Which Wordpress Plugins do we need to avoid?

[David_Perdew]

Regina - weigh in here. What do you look for in plugins to avoid?

Of course, there's security issues. I rely on Regina for that, but I now look for coding efficiency too.

My Number 1 offender was one called WP Ultimate Light box - and we paid for it! It was a video lightbox tool that we used. After the site crawled along for awhile, we finally figured out that it was loading 6500 lines of code and 10 JavaScripts to every page!

Lazy programming will kill your site.

Which plugins do you avoid like the plague?

[ReginaSmola]

Great topic David! I was just talking about this the other day.

I follow a few parameters for plugins I avoid:

If a plugin hasn't been updated for more than 6-months to a year
If a plugin is no longer support by the developer
If a plugin has been removed from the WordPress.org repository (Big Red Flag!)
If it slows down my website
If it gets bad reviews

I just recently removed the Related Posts plugin because it was really bogging down my site. It was a great feature to lead your readers to a related post, but not for the price you pay for them closing the site because it takes so long to load. After I disabled (and removed it) my site was 3 times faster. Woohoo!

There a couple places you can check the load time for your plugins such as:

http://tools.pingdom.com < Tip: Before you click on "Test Now," be sure you click the little "Settings" link below where you put in your url and UNCHECK "Save test and make it public." There's no reason in the world you want the test indexed on Google.

A great plugin to see load times is the P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) plugin. You'll be amazed on how many resources your plugins use.

My wishlist is that plugin developers would only make the scripts load on the posts/pages NEEDED. There is no reason to have your Form script load in the header if you only use it on your contact page.

[KellyMcCausey]

WPLocalDirectory, I got it from Warrior Forum for a client. It's been a real pain to work with. They revamped it completely and there was a whole new learning curve. The support forum was not terribly useful.

I will say that one of the owners did step in and help me over the hump - but we decided to drop it and pursue a different solution anyway. We just didn't trust the future of the plugin.

It brought up a whole issue for me. Buying plugins for a one time low free - yes it's 'premium' cuz you paid for it. But when they haven't built in any ongoing fees, how can they possible provide sufficient support? It has given me an appreciation for plugins with annual license fees. I'll gladly pay them if it gives me peace of mind about support being there as Wordpress changes.

[LynetteChandler]

Ugh I so agree on the Javascript. As a WP developer I often take extra time and go to great lengths to avoid loading not only JS but CSS on pages and posts not needed and that includes the admin side too.

Every time I buy a plugin that is open source, I find it truly amazing how B-A-D they are. Horribly coded, does not conform to WP recommended developer practices. I spent weeks overhauling one of my own plugins just so they are inline with WP. Some themes too awfully coded but they look great, people love them etc.

Many of them also have obvious holes like... developer 101 never trust user input but the theme or plugin never checks if the data is valid or sanitizes them. I'll admit in the early days this is one of my mistakes and it does take time to go back and fix them.

You'd be surprised how many of the paid plugins are badly coded. I don't want to paint everyone with a wide brush there are some good ones on Warrior but I've bought enough on there only to peek under the hood and learn it's not what I want on my site. One of these while not badly coded was half-baked I think the name was WP-Dealpon.

Years ago, when I mentioned coding efficiency to a marketer who was teaching people to outsource their programming, I pretty much got laughed in the face. His bottom line, who cares when people don't actually see the back end and the plugin has extra unnecessary code, the important thing is getting it done.

I'm rather conflicted with that because I do agree getting it done is important, but getting it done while leaving the keys to your house by the front door... sorry, can't do it.

Oops sorry for going on a rant David

[ChristineCobb]

Mine is WP Instant Pay -- It seemed like a great idea -- a simple affiliate setup where the affiliate gets their cut instantly into their PayPal account (similar to RAP except it actually divides the buyer's payment into the various PP accounts). It only really worked for 1 product and was kind of clunky, so I decided not to use it but when I deactivated, it broke other things. So now I have a plugin that I can't get rid of.

Then I found out that the idea and early development was a gal that was approached by a big IMer to joint venture the project. Somewhere along the way the IMer kicked her out of the deal, kept all the code and launched it on his own. I have another plugin that she developed and it works great, so tend to believe her story.

