Plugging Out: These Are The Crappiest WordPress Plugins You Should Avoid

I hate being bipolar. It’s awesome.

Much like this funny quote depicts the tricky duality behind bipolar people, the same goes for the wide plethora of WordPress plugins. They can at the same time be the best and the worst thing about this popular CMS. Lots of (plug)ins, lots of (plug)outs, if you will. Anyone who has ever used WordPress professionally knows how beneficial it could be to utilize most of the cool and useful WP plugins in all their glory – with their glory, of course, being the ability to easily and cheaply add extra features and extend often limited WP’s built-in capabilities. However, the thing is that not all WordPress plugins are created equal.

Since anyone can upload a plugin these days, and many of them end up online without being thoroughly checked by WordPress, you might easily wind up installing a crappy plugin that will only make your life miserable, which is exactly the opposite of what a good WordPress plugin should ultimately do.

A good plugin should not have any security issues, should be regularly maintained, shouldn’t have an out-of -date code and should be compatible with other plugins. Here are some of the WordPress plugins that don’t really meet these requirements.

BackupBuddy

This plugin was a slam-dunk for a long time, but it managed to turn into one of the worst plugins out there over the last couple of years. BackupBuddy became so unstable and buggy, its developers should consider renaming it to BackupBuggy. Joking aside, many users did lose a lot of money trying to troubleshoot this plugin and make it useful again, but it turns out the only thing it managed to plug in was an added business liability. Some users even reported that, when it comes to shared hosting providers, they couldn’t get BackupBuddy to run at all on some of their pages. In order to avoid these issues, try VaultPress Lite instead.

Themeforest

Although highly rated, this one is definitely a plugin you will want to steer clear from. One of the biggest things the developers behind this plugin are boasting about is its responsiveness. However, according to our experience thus far,  the reality is pretty much the opposite. Themeforest plugin has a button in the admin which should “enable responsiveness”, but what this button will actually do is enable a code that detects if you are visiting the page via a portable device or a desktop computer, and it end up providing you with a completely different content.

Themeforest manages to fail at the one thing where it should excel – caching. Caching is perhaps the most important thing when it comes to performance, however, Themeforest just doesn’t make it work. To make matter worse, the performance of this plugin is significantly hindered by an insane amount of code – almost 10 times in size in comparison to other similar themes. Also, it comes with multiple heavy sliders, and it embeds an old version of the visual composer plugin. If you don’t want to lose your clients, or your hair for that matter, try using Elegant Themes, Genesis Framework or Headway Themes instead.

Akismet

Just like BackupBuddy, this WordPress plugin that is used for spam protection simply isn’t as good as it once was. Turns out, Akismet has been causing many issues over the last couple of years as it requires adding some other helper plugins to make it function properly. But even then, it still has many problems and doesn’t run smoothly. If you seek a full-fledged spam protection WordPress add-on, give Antispam Bee, WP-SpamShield or WP Zero Spam a try.

Google Analyticator

As a wrap, we would like to mention another plugin we never thought would let us down – Google Analyticator. This little module was a top plugin for many dashboards across the web, showing the top posts to users around the globe, but what we simply couldn’t turn our blind eye to were the constant popup ads that would manage to irritate even the calmest of the calm. So, if you don’t want to anger your beloved clients with these annoying popups, make sure you try Google Analytics by Yoast instead.

If you don’t agree with some of our opinions, or you happen to have different experiences with these, feel free to mention them in the comments.