Choose Your WordPress Plugins: The Smart Way

WordPress offers thousands of opportunities for you to create a stunning website.

If you want to choose your WordPress plugins, you need to be wise about it. As a part of the WordPress community, we’ve helped a lot of users to develop and maintain their own WordPress websites.

Stay tuned to find some expert tips and tricks on how to choose your WordPress plugins the smart way.

How to Choose Plugins for a WordPress Website

It goes without saying that the quality of the plugin plays an important role when choosing among hundreds of them. However, it should not be the only deciding factor.

You also need to consider the functionality of the plugin and whether it will improve the user experience for your visitors.

Finding relevant plugins to meet both those conditions is not always an easy and straightforward process. When you’re faced with a decision on which plugin you should choose, answer the following questions:

1. Can I Add the Desired Functionality Without Installing a Plugin?

If you are working without the help of a professional WordPress retainer, do some more extensive research on what standard WordPress features you could use.

There certainly are less known features, or as we like to call them, “small hidden treasures”, inside the WordPress Core. They can help you add the desired functionality you need or find a suitable workaround to achieve the results you are looking for.

Similarly, if you have already written a code snippet or know that you can use an existing CSS or JavaScript snippet, consider incorporating it into your website and avoid adding extra plugins, that would practically do the same job.

2. What Is the Reputation of the Plugin?

For plugins found in the official repository, check the ratings and reviews first.

Generally speaking, you’ll want to look for plugins that have a 4-star or higher rating. You can click on the individual stars to read the reviews. Some reviews won’t be helpful, especially if they consist of one-word descriptions.

Try to find reviews that are more articulate, well-balanced, and go deeper into the functionality and performance of the plugin.

If you’re using a plugin from CodeCanyon, read the comments left by the buyers and check the overall plugin rating. Similarly to the official repository, you’ll want to choose a plugin that has more positive comments that go in-depth about the practical use of the plugin.

Make sure that the plugins are following the best WordPress Coding Standards.

3. Is the Plugin Maintained?

A good way to find out if a plugin is well maintained is to check whether the author is following the support forum and fixing potential issues, as well as answering user questions on a regular basis.

For any plugin that you’re considering, check the date of the last update and whether it’s compatible with the latest version of WordPress.

Avoid plugins that haven’t been updated in the last year as of the time of your research, since installing such a plugin can lead to security issues, among others.

In some cases, that can also be a sign that the developer has no interest in maintaining the plugin, which means no new functionality is likely to be added in the future.

You do not want that, as you would want your website to be compatible with any changing requirements in web development and any third-party software you may be using.

4. How Reputable Is the Developer?

Aside from plugin reputation, you should also check the credibility of its developer. Clicking on the plugin author’s name will show you how many plugins they’ve developed and whether they’ve contributed to WordPress in any way.

Check how many support threads they have resolved and if they have a website listed. On their website, look for information about them, check if they have support documentation and if the website looks credible.

Be cautious of developers who only have a single plugin listed and don’t actively participate in the support forums.

This could indicate that you may be left to your own devices if you run into any issues with the plugin. Having only written one plugin is not necessary a bad sign, but it should make you more cautious, and we urge you to do careful due diligence on your part.

5. How Clear Is the Description of the Plugin’s Functionality?

Regardless of where you’re downloading the plugin from, make sure its description is clear enough for you. You’ll want to look for plugins that have a detailed description and a FAQ section.

Having a proper demo (if applicable – demos are not always possible), screenshots of the plugin’s functionality, options page and look and feel, can help you better understand what the plugin you are buying is, and how likely it is to do the job you are expecting it to do.

6. How Many Active Installs Does the Plugin Have?

Generally speaking, if the number of people using a plugin is relatively high, it’s less likely that it will cause potential problems.

You can easily see this information on the plugin’s page, but do keep in mind that some plugins offer a very specific functionality which may in turn result in a low number of installs.

In such cases, you’ll want to pay extra attention to the ratings, reviews, and other factors mentioned above.

