Trawling through the WordPress plugin library, you will see thousands and thousands of plugins. The WordPress plugin database comes with no guarantees that each plugin is secure, efficient or that it is not already compromised or contains malware.
So how do you choose which ones you should use?
A number of plugin traits to look for are
- How many times has the plugin been installed? If the plugin you looking for is not a niche plugin, then you should expect it have been installed in the thousands if not tens of thousands.
- Do the plugin reviews average a high rating?
- Was the last update recent? I would call recent the last six months. Plugins are vulnerable just like any other pieces of code – if the developers are updating the plugin constantly, the it is more likely to be more secure than not
- Does the developer list terms of service or a privacy policy?
- Check to see if the plugin is compatible with the latest version of WordPress
- Browse through the plugin’s support forum to see if there are potentially any issue that you might face by installing it.