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Five Plugin Red Flags WordPress Hosting Clients Need To Know About

Five Plugin Red Flags WordPress Hosting Clients Need To Know AboutThe fact that WordPress is open source and has such a huge, vibrant developer community is great. For the most part, the huge number of plugins available come with the security afforded by millions of downloads, high ratings, and reliable developers who have worked hard to become known figures in the community.

However, not all plugins are safe and automated protections you may rely on, aren’t effective as pointing out which aren’t. This is because a plugin is a package of PHP code that may also contain files such as images or JavaScript. The code in a WordPress plugin has privileged access to the site and its database. Any JavaScript code is trusted by visitor’s browsers. Because of this, it’s important to make sure that it doesn’t contain security vulnerabilities or malware.

Almost all of the most popular plugins in the official repository are perfectly safe. Plugins with many thousands of users are intensely scrutinized and problems come to light quickly. But there are tens of thousands of WordPress plugins and it’s wise to be vigilant.

The best way to find out if a plugin is safe is to check the code, but it isn’t reasonable to expect that of most WordPress hosting clients. This article looks at how you can identify unsafe WordPress plugins without looking at the code, by identifying the top red flags for knowing what to avoid.

1. Is The Plugin From A Reputable Source?

To be safe, you should install plugins from the official repository or from the website of a developer with a good reputation in the community. Google the name of the developer to find out what has been written about their plugins. If you find mostly negative commentary or no information at all, you may want to find an alternative.

Check the version of the WordPress Plugin you're installing

2. Has It Been Updated Recently?

Abandoned plugins don’t get security updates and may be incompatible with your version of WordPress. Even if a plugin has not been abandoned, infrequent updates are a bad sign.

The plugin’s page on the official repository will tell you when it was last updated and which versions of WordPress it is compatible with. Avoid plugins that haven’t been updated in the last few months. Even if an old plugin seems to work properly, there may be hidden issues.

3. Does It Have Ongoing Support?

Does your WordPress Plugin have ongoing supportCheck the support section of the plugin page on WordPress to see if the plugin has continuous and active support. You’ll be able to see how many issues have been identified and how many have been solved by the developer community within the last few months. Moreover, by clicking “view support forum”, you’ll be able to see how active the plugin community has been and how much support it has from other users.

4. Is It A “Free” Premium Plugin?

Many developers of premium plugins also release a free version with limited functionality. It is perfectly fine to use these plugins. But if you find a fully functional premium plugin offered for free, do not install it. Plugin pirates install malware in these so-called “nulled” plugins.

5. Did The Plugin Recently Change Owners?

This isn’t always an indication of a problem: developers sell or transfer plugins for many reasons. But in recent months there have been incidents of popular plugins ending up in the hands of unscrupulous developers.

6. Does the Developer Have a Bad Reputation?

Before installing the plugin, it can be a good idea to check up on the reputation of the developer. A quick google search of their name can merit a lot of results here. Similarly, it can merit nothing at all. This, in itself, can be a red flag and suggest the developer is either new to the WordPress scene or isn’t trusted.

7. Is It Popular With WordPress Users?

Rating of the WordPress plugin on whether it is unsafePlugins with few users are more likely to cause problems. There are millions of WordPress sites, so if only a handful of WordPress users have installed a plugin, you should be cautious. There are a couple of possibilities: the plugin targets a narrow niche or it is being avoided by other WordPress users. It may also be a brand new plugin, but that should be a red flag too.

As a rule, stick to plugins that are installed on lots of WordPress sites: problems are more likely to have been noticed and ironed out.

 

8. Is It Compatible With the Latest WordPress Version?

Checking for updated compatibility is a good step towards being able to judge the reliability and safety of a plugin. The “Requires WordPress Version” will let you know how far back you need to go in order to have the plugin properly work with your website. Making sure you have the latest version is as much about security as it is about optimizing your WordPress site for performance.

Avoid this message for WordPress plugins

Finally, if you happen to see the message above, it’s definitely not a good idea to install the plugin. There’s a reason why the developer hasn’t updated it, and it’s probably not one you want to know.

The WordPress Community Is, In General, Reliable

There are thousands of honest, competent, and generous plugin developers. But there are some bad apples, as there are in any large community. Before installing a plugin, run through these seven simple checks to keep your WordPress site safe.

Blog Post SummaryLooking to get started with WordPress Gutenberg? Learn how to use it with our Guide to Gutenberg. We’ll take you through the entire process of setting up your first page with blocks.