Plugins That You Might Consider Using

Now that we’ve covered what to consider when choosing quality plugins, here are just a few examples of useful plugins to consider, when building your own WordPress website without the help of a professional maintenance service provider.

Yoast SEO

While WordPress comes with many SEO benefits, Yoast allows you to optimize your posts and pages for search engines as well as generate a sitemap. It includes other benefits such as verifying your site with Google, Bing, and Pinterest as well as integration with Facebook Open Graph and Twitter cards.

Google Analytics by Monster Insights

If you need an easy way to integrate Google Analytics into a WordPress site and give your clients the ability to see the stats in their dashboard, then this plugin is the solution.

Some of the key features include amazing analytic tools and easy-to-use interface, universal or asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code, the ability to track search results, outbound links and downloads, and more.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 remains a popular plugin and with good reason. It’s updated regularly, easy to use, and allows you to create multiple contact forms. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, and more.

Akismet

Comment spam is a fact of life for every website owner. With Akismet, you can reduce the amount of spam, not only in the comments section, but in your contact form submissions as well.

Easy Image Gallery

You can save some time and effort, using Easy Image Gallery to showcase images. It allows you to easily create an unlimited number of awesome image galleries in any post or page, and then reorder them by dragging and dropping each image.

Best WordPress Tracker Plugins

1. Jetpack
2. WP Power Stats
3. Analitify
4. WP – Piwik
5. Extra Watch
6. KISSmetrics
7. Crazy Egg
8. WP Statistics
9. Simple Feed Stats
10. WP Online Counter
11. Analytics Cat

Jetpack

Jetpack by WordPress is one of the basic plugins every WordPress website should have. It represents a powerful analytic tool, but it also provides a number of other features like security services or image optimization.

This plugin helps to track trending posts, visitor’s peaks and visiting timelines. It offers website monitoring options and mobile optimization services. All aimed at directing more traffic to your website.

Amongst other things, Jetpack is great for protecting websites from brute force attacks; it also provides great customizing tools for your site, like galleries and notifications. Its social media integration is really good, so it helps you generate more visits by proper trending topic analysis.

WP Power Stats

WP Power Stats is a light-weight champion when it comes to WordPress plugins. Incredibly small, yet amazingly efficient, this plugin gives you detailed and statistical information about the traffic on your website.

Some of the main features this plugin offers to users are fully customizable options, private statistics only available to you, page tracking, views tracking, OS, location, device types and much more. The best way to observe WP Power Stats is to think of it as a stripped down Google Analytics tool, with core basics needed for general traffic analysis.

Analitify

Amazingly simple one-click installation and intuitive, easy to use interface, this plugin provides you with quite the number of features you can use to maximize your website’s traffic potential.

Analitify gives users the ability to track real-time statistics, get individual information about posts or pages and also it provides users with detailed analysis of other necessary data.

Average time on site, average pages and page views, bounce rate, geographic location, the number of sessions, these are just some of the analytic services Analitify provides.

Even though its free version has limitations, this plugin is great for small businesses and beginners in web analytics and it doesn’t affect your WordPress website’s loading speed.

WP – Piwik

This plugin is amazingly simple, but it does its job perfectly. Piwik represents an open source web analytic system, that provides users with various website analyses, but it doesn’t show Google Analytics data, as it runs on a different platform.

WP Piwik adds the Piwik javascript code in every page of a user’s website in order to save them from manually coding PHP. It can provide users with detailed analysis of page views, the number of visitors, time spent on the page, top pages and even top browsers and devices used. It gives precise bounce rates and is fully customizable and quite user-friendly.

Extra Watch

Extra Watch is generally made as an optimization plugin, aimed at analytics, but it has evolved into a great tool for full on traffic analysis. With optimization options that allow users direct site editing, this plugin also provides daily and weekly stats in preferred forms.

This plugin gives users access to monitoring visitor behavior, time spent and it gives reports when visitors leave the site. This plugin also provides you with “bad words” blocking, which helps block specific IP addresses.

KISSmetrics

KISSmetrics provides users with a bit different analytic data. Instead of focusing on the overall website usage, this plugin tracks individual visitors, follows the links they’ve clicked and pages they’ve visited.

