Use quality plugins!

Hunting for a WordPress plugin often means entering a jungle. There are tens of thousands out there… which to use? How to avoid getting burned?

Is the plugin going to be supported? Will it be maintained and compatible with next year’s WordPress? Does it appear to work, but under the hood is dangerous spaghetti?

Since we’re WordPress users, we have just as much experience, positive and negative, of these issues as our users. When we built updraftplus.com – in WordPress, of course – we did not take much time to research forum plugins. We did not want to delay the launch, so we used a solution we were already familiar with, without looking more closely.

This turned out to be a mistake; the plugin not long after stopped being officially supported entirely, and it needed a lot of manual attention to keep it going.

We’ve now replaced our forum with bbPress, which ticks a lot of boxes: been around for a while, made by the same authors as WordPress, widely used with over a million downloads, good rating (4.3 out of 5 from over 200 reviews), a responsive support forum of its own, a well-maintained changelog which charts the software’s progress. And (the icing on the cake for us), it had an importer for all our existing forum data – so the whole forum is still there. It’s even (with a little tweaking from us) the case that all the links that Google has indexed still work.

Now, if we’d gone with bbPress from day one, then we’d have saved a lot of work. “Quick and easy” is not the way to get your WordPress plugins, if you’re intending to still be around tomorrow. It always leads to trouble.

It’s our own experience with WordPress plugins that has shaped the development of UpdraftPlus. We believe that we tick all the right boxes too:

• Provable pedigree (the original Updraft plugin was launched in February 2011; UpdraftPlus came in 2012. Our parent company has been going and working with WordPress since 2007).
• Widely used – over a million downloads (in the top-50 all-time list of WordPress plugins)
• Good rating (4.8 out of 5 for the free version, from nearly a thousand reviews)
• Responsive support – which you can see on the public forums for both free and paid products (though most customers prefer to use the support ticket form).
• A consistent history of innovation (changelog)

We intend to keep this up. We keep breaking our sales records and have recently hired, and you’ll here about that soon. If you’ve not yet taken a look at our flagship product, UpdraftPlus Premium, then please do so!

David Anderson (lead developer, founder, UpdraftPlus)