Wordpress plugins i try to avoid at all cost

One of the biggest benefits of the wordpress ecosystem is its vast selection of available plugins. When starting out with developing wordpress websites, it can be tricky to know what to look out for when deciding which plugins to choose, especially since there are so many different ones that solve the same problem.

Some basic research that needs to be done when choosing a plugin are the following:

• Maintainance: Is the plugin being actively maintained? Is it maintained by a team or an individual? Is the longterm development of the plugin guaranteed or is it just a hobby project?

• Code quality: Are WP best practices being followed? Is the plugin generating a lot of php warnings and even errors even in its default config? Does it behave predictable? - PluginTests.com - wphive.com

• Data Handling: Does the plugin rely on external services and domains? Is data being sent to 3rd party servers even if not really necessary?

• Cost & Licensing: Does the plugin provide fair and scalable licensing if it is a paid plugin?

Now even when checking a plugin for all these criterias, sometimes only time and experience will tell if the plugin is going to save time or make your life harder than it needs to be. And in order to save others from having to learn this the hard way, i wrote down my list of plugins i try to avoid nowadays. This is of course just a personal experience and my subjective opinion, results may vary.

WPML

Making a website multilingual requires a lot of work and if not done properly can lead to absolute chaos. WPML is probably the most famous Multilang plugin for wordpress and has been around for ages. But the whole thing is a complete mess. Base installation requires like three different plugins, the system they used creates duplicates of each page in each language and the relations between those translations often break, randomly change or disappear completely. If the people that translate the website are not super careful, you will almost certanly end up with a huge chaos in your CMS with abandoned drafts, wrong translations.

From my personal experience, WPML always caused more trouble than it saved me time, often completely breaking url structure or content. Working with wpml is like beeing an elephant in a porcelain store. Some random little option in the settings might completely kill your entire website.

Additonally to the instability this plugin brings, it also drastically decreases performance of any website i had it installed. Also the UI is ugly and the UX is also bad.

Alternatives: -Polylang: buggy -Translatepress: my choice -Weglot: expensive

Yoast

Like WPML for translations, Yoast is almost seen as the standard SEO plugin for wordpress. Since wordpress does not have the built in option to set meta descriptions in its editor and add markup to pages and posts, it is basically essential to install a SEO plugin on any website which should be indexed by search engines. Now Yoast has the same issues like WPML, it is bloated, essential functionalities require installation of additional Yoast plugins and the UI/UX is ugly and outdated. For example in its basic version it lacks the option to add markup to products.

At least it will usually not tank your websites after updates or changing the config, but there are just much better options out there, which do the same task and more in a more performant and convenient manner.

Alternatives:

• Rankmath
• SEOpress
• The SEO framework
• All in one SEO

Jetpack (or any other automattic plugin)

This plugin is generally known to cause trouble and it tries to do many things at once but none of it really properly. The biggest drawback of using this plugin is the integration of your woocommerce store into the wordpress.com universe, which can make it really hard to deinstall again. Also they send your data to wordpress.com.

Most other plugins from Automattic are shit too, woocommerce being one of them but for the time being there is no serious alternative to woocommerce. I am really looking forward to Fluentcart.

Plugins that embed content from other websites

Plugins that embedd Social Media Profiles or Maps into your Website should also be avoided. Embedding your Instagram on your website will only ever work very unreliably and if you want to embedd google maps, just embed it directly with Gutenberg.