Best Self-Hosted WordPress Plugins 2015: How To Choose (not WP.com blogs)
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How to choose the best Self-Hosted WordPress Plugins 2015. This doesn’t work for WordPress.com blogs. Only self-hosted.
I thought I’d explain how you might choose a WordPress plugin. There’s lots and lots of plugins for everything you’d want to do in WordPress, and sometimes it’s not very easy to pick one. Picking the right one can be a very good thing. It can be the difference between something that will bog your site down and something that will really help your site soar.
The way you pick a WordPress plugin is…at least the way I pick it — I’ve been using WordPress for a long long time, and so I’ve been looking at plugins forever. There’s several things here that can help you choose one.
Let’s say you’re looking for a forms plugin. So you want a form, like a contact form. So I’ll type in form in the search here. There’s all of these plugins. How do you choose one? It’s impossible to choose one just by looking in here. I mean, you can pick one and hope it’s good.
A couple of things I look for is when it was last updated, because this means it has active development on it. It means the developer has paid attention to it. They care about the plugin, they’re trying to make it better. That’s a good indicator that a plugin is still in good repair and the developer has really worked on it.
Five months ago is not a great time frame. Two months ago might be okay, it depends. I’d rather do ones like this that’s “a day ago” because then you can tell, you know, “11 hours ago”, “a week ago” these kind of things, you know they’ve been working on it, very frequently. That helps.
The importance of plugin reviews:
Another thing that helps too is how many stars it has, of course, kinda like Amazon or anywhere, how many stars it has, is how good it is, you know, how many ratings it has. Also here’s another way to tell: look at the downloads. Look at how many downloads it has. This tells you that so many other people have heard of it and downloaded it and at least tried it. So I would always choose five million downloads over ninety-nine thousand. Ninety-nine thousand isn’t bad either, but especially when it says untested with your version, and this one says compatible, it means they’ve updated it recently, so this one might be a good one to pick.
The other way to choose a good plugin, let’s see forms plugin here…You can look through, compatible with your version, updated a week ago, 111,000…pretty good reviews, that’s fine.
Finding social proof of the best WordPress Plugins:
Another way that I would choose is I would go to the web and say…”best WordPress forms plugin” and another good thing — I just saw that in the search box — put in the year too, because I’m sure people have been writing “best form WordPress plugin” posts for like the past 10 years, or 5 years or whatever. You may not get a current, you know, version of a post that’ll tell you what’s good this year. What’s good in WordPress now, because maybe some plugins have fallen off in the past couple years and they’re not good anymore and you don’t want to use those because they’re not going to be good for your site.
Window Shopping on Roundup Posts:
This is similar to is window shopping. It’s good to do that the first couple times you do WordPress plugins and install them.
Contact Form 7 (https://wordpress.org/plugins/contact-form-7), I just know this plugin from using it for a long time and seeing it on a lot of blogs and things like that so I kinda know this one already because I’ve been kinda looking for plugins for years. But if you look at this it says “Most Popular Plugins of 2014”. That’s a good clue that a lot of people got some really good use out of it. Usually the bad plugins that aren’t coded well won’t do well. They typically don’t make onto websites a lot and people, they get bad reviews and people just don’t use it.
Continued at http://ovr.li/1FJC8V0
This video shows how-to select plugins in twenty fifiteen (2015) in WordPress. If you are learning how to create a website or how to build a website this tutorial will help you do that.
In WordPress Itself:
* Check update frequency
* Check download count
* Check number of reviews
* Check version compatibility
On the web:
* Check roundup posts for social proof of the best WordPress plugins
Example: “35+ best WordPress form plugins”
Credits:
This video uses these sounds from freesound:
* whoosh.wav by Benboncan (http://www.freesound.org/people/Benboncan )
* sparkles.wav by LS ( http://www.freesound.org/people/LS/ )
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