelines to consider
Bad Paid Plugin Vendors
Following the principle of economies of scale some plugins are built to do it all as ‘once size fits all’ meaning built to cover as many scenarios as possible and be able to sell to as many customers as possible from different industries and needs, however that ends up adding many extra features that some clients will never use, and that contributes to ‘bloated software’, the best option is to buy a plugin that only does what you need and that means the least code (clean, simplified) as possible to avoid the conflicts mentioned in the above paragraph ‘Less is More’
It is increasingly difficult to determine the reputation of a plugin vendor via reviews as they can simply pay people in other parts of the world to leave a fake positive rating. Also, usually the plugin vendors offer a free version (and 14 day refund for the premium), so it is easy to be convinced and start working with the free version and they are proactive helping you setup and even troubleshoot the free version, since you haven’t paid it is easy to like them, but in some instances as a way to ‘thank them’ for the free support while on the free version they ask you to leave a positive review (and provide a link) that can be interpreted as if you were positively rating the plugin itself instead of the pro-activity of the person.
I ended up paying for the paid version thinking it would be less buggy and knowing I would get my money back, spent lots of hours of those 14 days of grace period learning how the specific plugin works (learning curve) and fighting bugs that at one point I didn’t know were user error, etc, going back and forth with support, doing it enough times that you realize that the plugin is buggy. It becomes completely clear when you notice that at some point the support person becomes a sort of cheerleader ‘rooting’ for you in hopes that you fix the issue. To me it looked like they build a plugin that is 75% way done and hope that a senior developer (better than them) comes and closes the gap and makes it work.
At this point you have invested so many hours that the project is ‘too big to fail’, then you jump to the next plugin, the competitor, same price and same thing happens, actually it was then when I noticed that both plugins convinced me via positive reviews and ratings that were potentially dishonest, from countries in the world that paying a person to leave such review is not expensive.
Good Paid Plugin Vendors
It was then when I was putting more attention and looking for more solid referrals and not basing myself from just from the official WordPress plugin directory or Reddit reviews that I found a plugin that looked like a serious business, the plugin costs 3 X the yearly price of their competitors.
Something you still have to be careful when you find a reputable business selling the plugin you need, make sure it does everything you are looking to solve. For example I needed to be able to allow the visitor to the website to fill up a cart (using Woocommerce) and then be able to download the cart or send via email to themselves, effectively generating an estimate.
The plugin that I bought was able to do everything I needed, except the download/email part. They recommended me a plugin that would do it, a free one, which had excellent reviews, however as I explained earlier, free plugins are not guaranteed to work, those are a generous gift to the community and you can’t and should not demand that the creator fixes it ASAP, etc. Bottom line since the free plugin did not work, the premium plugin that I bought is useless, it doesn’t matter that they are willing and able to troubleshoot what they sold me, still they are not responsible for other ‘third party plugins’ which is fair, what is not fair is that they recommended a plugin as if they had tested it throughly when they did not or they can’t recommend and if they do they have to clearly state something along the lines ‘although our plugin covers part of what you need and we will guarantee it will work, the other part will be done by this other x plugin which we can’t warrantee. However this is what you can expect, this is where you can ask for support, and if you want us to fix it is going to be $’ , that way the person knows what to expect instead of again putting countless hours that go to waste.
What plugin vendors don’t know that is not whatever amount you pay them, the issue is the obscene amount of work hours that their lack of care or greed to make a sell lead to.