Are you a developer looking to code your own applications with WordPress? Explore the benefits for headless WordPress and see if it’s the right choice for you.

 

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WordPress

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Why Migrate Your Website or eCommerce Store to the Cloud?

Why Migrate Your Website or eCommerce Store to the CloudWhen your website or eCommerce store is slow and your hosting provider has no solution, it is time to think about migrating to a new hosting platform. Unhappy hosting clients have lots of options to choose from: traditional shared hosting, dedicated server hosting, virtual server hosting, and more.

But many choose cloud migration to a modern hosting platform that combines the benefits of traditionally managed hosting with the flexibility and scalability of virtualization.

Just like shared hosting, cloud application hosting is a multi-tenant platform – more than one clients’ site is hosted on each server. But that is where the similarity ends. Cloud hosting uses virtualization and orchestration software to join many servers together into a large pool of compute and storage resources. Each site uses a slice of the resources in the pool.

What does that mean for hosting clients? The “pool of resources” model is more flexible than shared hosting or a dedicated server. When a site migrates to cloud hosting it gains superpowers. It can, for example, be given more resources whenever it needs them. When a site hosted on the Hostdedi Cloud is under heavy load, we can give it a bigger slice of the pool automatically.

Let’s look at some other ways a cloud migration could improve your hosting experience.

Scalable

When a site that starts life on shared hosting or a dedicated server grows too big, it has to be migrated to a different platform or more powerful server. In contrast, the cloud makes it easy to scale from small to enormous without migrating. A cloud hosting account has resource limits, but they can be increased indefinitely as the site grows. In the cloud, you will never experience a site that slows to a crawl because it is too successful.

Reliable, Redundant, and Fast

Reliability, redundancy, and performance are difficult for even the largest online businesses to achieve. For smaller businesses without a large IT department, a reliable, redundant, and fast hosting platform is too complex and expensive to build from scratch. But after a site is migrated to cloud hosting, it gains enterprise-grade reliability, redundancy, and performance for “free” – it’s baked right into the platform.

Secure

A well-engineered cloud platform makes it easier to build and maintain a secure site. The Hostdedi Cloud includes security features such as web application firewalls, a PCI-compliant hosting environment, and security hardening at deployment.

Rapid Setup

A new website or eCommerce store can be launched onto a cloud platform in seconds. Large and complex deployments may take a couple of hours, but that is much faster than other types of hosting, which can take days to be ready for migration. Rapid setup has other advantages too. It is quicker and easier to deploy testing and development sites on the cloud. Click a button and your new testing site will be ready and waiting.

Migrating your WordPress site or Magento store to a modern cloud platform is the solution to your hosting reliability, scalability, and performance issues – now and in the future.

  Download our free guide to Cloud Migration here. 

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Performance And Load Testing Your WooCommerce Store

Testing WooCommerce for Performance and SpeedSlow-loading pages and unresponsive interface elements are kryptonite for online stores. Shoppers expect a pleasant experience, and there is nothing pleasant about looking at a loading indicator for ten seconds or trudging through a multi-step checkout process that takes what seems like forever to load each page.

A fast WooCommerce store depends on dozens of hardware and software components firing in the same direction. Performance-optimized WooCommerce hosting provides the store’s main engine, but configuration mistakes and software bugs can throw sand into every page load and user interaction.

This article looks at why load testing can help to keep your WooCommerce store optimized, by finding areas for improvement and change.

What Is WooCommerce Performance and Load Testing?

Performance testing measures how a WooCommerce store performs on an ordinary day. How quickly do the home and product pages load? How long does it take for the shopping cart to be displayed after the user clicks the checkout button? Performance testing provides a baseline answer to these questions.

Load testing looks at performance under pressure. It answers questions such as these: How many concurrent users can a WooCommerce store support before performance becomes unacceptably slow? How does the store perform when traffic peaks during a sale? Load testing provides information about how your store performs under real-world conditions.

Why Performance and Load Test WooCommerce?

Performance and load testing put a WooCommerce store through its paces, revealing opportunities for streamlining and performance improvements.

By testing your WooCommerce site, you’re able to see how your hosting environment, application, and any plugins you have installed will work under pressure. You’ll then be able to see what areas need improvement – if any.

How to Performance Test a WooCommerce Store

A page speed waterfall with Google Chrome

An example page speed waterfall in Chrome.

The simplest way to load test a WooCommerce site is to time how long important pages take to load. The Google Chrome browser — and other browsers — include several tools to time page-loads and identify the causes of latency.

