What one veteran WordPress user thinks about plugins, part zero.
The following is my understanding, opinion, etc.
I’ve been using WordPress since 2012. It’s a great platform. AI tells me that, as of today, around 43 percent of the web runs on WordPress.
At surface level, WordPress is easy to load up and post from. Next, some users want to manage their content, enhance how it’s displayed, reorganize it, etc. Often, that’s where plugins come into play.
I recall learning about plugins and using a few in my early days. They seemed great – one would load a plugin, then get access to surprisingly convenient utility.
In my case, there were two such plugins, each offering something I could have done myself but only after a lot of programming. Both plugins were free, and offered such utility with minimal effort. I really enjoyed using them.
One crashed fairly early on – it just stopped working. It didn’t seem to make much of a mess, nor did it affect many posts. What it did, I admit, seemed too good to be true. When it stopped working, I just continued without it.
The other plugin was key for several in-depth posts. When it broke, it made a mess, since it was a presentation plugin. Once it failed to encode the content meant for it, the raw code was exposed. While it all seemed harmless enough, it was unsightly and made those posts useless. I stopped using that plugin, or any like it.
Both that plugin, and the one that broke earlier, were free. Paid ones might have more and better support. However, I think a user would have to be quite attached to a plugin to keep using it after its breakage crashed their site.
Nowadays, I typically use a cache plugin (more about that later), and sometimes nothing else. I’ve even had a cache break on me, giving an error message where my site should have been displayed – not fun, but I recovered from it.
That said, many WordPress users seem to depend on and celebrate all kinds of plugins. WordPress is PHP-based, so the potential utility of a plugin is virtually unlimited.
I plan to continue about WordPress plugins.
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