Beginner’s Guide: How to Choose the Right WordPress Plugin

With over 59,000 plugins in the WordPress directory alone, it can be hard to pick the right plugin for your website.

We’ve faced this problem firsthand when building and managing our own websites. Although we now have a trusted toolkit of plugins that we rely on, it took us a while at first to find the best options for our own business.

In this guide, we’ll share the exact process we use to pick plugins for our websites. This checklist is the same one trusted by our team and other WordPress experts to find reliable and effective plugins.

Before You Start

Over the years, we’ve learned that the first step in choosing a plugin is to clearly define your needs. Start by writing down exactly what you want the plugin to do.

We recommend creating a checklist with the features you’re looking for, ranked in order of importance. This has always helped us focus on finding plugins that meet the most critical requirements first.

Sometimes, it’s impossible to find a single plugin that does everything. By prioritizing your must-have features, you’ll find it easier to narrow down your options and make the best decision.

Don’t worry if you need more than one plugin to achieve your goals. We’ve often combined plugins that work well together to get the desired results. The total number of plugins doesn’t matter as much as their quality and compatibility.

With that in mind, let’s explore how to choose the best WordPress plugin for your site.

How to Search For a Plugin

In our experience, the WordPress plugin directory is the best starting point when searching for plugins. With thousands of plugins available, it offers a wide variety of options, but the sheer abundance can make it tricky to find exactly what you need.

We’ve found that the search feature in the WordPress plugin directory can be limiting. That’s why we often turn to Google search or explore WPBeginner’s WordPress Plugins category for curated recommendations.

Another approach we recommend is browsing the most popular plugins in the directory. By checking the first two pages of popular options, we often discover reliable plugins that fit our needs. If nothing matches, then it’s time to run a specific search.

From our testing, the WordPress plugin directory search results are primarily based on relevance, which helps narrow down options effectively.

Each search result displays essential details like the plugin’s name, rating, description, number of active installs, author name, and compatibility with WordPress versions. These metrics have always helped us evaluate plugins quickly.

We recommend choosing plugins with a good number of active installs, strong ratings, and compatibility with a recent WordPress version. This combination has consistently worked well for us in ensuring quality and reliability.

Find A Plugin From an Expert Picked Directory

As an alternative to plugin search, you can look at WPBeginner’s WordPress Solution Center.

It is a curated directory of hand-picked WordPress plugins and tools. Our team of professional WordPress experts thoroughly tests and reviews each plugin on the list.

This saves you time as you can trust those plugins as the most reliable solutions.

Plus, detailed reviews allow you to compare the pros and cons and see how the plugin would work with screenshots and step-by-step instructions.

Comparing Plugins – Which One Should You Download?

Once you have found a couple of plugins, you can open their pages in new tabs to compare them.

Each WordPress plugin page contains information about the plugin, what it does, how to use it, and more. You will need this information to decide whether this plugin is the best fit for your WordPress website.

The sidebar on the plugin page contains valuable information, including the plugin version, the last updated date, active installations, and the minimum WordPress version required to run the plugin.

A plugin’s last updated date and active installs are good indicators of a plugin’s popularity.

This section will also show the tested up to WordPress version. If it doesn’t show the most recent version, then there is no need to freak out.

Although plugin authors check their plugins with each new WordPress release, they may only update the plugin if needed. Please see our article about installing plugins not tested with your WordPress version for more details.

Plugin Ratings

You can also see plugin ratings in the sidebar on the plugin page. The number of stars indicates a rating score, where 5 is the highest and 1 is the lowest.

You should keep in mind that many WordPress users use a plugin without rating it. A plugin downloaded by thousands of people may still not have many user ratings.

Plugin Reviews

When a user rates a plugin, they are asked to write a review along with their rating. You can see these reviews by clicking on the rating bars.

For example, if someone has given a plugin one star, then you can click on the 1-star link to read their review.

Another thing to notice here is the total number of ratings. For example, if a plugin only has one or two people rating it, then it is really not a significant number.

