WordPress Plugins – The Beauty and The Beast

WordPress is a great software because it is free, easy to use, and can be customized to create incredible websites and even eCommerce websites. However, with great power comes great responsibility. WordPress novices often fall into the trap of using themes that rely on a lot of plugins or simply install a lot of plugins without realizing the risks they are taking.
There are almost 50,000 plugins for WordPress! More and more are being created every day to the point that it is overwhelming for someone to sift through such a mountain of plugins.
Limit your plugins: My suggestion is to limit the number of plugins you have to the least amount necessary. Therefore you should really only be using 10 to 20 plugins, perhaps a bit more if you are an enterprise site or eCommerce website. When it comes to WordPress plugins, less is more.
Evaluate the quality of plugins: The other thing to do is look at the total installs, the frequency of updates, reviews, and the legitimacy of the developer or company behind the plugin. A plugin that might get abandoned by a developer could be risky and not get updated in the future. Additionally, high use plugins are typically more frequently updated and have overcome common bugs through support tickets.
Build Only What You Need: You may also not need all of the features of the plugin and its possible custom building the one feature you need may be more economical in the long run rather than installing an entire bloated plugin code base you don’t really need.
Here are some plugins we have used on major sites that have served us well.

Some plugins we suggest and have trusted:

Advanced Custom Fields – A great plugin for creating custom backend fields for anything you need such as text fields, radio boxes, select boxes etc.
Wordfence Security – One of the best security plugins on the market that will help defend against brute force attacks and much more.
WooCommerce – The top eCommerce plugin for WordPress that is used by millions of web stores on the Internet.
Akismet – The top spam protection plugin used by millions of WordPress websites.
Yoast SEO Plugin – The top SEO plugin on the WordPress market.
Contact Form 7 – One of the top contact forms on the WordPress market.
Contact Form 7 Honeypot – A great spam protection plugin for Contact Form 7.
Gravity Forms – One of the top form plugins for WordPress
Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress – A great plugin for adding social sharing to your blog or website pages.
Related Posts for WordPress – A plugin that you can use to add related posts to WordPress.
Shortcodes Ultimate – A plugin that can be used to create short codes to create functionality in the Wysiwyg.
Top 10 – A plugin that can be used to display the top posts on your blog or website.
Mailchimp for WordPress – A plugin connecting WordPress and Mailchimp for email marketing.
Buddy Press – A plugin to create and leverage users in WordPress.
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For advice on plugins, please contact us at hello@trellis.co!