The Good and Bad of Plugins and Themes

Video Transcript

In this class, we’re going to talk about the good and bad of plugins and themes.

Now plugins and themes add features to our WordPress sites that do not come with the initial installation of WordPress. And that’s one of the many benefits of WordPress being an open source program. So generally speaking, that is a broad overview of the good with plugins and themes. Of course, there’s a lot more, but that’s the gist of it.

The bad part of plugins and themes is that they need to be regularly updated to stay ahead of the hackers that find security holes in the otherwise solid code writing skills of the plugin and theme developers. Keeping the plugins and themes updated is super easy, and in many cases can be automated. Another of the bad parts regarding plugins and themes is not so much an issue with the plugins and themes as it is with us, the site owners, as we touched on briefly in a previous class when covering the site health tool, it can be a security issue, and frankly, my opinion, a performance issue, if we have plugins and themes installed, but are not active, because we are not using them. But that’s an easy fix. simply delete all plugins and themes that you’re not using it if you go into plugins, installed plugins, just as an example, all these plugins are installed, but only those with the blue line here to the left are currently active.

So if I’m not using these other ones, delete them, chances are pretty good. I know where to go to get them if I want to install them and activate them again. Now, of course, that being said, the site health tool may tell you to install at least one of the default WordPress themes along with the active theme that you’re using. The other possible bad thing about plugins and themes is where you go to get them to begin with. When you’re looking at free themes and plugins, you should only get them from a trusted source like wordpress.org is repository for themes or plugins.

There are a lot of tests that these plugins and themes must pass before being allowed in the wordpress.org repositories. And that may not be the case for the free items outside of the repository. Even paid themes and plugins should only come from trusted sources. So before you install plugins or themes into your WordPress site, do your research ask around if you’re not sure plenty of groups on Facebook and other social media or marketing or WordPress related forums that would be more than happy to give you information regarding themes and plugins that they themselves have probably used. Above all else. Have a fresh backup of both your files and database before you install a plug in or theme. Whether it’s free paid for from wordpress.org repository or not. It’s a good idea that before you install anything into your site, you have that fresh backup just in case. Well that’s going to bring us to the end of this class on the good and bad of WordPress plugins and themes. Thanks for checking it out and you have a great day.