Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

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When working with WordPress, can anyone recommend a trustworthy place to go for plugin recommendations?

The problems I find with WordPress are:

- WordPress core is missing a ton of stuff you'd expect to be there so you have to turn to plugins.

- It's hard to assess the quality of plugins. They conflict with each other, kill page speed, they break as WordPress is upgraded, and there's tons of bad advice you have to navigate around (I find this problem with PHP in general, where top voted answers/suggestions are bad so you need to keep your wits about you more-so than other communities).

Generally when I'm fixing WordPress websites, I'm stripping out all plugins (I've seen over 50 on one site before!) that have been added by non-technical users, then trying to find the simplest way with the fewest plugins to get the functionality back to what it was.

You can get pretty far with just ACF, a contact form plugin, an optimisation plugin (how is page caching still not built into WordPress?), and coding small features into themes directly.

> You can get pretty far with just ACF, a contact form plugin, an optimisation plugin (how is page caching still not built into WordPress?), and coding small features into themes directly.

This. I work on large, high-traffic WP sites a lot, and we're essentially keeping a hand full of plugins and writing everything else ourselves. Lots of plugins are complicated because they want to enable ordinary users to customize their behavior, which you don't need if you have even basic php skills. And from a code quality point, I prefer our own over most plugins.

If anyone builds sites for clients and uses a lot of plugins, it's because they don't have anyone that can write code.

Can you recommend any plugins in particular or a place you'd trust for plugin recommendations?

> Lots of plugins are complicated because they want to enable ordinary users to customize their behavior, which you don't need if you have even basic php skills

Yes, I've realised this too. Generally you pay for the features + customisability you don't use as well.

E.g. if you want to add social sharing icons yourself, just inline a few SVG icons with links to like 3 social networks into your theme and you're done. A social sharing plugin though will offer to connect to 100+ social network, with live share counts, icon choices, colour choices, page placement choices etc.

On top of this, most plugins aren't optimised and they'll load JS and CSS you're not even using (including on pages you're not using the plugins at all).

Similarly, I've seen contact form plugins that for a simple three field contact form will load underscore JS, backbone JS, fontawesome, jQuery and a pile of CSS.

I think part of the problem is WordPress plugins compete with each on features and need even more features on top to charge for the premium version, so page speed and robustness via simplicity get lost in the noise.

I can't recommend anything beyond ACF (and that I'm somewhat hesitant, it has a few annoyances) and maybe Autoptimize (feels stable, but haven't worked with a lot). I work with Yoast a lot because clients like it and editors know it, but I wouldn't recommend it. I hate all Permalink-Plugins I've ever seen. I don't do any caching in WP, I use varnish.

Otherwise I experienced exactly what you mentioned. Install a plugin, write code to dequeue its resources from all pages it's not running on. Of course, there are plugins that help you do that, but it's yet another plugin!

> I think part of the problem is WordPress plugins compete with each on features and need even more features on top to charge for the premium version, so page speed and robustness via simplicity get lost in the noise.

I agree, that looks like part of the reason for bloat, but most have also evolved over years. Most successful plugins have been around for a decade or so, and few people talked about web performance in 2010. That many authors initially just solved their own problem while learning php and shared their solution plays a part as well (not to mention that they often started writing them on php4).

With regards to Yoast SEO, I stepped away from that. Over the past few years there have been many instances where an admin_notice could not be removed. The last straw for me was last Black Friday sale, with a yellow flashing banner on all my admin pages. Not fun.

I use The SEO Framework now on most of my sites, and it is a good experience. It is made by someone who cares about his users instead of wanting to milk them.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/autodescription/

If you need to move data over from SEO plugin to SEO plugin, check out the Data Transporter plugin. https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-data-transporter/

Indeed. This is one of the reasons we started maintaining what is essentially a WordPress-for-enterprise distro, with a mix of first- and third-party code. The third-party plugins we bundle with it are from the select few sources we trust to build and maintain quality code (typically our peers).

> This is one of the reasons we started maintaining what is essentially a WordPress-for-enterprise distro, with a mix of first- and third-party code.

Is this available publicly? Most of my work these days is putting right WordPress sites (and setting up Varnish and ESI) rather than building them, but this would be of interest.

It sure is, and fully open source. https://www.altis-dxp.com/ (https://www.altis-dxp.com/resources/docs/getting-started/#cr... to jump straight to the download from Composer stuff; https://github.com/humanmade/altis for the repo)

This looks very useful - thanks.

The pre-approved plugin list (https://www.altis-dxp.com/resources/pre-approved-plugins/) returns 404 though :(

Thanks for the heads up, fixed!

Hmm, why Ninja forms? I've found it loads a lot of blocking JavaScript per page.

I think one of the largest and best place to find plugins is still CodeCanyon[0]. Because it has such a big audience and established market the good plugins are usually quickly separated from the bad ones.

[0]: https://codecanyon.net/category/wordpress

Even the high rated plugins there are pretty terrible and some are downright security nightmares. Just be careful.

Also have run into a ton of plugins that don't play nice with dockerized deploys (they want write access and don't use the native wordpress functions).

I agree, it's still a minefield and for a really big business where the site being down a few days is a disaster it's not the way to go. I still think that for the average user, WordPress + themes + plugins is the easiest (not best, but easiest) and cheapest way to go.

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