Why We Love Paying for WordPress Plugins

Josh Mallard on April 18, 2017

Everybody loves free! You get what you want and you don’t have to give up anything for it!

But is it the best “value”- even at $0.00? Is anything ever really free? Can we really get something we want without trading something for it?

love-paying-wordpress-plugins

TL;DR Why we love paying for plugins

  • You can trust they will be updated and improved over time
  • They are aĀ safer cart to hitch your horse to for the long haul (path dependency)
  • Support exists and is usually very helpful
  • The author / company has a VERY keen interest in your success with their plugin

What about free WordPress Plugins?

Don’t get me wrong, we love free plugins too. There are free plugins that we use almost all of our WordPress projects. There are many high quality and reliable plugins built by people that we know (some we like šŸ˜‰ ) and trust.

Why pay for WordPress Plugins?

However, we really love paying for premium plugins as well. But, when many in our community expect things for free, we feel the need to dig into why we love to pay for WordPress plugins.

Open Source works phenomenally, but sometimes the author / company’s interest in providing well for themselves is an even more effective and predictable incentive.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
– Adam Smith
The Wealth Of Nations, Book IV, Chapter II

Quality of the Plugin Code

The first thing you might expect us to reference here is quality. The assumption is that if you get it for free you must be sacrificing quality.

In reality, free does not automatically translate to a lack of quality. Conversely, paid or premium items do not automatically guarantee a high level of quality.

Quality in WordPress plugins is a highly objective matter. Does the code follow security best practices? Does it do what it promises (and many times, only what it promises), and is it easy for our clients to use. (Note: here is how we feel about extending Enterprise-level WordPress with plugins)

In our space, there are many free plugins that greatly outrank the premium plugin alternatives in terms of quality.

The reasons are also tied to incentives. Companies can build extremely profitable businesses on the back of a free plugin via “Pro” add-ons, extensions, support, and connections to larger service projects. (AKA Freemium) Also, many individuals take pride in their public WordPress reputation and are incentivized to maintain quality as a matter of pride (no negative interpretation implied).

Even though they’re not being incentivized through direct plugin sales, there is still a huge pressure to maintain the quality on a free WordPress plugin.

So, quality could be a reason but why else do we really love to pay for plugins?

Long-Term Reliability

It’s reliability. If there is no path to getting paid for their work, we cannot rely on that developer to keep the plugin updated with current WordPress versions or provide support for the occasional bugs.

For us, this is the most important reason why we’re happy to pay for code used on our client sites. We’re not looking for quick solutions for these features. When we choose a plugin (or build a feature ourselves) we are committing them to a “path dependency“.  We want it to be a fantastic path.

With any plugin that we choose to integrate, we’re looking for long-term, quality, and reliable sources that will best serve our sites for as long as possible.

How about you?

Have you experienced this? Any tools or resources you excitedly pay for rather than get for free? Tell us about it in the comments!

What Does “WordPress for Enterprise” Really Mean? – Extending WordPress

Josh Mallard on January 31, 2017

wordpress-enterprise

We previously addressed the fact that there isn’t exactly a WordPress Enterprise edition. However, you will regularly see people talking about “WordPress for Enterprise”. What does this mean? How does this differ from “WordPress for bloggers”?

In this post, we’ll look at how you would approach extending WordPress for an enterprise site.

A Different Approach to How WordPress is Extended

When using WordPress to develop your website, the core software can be extended in two ways:

  1. Via plugins
  2. Via your active theme

This extension of capabilities is the same for both blogs and large enterprise websites. However, there is a key difference when approaching extension for enterprise websites – the intentionality of the extension.

Intentional, Custom Development

It would be a gross misuse of resources to custom-develop every feature built for an enterprise website on WordPress. However, custom development is far more common for enterprise-level websites.

For these sites, we don’t want to piece together a feature that is “kinda what you need” using a variety of different plugins. We want to build exactly what you need in the cleanest way possible. This greatly reduces the potential points of failure for the ongoing maintenance of your site and means running your site is much more enjoyable.

Custom Development Security

When doing custom development, there should always be an intentional review for security best practices. For example, when developing any sort of user interaction, a careful review of every action should consider:

  • Capability – Does the user have permission to perform this action?
  • Intentionality – Is the user intending to perform this action?
  • Validation / Sanitization – Am I getting the type of content that I’m expecting?
  • EscapingĀ – Is the content I’m outputtingĀ safe to display?

Tip: There are some great engineering standards that I’ll commonly reference when building out features for client projects. 

Careful Vetting of Plugins

There will also be free, open-sourced plugins (there are almost 50k free plugins!) as well as premium plugins used on an enterprise website. For a typical WordPress website, this can be a pretty haphazard process. Search for the feature you want and install the plugin!

But, for enterprise websites, the plugins used will be carefully vetted. Among other factors, a few key things need to be considered:

  • Popularity of the plugin (e.g. how many times has it been downloaded)
  • Reputation of the plugin (what does a Google search reveal)
  • Reputation of the plugin developerĀ 
  • Update history of the plugin (how often and when was the last update)
  • User review history of the plugin
  • Plugin support history (take a look at the support tab threads – is the developer responsive? Are there many problems?)Ā 

The goal is to have all code that extends the default WordPress functionality on your site to be secure and performant. This is a crucial foundation to have set when we start to factor in the considerations needed for hosting and maintaining WordPress for Enterprise.

Sign up for the LimeCuda Zest to learn more about…

Considerations for Hosting and Maintaining WordPress for Enterprise Websites.