To do this in Chrome, head to the “More Tools” entry of the Chrome menu and choose “Developer Tools”. There are a couple of interesting tabs in this interface: Performance and Audits.

The Performance tab provides load-time measurements and a waterfall diagram that displays the page’s components and how long they take to load. This can give you a clear indication of what page elements can be optimized to increase your WooCommerce store’s performance.

In the Audit tab, you will find Lighthouse, a comprehensive performance testing tool that provides a wealth of information, including performance optimization suggestions. Once you’ve navigated to this tab, simply click “Perform an audit” to start the test. You will be given results in relation to four categories.

  • Performance
  • Accessibility
  • Best Practices
  • Progressive Web app

Under each category, you will be provided with a list of audits you have failed and audits you have passed. This gives you a great springboard for implementing more advanced page optimizations.

Alternate Tools for Testing WooCommerce

If you would prefer not to use a tool from Google that requires the Chrome browser, take a look at Pingdom tools, WebPageTest, or GTMetrix.
With these tools, you can change the location you want page requests to come from. This allows you to test the speed of your site worldwide. You can also add advanced testing conditions, such as the number of tests to run, the browser the page is rendered in, and more.

Load testing WooCommerce with Lighthouse

Load Testing A WooCommerce Store

Loading pages individually is useful, but it doesn’t capture the full shopping experience. To do so, a test must simulate several page loads, putting items into the shopping cart, checking out, and more. Lots of tests should run concurrently to determine how the store performs under real-world traffic conditions.

Load testing is more complex than performance testing and will typically require help from a developer who can automate the process. There are several web services that make load testing easier by allowing site owners to run simulated shopping trips from the service’s cloud infrastructure.

Load Impact is one of the most popular load testing services. It allows WooCommerce retailers to record a typical shopping trip using a Chrome extension and then run the same trip multiple times simultaneously.

Cloud load testing can be expensive, but it’s possible to build DIY load testing infrastructure using cloud or dedicated servers and open source software — that’s how we load test our performance-optimized WooCommerce hosting plans.

Blog Post SummaryRecently started your first WooCommerce store or looking to expand functionality? Explore these eight WooCommerce plugins we think you should know about.

Alternatively, but not take a look at the WooCommerce hosting plans we have available on cloud? They come with auto installs and a series of optimizations designed to help you get the most out of your WooCommerce store.

 

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WooCommerce

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Cloud Migration: Challenges And Solutions

Cloud Migration- Challenges And SolutionsThey say that moving home is one of the most stressful events in our lives. Migrating a website to new hosting can be pretty stressful too, especially if you aren’t well prepared. In our last cloud migration article, we talked about why you should migrate your site to a cloud platform. In this article, we look at the challenges you may face on your cloud migration journey.

In a properly planned migration, the site starts the day on one hosting platform and ends it in the cloud with minimal downtime or disruption. But it’s good to be aware of what could go wrong and what you can do to help the migration run smoothly.

What Cloud Migration?

Cloud migration can have unforeseen side effects if the people working on the site aren’t informed in advance. Discuss the migration plans with stakeholders to minimize disruption. It would be unwise of your marketing department to launch a new campaign on the day of the migration, or for developers to roll out major site changes just as you’re about to move the site to a new hosting platform.

Discussing the migration with stakeholders allows them to raise concerns: perhaps the marketing department is running tracking scripts that may break during the migration – if stakeholders know what’s coming, they have time to prepare.

Choose a Cloud Platform That Aligns With Your Objectives

There are many different types of cloud platform. Some, like the Hostdedi Cloud, are engineered to provide the best possible hosting for selected applications. Others are general server hosting platforms that require more work and technical knowledge to achieve the same result. Many provide minimal support. Your cloud migration will be less disruptive if you know what to expect from the cloud vendor.

Plan to Avoid Downtime

A well-planned cloud migration should cause minimal downtime. Some factors can’t be controlled, such as the time it takes for changes to DNS records to propagate, but with careful preparation and implementation, disruption can be kept to a minimum.

Search Engine Optimization

A badly executed site migration can negatively impact SEO. Cloud migration without a domain name change should not cause SEO problems. Migration can be more tricky if the site is moved to a new domain. A detailed discussion of domain name changes is beyond the scope of this article, but you should be aware of the potential for disruption if redirects and DNS record changes are not handled properly.

Planning is the best way to avoid the issues we have discussed. In the next article in our series on cloud migration, we will discuss how to build a successful migration plan.

  Download our free guide to Cloud Migration here. 

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Hostdedi

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