[David_Perdew]

A great plugin to see load times is the P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) plugin. You'll be amazed on how many resources your plugins use.

Gary Cornelisse turned me on this as a way to test site speed. Love it...

[David_Perdew]

Oops sorry for going on a rant David

Loved it Lynette this is the kind of content that informs our members - very important... Promoted it to an article.

[ReginaSmola]

Hey Chris,

For the plugin you "can't get rid of" check the wp-config.php and .htaccess file for extra code linking to it. I've seen plugins that break your site when deleted because those files are looking for them.

[ChristineCobb]

Hey Chris,

For the plugin you "can't get rid of" check the wp-config.php and .htaccess file for extra code linking to it. I've seen plugins that break your site when deleted because those files are looking for them.

I checked those and it must be something else.

[David_Perdew]

Then I found out that the idea and early development was a gal that was approached by a big IMer to joint venture the project. Somewhere along the way the IMer kicked her out of the deal, kept all the code and launched it on his own. I have another plugin that she developed and it works great, so tend to believe her story.

I was a long-time monthly subscriber to that guy until I read that story. And I canceled immediately. And then when I thought about it, none of his tools ever worked right. So, I should have bailed long ago. He was one of those in the Warrior Forum everyone looked up to...

[geoffhoff]

I have an idea that I know who that big IMer might have been...

The general class of plugins that I have had trouble with on my client's sites (I've never used them myself) are the caching plugins. They are supposed to speed up the loading of a site, but often actually slow them down and some of them make it nearly impossible to "check your work" as you build a WordPress page because the cache won't clear and you won't see the changes you've made.

Geoff

[richardschnur]

My latest chase has been to find a social plugin that is performance friendly.

Most of the ones I initially tried were slowing the load time badly. They looked cool, but I'm on a normal hosting plan so I don't have dedicated resources for these things.

I develop mainframe software so I know about the trade-off of code efficiency with code production speed. We unfortunately do not have access to unlimited horsepower or memory so we trade-off. I have always tried to go for speed first and readability second. It's nice to get both, but not always possible. For my environment that's what off line documentation is for - to help folks understand.

One thing that I have seen happen is that many of theses folks are poorly trained. Like a spoken or written language you can know how to use it, but still not be proficient in it. Some are just lazy.

I've seen this especially in the app market. People are in such a hurry to make their "millions" that they could not care less about usability, efficiency, maintainability. The seem to think any old piece of trash will sell.

[MartinRussell]

I was going to suggest a POP-up plugin that Dominates the marketplace for such things. But I'll let their customer service record speak for itself.

My actual suggestion is a little different - it's WP-DB-Backup.

It's a quality plugin, very popular, highly recommended and does exactly what it says it does - ie backup your WordPress database automatically. All good so far.

The problem is that people install this plugin and think that's all they need. They forget about their themes, plugins, images etc, as well as any non-WP uploads to their site. If your site goes down that is a lot of work to redo, and that's assuming you can remember all of what you had.

[David_Perdew]

One thing that I have seen happen is that many of theses folks are poorly trained. Like a spoken or written language you can know how to use it, but still not be proficient in it. Some are just lazy.

I've seen this especially in the app market. People are in such a hurry to make their "millions" that they could not care less about usability, efficiency, maintainability. The seem to think any old piece of trash will sell.

Richard - I've been working with a programmer for almost a year that was introduced to me here. He's awesome. And your complaint is one of the biggest things I learned from him. He vets all the plugins and apps that I add from 3rd parties just to make sure they don't drag my sites down to a crawl. Relying on a GOOD programmer is really important. And good ones don't come cheap...

[richardschnur]

When I manage projects I am always fighting the time-quality-quantity battle. You can have any two, but rarely if ever all three. When quality loses the fight you get what you've got coming.

I can tell the bad apps because they are simple tools, but yet it seems every other day (sometimes literally) I am prompted that there are updates available.

Obviously nothing is static and fixes and enhancements are necessary, but every other day?

It used to be that people were more tolerant of the idea that problems occur and there is always the next release, but that is not as common as it used to be especially in some larger companies (my main clients). I've noticed alot more tolerance for stretching the schedule to make sure it is the best possible without getting stuck in the perfectionism loop.