Even though it provides users with no overall website traffic data, it gives great insight about individual visitors, and it can be quite helpful when it comes to increasing conversion rates.

Crazy Egg

An amazing plugin that provides users with a detailed website traffic statistics, based on a motto seen on their website – what’s making your visitors leave?

Crazy Egg works on heat-mapping and scroll count, amongst other tools, to provide a detailed visual representation of the general usage of a website. Some of its amazing features are click counter, overall usage statistics, specific links and element clicks, and much more. If you want to have a full visual overview of your website’s traffic, this plugin is just what you need. The only downside to it is that it’s free for 60 days only.

WP Statistics

WP Statistics is a great plugin for detailed website traffic tracking. It doesn’t depend on third party services, which makes this tool quite useful and applicable in various ways.

This plugin helps you track visitors, gives you detailed page stats and covers current and previous sessions while working on all popular search engines and browsers.

It comes with some features like full geographical data, recording stats on exclusions; it exports data in various formats and gives shortcodes for different types of data from different elements

Simple Feed Stats

When it comes to feeds reports – Simple Feed Stats is absolutely great.

It has a lot of customization options that help adjust the data to user-specific wishes. It allows users to insert custom content showcased in feed, but it also comes with some other great features. Graphic, text and markup optimization for feeds, shortcodes for feed display, collecting of daily and overall statistics and in-depth analysis are just some of the great features this plugin provides.

WP Online Counter

Simple and small plugin, meant mostly for beginners and small business websites, WP Online Counter gives detailed analysis and counts of current online visitors, the highest number of visitors, most visitors online at the same time and the total number of visitors.

This plugin only works on servers with MySQL 4.1 or higher, but it provides you with the option of displaying configuration, and customization through the WordPress dashboard.

Analytics Cat

Definitely the simplest of all the plugins from this list, Analytics Cat provides simple but fast and quick solutions for traffic analysis.

This plugin provides the simplest way of integrating Google Analytics code to your website, and it helps you exclude logged in users from its tracking. This comes in as a very useful tool when you and your administrators, or employees spend a lot of time on your website. In order to show precise data, this plugin helps you get the true statistics you need from your WordPress website.

Debunking Some WordPress Plugin Myths

Here are two popular misconceptions that you may have heard on the topic, and why we think hearing those may be misleading you.

Misconception

WordPress plugins can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, a high quality plugin can help you add the functionality you need without spending extra time on development or without having to research the proper way to do it.

On the other hand, it’s all way too easy to wind up with too many plugins installed, if you’re not careful and want to please your client by adding every little feature they’ve discovered online.

Our take on this

Your website performance can be affected by poorly coded plugins, but there is no direct correlation between the quantity of plugins and the website performance.

You can have as many plugins as you like, in order to add extra functionality to your website. You just need to make sure the plugins are high quality and properly installed.

It is quality, not quantity that may impact your website performance. Any number of poorly coded plugins may or may not lead to your site consuming too many server resources, and in turn produce a sluggish website.

There are certain plugins with a proven track record over the years. It would make sense to first consider using those plugins for adding a certain basic functionality to your website, before looking for ways to create a custom plugin to do the same job.

What you should be considering as well is: the plugin’s rating, reviews on the plugin from your peers, plugin author reputation, compliance with the best WordPress Coding Standards.

Misconception

Common problems, related to installing too many plugins, include 500 error, the notorious “white screen of death”, and your website crashing.

Our take on this

If you install a plugin, which hasn’t been developed following the best WordPress Coding Standards, or is using deprecated functions, that could cause fatal errors on your website, such as the “white screen of death”.

Again, it’s quality, rather than quantity, that may cause you headaches in the long run.

In Conclusion

Remember to carefully consider what kind of functionality you are looking to add to your website. Try to imagine in detail exactly how you’ll be using that functionality and how you or your visitors will benefit from it.

Weigh all your options. Finally, evaluate plugins, based on quality and relevance.

After you have created your WordPress website, and you have started growing your guest count, your next goal would most probably be to enhance your current website’s security and stability, while also lowering your costs.

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