WordPress Plugin Worst Practices?

If you purchase through a link on our site, we may earn a commission. Learn more.

Usually on WP Mayor we review quite a number of free and premium plugins that provide amazing additional functionality to WordPress. We do our best to promote these plugins, and we are very happy that there are thousands of great plugins for WordPress.

However this week I had quite a negative experience with a particular pair of plugins hosted on the WordPress.org plugin repository, and I'm here to tell the story.

Table of Contents
WP Engine High Performance Hosting
BionicWP Hosting

Usually on WP Mayor we review quite a number of free and premium plugins that provide amazing additional functionality to WordPress. We do our best to promote these plugins, and we are very happy that there are thousands of great plugins for WordPress.

However this week I had quite a negative experience with a particular pair of plugins hosted on the WordPress.org plugin repository.

Before anyone comments about the plugins themselves, I must say that I have not checked whether they do the job they claim to do, and they might do it fantastically well. My main issue is with the absurd UI they employ, as well as the in-your-face advertising inserted into the admin pages.

The two plugins are the following:

Let’s start by the promo banner they use on the plugin’s download page on WordPress.org. My first impression is that this seems like a promotional banner for the company and its services, rather than for this particular plugin:

Things get worse however. Upon installing and activating these two plugins, I was shocked to see their entries in the dashboard menu, with a bright green background, as if they’re screaming ‘Hey you, we’re the most important item in your menu!!!!!!’. And that is not even the hover state….

At this point, I am already making my way to the plugins page to uninstall these plugins, but the fun doesn’t stop here. Here are their entries in the plugins list, compare it to the ‘innocent’ and standards-compliant plugin above it:

Again they use a different background colour, insert their logo and also a green banner advertising their services. My impression when I see such things is that they are an unprofessional company that is not worth working with.

Another bad practice I am noticing is that the plugins display a red warning box at the top of every page in the dashboard, saying that the plugin is not configured. This is all well and good, but please provider a button to close and disable this warning, maybe I’m not ready to configure the plugin just yet, and I don’t need any reminders to do so.

At this point, I dare myself to take a look at the plugin’s configuration page, given that the red action box is imploring me to do so with no option to disable it. What do we find here? Lots of advertising, that’s what:

Both of these plugins operate on the freemium model, whereby you can upgrade to a paid version which has more features and better performance, as they claim. So they do their best to provide as many call to actions as possible, to encourage people to upgrade. Apart from that they again use big banners to promote their company services, as well as put a big red box imploring you to enable a credit link.

At this point, I’ve had enough with this kind of promotion inside a plugin, and I am dead sure I won’t be using this plugin for myself or for any of my clients. Hence I just navigate back to the plugins page and delete them from my site.

Now I’m sorry that I had to mention these plugins specifically, but it was a perfect case of things done badly. Let this be an eye-opener for plugin developers to do things the right way. I hope Acurax will realise their mistake and come in line with WordPress plugin standards, and I will gladly do another review about the functionality of their plugins. I want to stress that I have nothing against Acurax themselves, nor can I judge the quality of their work, this is purely an article criticising the way they have built their plugin’s interfaces. To their credit, I have looked at the support forums of their plugins and found that they respond in a very timely fashion to each support request. In that area they are surely being exemplary to other plugin developers, so I hope they do the same in the user interface area and remove the intrusive advertising they are currently using.

What do you think? Should such plugins be allowed in the WordPress plugin repository, or are they a detriment to the value of WordPress, especially when installed by first time users?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure to subscribe to WP Mayor’s RSS feed.

Jean Galea

Jean Galea is an investor, entrepreneur, and blogger. He is the founder of WP Mayor, the plugins WP RSS Aggregator and Spotlight, as well as the Mastermind.fm podcast. His personal blog can be found at jeangalea.com.

Discover more from our archives ↓

Popular articles ↓

7 Responses

  1. Hi, I have written a post about something similar, a very short note only, this is one of the biggest problems of the WordPress community development.

  2. Absolutely. I had someone install tht plugin on a site I was helping her with and it caused tons of problems, not to mention how annoying it was. I’m actually surprised they haven’t banned that one.

  3. Sadly there is that and worst in the repository. Things have gotten kinda yucky in there in some areas. This is an area where rules need set so that development teams know what is and is not acceptable. There also needs to be a mechanism for getting those out of the database.

    Kim

    PS: Tried to tweet the post and the twitter button simply opened the same post in a new tab/popup. Didn’t work as planned LOL

    1. Thanks for pointing that out Kim, there seems to be a conflict with WordPress SEO and Jetpack sharing icons, should work fine now.

  4. Hilarious but wordpress.org is full of these pathetic plugins. Why there’s no rules to limit them.

Share Your Thoughts

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Claim Your Free Website Tip 👇

Leave your name, email and website URL below to receive one actionable improvement tip tailored for your website within the next 24 hours.

"They identified areas for improvement that we had not previously considered." - Elliot

By providing your information, you'll also be subscribing to our weekly newsletter packed with exclusive content and insights. You can unsubscribe at any time with just one click.