Choosing and using wordpress plugins if you’re not a coder
Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Plugins add a substantial amount of functionality to blogs. Practically every blog has a good few of them. I also use several plugins on Blogsolid to enhance it a little bit. But plugins also have a dark side – they can overload your server or expose your installation to hackers.
Today we will look at how to choose and use plugins safely.
Have as few plugins as possible
The less plugins you have, the lighter your wordpress installation is. Light installation has 2 advantages:
- Your page load times are shorter. Your server has fewer files and less code to go through and performs lower amount of querys to the database. Quick load times can positively impact your google ranking or at least you will not be impacted negatively by your websites slowness.
- Your server will not go down. Whatever hosting you use, especially if it is a shared hosting, it allocates a limited amount of server resources to your account. The more plugins you use the more server resources they require. If you are close to your servers limits, a sudden spike in traffic can overload your server and your website will become unavailable.
But don’t be shy. If you need a plugin – use it!
On the other hand, plugins give you fantastic amount of additional functionality, which can do a lot of good to your blog. Worpress was build to allow for plugins. So if you need a plugin, do not shy away from it because you worry about your server.
There are ways to limit the impact of additional plugins on your sever. The best is probably the WP Super Cache, which I already mentioned in the previous post.
Chose plugins wisely
There is a plugin for everything these days. Just type what you want to get into google, add ‘wp plugin’ or ‘wordpress plugin’, hit search and you’ll have it. Usually you can find not one but multiple plugins offering similar functionality.
But downloading and installing anything you find can be risky.
- A poorly written plugin can damage your installation. This happens more often than you would think. You upload the plugin to your server, click install… and your site goes down. Look into the “See what others are saying…” section of almost any plugin on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and you will see comments by people who got errors when they installed plugins. This can happen even with a well written and tested plugin but if the plugin is poor, risk is greater.
- There is no guarantee that a plugin will be maintained in the future. If the developer does not continue development, the plugin might not be compatible with future versions of wordpress and you may have to discard it. If your blog was heavily reliant upon it, you will be in trouble. This happened for example to the Custom Query String plugin, which allowed to manipulate the amount of posts displayed per page in archives, categories and on the front page. It was discontinued when Wordpress version 2.3 came out and never really brought back to life. I do not know a plugin that would now give this functionality and was widely used.
Choosing plugins
The best way to manage the risk of running into troubles with a plugin is careful selection of plugins to use. This will take you not more than 10 minutes and can save you headaches later.
I’d suggest to:
Install only plugins which have been tested on the current version of Wordpress
If something is not made for the current version, then it already suggests that it’s not supported. By the current version I do not really exactly mean 2.8.6 which we use now. Changes between versions on the 3rd digit are quite small and they rarely impact plugin compatibility. Majority of 2.8.X plugins should be just fine. But then again if something still shows 2.8.2, you should get a bit suspicious.
Do not install plugins which are compatible only up to 2.7 or less.
Install only plugins which are widely used
If thousands of people use a plugin it means that:
- It is fairly well tested – by thousands of other users.
- If the developer drops it, there’s a greater chance that someone will pick it up and continue maintenance.
How to know if a plugin is used widely? Well it’s a bit tricky.
On each plugin page there’s a ‘stats’ tab (example). It shows the amount of downloads of the plugin accompanied by a nice graph. I’d suggests choosing only plugins which have at least a couple of hundred downloads a week in the recent weeks.
The trick is however that some respected developers (Yoast.com for example) offer downloads from their own websites as well. These downloads will not be included in the stats page, so for some plugins these stats will not be accurate. If this is the case with a plugin you’ve chosen, you might have to do more digging.
You can have a look at the developer’s website and his work try to assess his expertise and commitment. For example, a possible successor of the above mentioned Custom Query String could be Custom Post Limits. When you go to its author’s blog, you will notice the amount of plugins he created. It’s easy to see that he likes doing it and people tend to stick to their passions. On the other hand, Scott (the author) did not post since August, what might suggest, he’s moving away from blogging/wordpress/developing. Many things can influence this – he might have gotten a great job, which takes away his whole time, he might have gotten bored with maintenance and fixing bugs, he might have fallen in love and followed his new better half to a different country somewhere, where they do not use internet that much. Whatever the reason, if this plugin is not updated when WordPress moves to 2.9, it might simply stop working.
In general remember to consider the risks and rewards of choosing a particular plugin before you install it.
I contacted Scott before publishing this article and the Custom Post Limits plugin will be maintained, so stay calm if you’re using it. Also, I should mention, that some of the suggestions above were brough up by Scott in his reply to me. Thanks a lot Scott.
What Scott also mentioned is that sometimes even a simple thank you or a small donation can keep the developer motivated to continue. After all, developers spend countless hours coding plugins, often not hearing any gratitude, but getting only support and error tickets from users.
Using plugins
Backup and test
I cannot emphasise this too much. You should back up your site (at least the database) before each update of a plugin and each wordpress update. Getting out of a mess caused by a plugin which updated incorrectly may be a real nightmare.
If your blog gets many visits, the best approach would be to also test everything on a separate copy of your site before updating the live one, to save your readers from the downtime if an update is unsuccessful.
Of course this is even more time consuming than just doing a backup, so if you do not want to do this for each plugin update, consider doing this at least for the worpress engine updates. These can make more than one plugin incompatible.
I would actually say that there is less risk if you let your installation be out of date for a couple of days, than to decide on an upgrade without a backup.
Uninstalling plugins
When you uninstall a plugin, you should also test.
Some plugins require you to add some php code to your theme. When you uninstall, the code will display errors on your pages unless you remove it. Other plugins enable various functionality when you put custom tags in the posts. When you uninstall the plugins, some of these tags may start appearing as text within the post. Testing off-site helps you avoid all these issues.
In future posts I will show very easy methods of setting up a separate copy of your website so that you can do all the updates and uninstalls without exposing your site to a risk of downtimes.
Stay tuned!