However, if those one or two people left a good reason for their rating in the review, then this would make their rating significant for others.

Support Overview

The support section of the plugin page’s sidebar will give you a quick overview of the number of support threads opened for a plugin during the last two months. It will also show you how many of these threads are resolved.

You can see support threads by clicking on the Support tab in the plugin menu bar. Just like the reviews, unresolved support threads don’t necessarily mean that the plugin has issues.

However, if a plugin has many unresolved threads and the author has not responded to any of them in the last two months, then this could mean that the author has lost interest. The plugin may still work for you but might not be supported in the long run.

Plugin Screenshots

For most WordPress plugins in the directory, you will see a Screenshots section below the plugin description. Looking at plugin screenshots is a quick way to see how the plugin looks on the front and back end of your WordPress blog.

Sometimes, screenshots are more helpful than the actual plugin descriptions, which could be lengthy and confusing.

With screenshots, you can see how the plugin will look and what it does. In this way, you can quickly determine whether you should try it.

Check FAQs and Other Notes

Don’t forget to check the FAQs and Other Notes sections below the plugin description (some plugins may not have them).

These sections usually contain useful information about using the plugin. Sometimes, users complain that a plugin does not work without even reading about how to use it.

When you are trying a plugin, make sure you read these sections to configure and use the plugin properly on your website. You might also find some other excellent tips there.

For example, if you are looking for a plugin that adds a widget, you might find out that it also provides a template tag that you can use in your theme or a shortcode that you can use in posts and pages.

You may also see the plugin author’s advice on adding your own CSS styles to the plugin output.

Testing a Plugin

WordPress plugins can slow down your website if poorly written or don’t follow WordPress coding standards.

To check for this problem, you can go to Pingdom or any other site speed-checking service. Test your website’s page speed before activating the plugin. Then, take screenshots or note down the results.

After that, go back to your WordPress website and activate the plugin. Now, test your website speed again.

If the plugin significantly slows your site’s speed, you should try finding a better plugin.

For example, in the screenshot below, you will see that a plugin has added an extra 0.8 seconds to our test site’s load time, making it significantly slower.

For more details, you can see our complete guide to WordPress speed and performance.

Giving Back to the WordPress Community and Plugin Authors

WordPress is a free community software, as is the WordPress plugin directory. Plugin authors put much time, hard work, and creativity into writing those plugins.

You can help them in many ways:

• Donate: If you find a plugin useful and the author has a Donate URL on the plugin page, please consider donating some money. It is not the price of the plugin but a token of appreciation instead.
• Rate the plugin: As we mentioned, many users don’t feel inclined to rate a plugin that works well. You can help break this trend. When you find a plugin you like, consider leaving a rating and a review. A few lines are good enough to let people know about your experience with the plugin.
• Mention the plugin on your blog, Twitter, or Facebook.

What to Do When a Plugin Doesn’t Work

If a plugin creates an error or does not work, the first thing you should do is determine whether it conflicts with another plugin or WordPress theme.

You need to deactivate all other plugins and activate a default WordPress theme. Try testing the plugin again. If it still does not work, then you might want to open a support thread.

Visit the plugin’s page in the WordPress directory and click on the ‘Support’ tab. Scroll down till you find the support form and fill it out.

Remember that WordPress plugins are open source, which means that they come with no warranty and that the plugin authors are not required to answer your questions.

However, most plugin authors care about their code and will try their best to answer support questions whenever possible. You can check out our guide on how to properly ask and get WordPress support easily.

Bonus Resources

The following are a few additional resources that will help you use WordPress plugins more effectively:

• Do Inactive Plugins Slow Down WordPress? Should You Delete Them?
• How Many WordPress Plugins Should You Install? What’s too many?
• Is It Safe to Use Outdated WordPress Plugins? (Explained)
• How to Enable Automatic Updates for WordPress Plugins and Themes

We hope this guide helped you choose the best WordPress plugin. You may also want to see our expert pick of the essential WordPress plugins for every website and our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

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