As technology continues to revolutionise the way that you run your business, it seems as if there’s an almost infinite number of software solutions now available to help support your day-to-day business operations and make life easier for you and your team.
Many of these software packages and SaaS products also come with an entire marketplace full of themes, plugins and extensions that can be purchased and installed within the software based on your business needs.
As technology continues to revolutionise the way that you run your business, it seems as if there’s an almost infinite number of software solutions now available to help support your day-to-day business operations and make life easier for you and your team.
Many of these software packages and SaaS products also come with an entire marketplace full of themes, plugins and extensions that can be purchased and installed within the software based on your business needs.
The problem is that these marketplaces often contain hundreds, if not thousands of plugins and extensions, all at varying degrees of quality and cost, and unintentionally installing a poor-quality plugin can significantly affect your software and cause ongoing issues for your business operations.
That’s why today, we’re going to discuss what is a plugin, what are the best practices for using plugins in your business software and give you everything you need to know about plugins, with a focus on website Content Management Systems (CMS) and Digital Experience Platforms (DXP), to help protect your organisation and guarantee optimal software performance.
What is a plugin?
A plugin, or an extension module, is a piece of software often built by an independent developer or company that can be installed within your CMS or DXP to extend upon the core capabilities of the platform and increase its functionality to suit your business needs.
As mentioned, there are huge marketplaces of plugins and extensions dedicated to specific platforms online, such as WordPress Plugins, Salesforce AppExchange and many more. Unfortunately, these marketplaces are often unregulated, and anyone can contribute to the pool of plugins, putting the onus on you to carefully review each plugin before installing it on your system.
If you do happen to install a poor-quality plugin, it can cause major problems with your core software, including bugs, performance issues and frequent crashing. What’s worse, plugins can be quite difficult to uninstall completely, as they become heavily intertwined with your platform’s back-end code.
So, how do you choose the right plugin for your business needs?
When considering a plugin to boost the functionality of your CMS, ask yourself the following questions as part of your vigilant review process:
1. Do I really need this plugin?
Determine whether the benefits of the plugin outweigh the increased management costs to your business.
2. Is this plugin compatible with the most recent version of my software?
It’s not unusual to see plugins that are built for a certain version of your software, such as a range of WordPress plugins, however you find they aren’t maintained as new versions arrive. This is a big red flag and a sign you should avoid this plugin altogether.
3. Is this plugin going to be compatible with my other plugins?
This one is a little more difficult to determine. Try to do some research to find out if there have been any documented issues with one or more of your plugins working together. You can usually find this information on software-specific forums.
4. When was this plugin last updated and how many updates has it had before?
If the plugin in question is recently updated with a long history of previous updates, this is often an indicator of a well-maintained piece of software. However, if the last update was more than a couple of years ago, it’s probably best to walk away.
5. How many downloads or installations does this plugin have?
A high number of installations is often an indication of a quality trusted plugin product especially when it’s coupled with evidence of good developer support.
6. What do the reviews say about this plugin?
Don’t just read the good reviews. Look at the bad reviews as well to see what issues other users have had with this plugin. Oftentimes, reviews can suggest problems such as needing a certain level of experience to properly configure the plugin. Understanding this can save you a lot of wasted time, money and energy.
7. Are there any hidden costs attached to this plugin?
Sometimes a plugin can limit the number of users if you don’t fork out additional fees. This doesn’t just apply to the users of the plugin either – it includes anyone who uses your entire CMS. This can severely constrain your business and limit the number of staff that can contribute to certain business activities, such as website marketing.
The recommended digital stack for best practice website plugin management
To help protect your website and your business, the best thing to do if you are going to use plugins is to first create a development or test version of your website. This is a complete carbon copy of your live website that is hidden from other internet users behind a password-protected wall. This helps to prevent any confusion with your live site.
Using this development version of your site, you can safely install plugins and make other changes without compromising your customer-facing website. If there are any issues, you can easily restore a backup of your site and try again.
If you’d like to shoot for absolute best practice, you should also make a staging version of your website, where major content updates can be made to allow for testing and stakeholder approval before making these changes on your live site.
Below, you can see our own DDSN digital stack as a business. Our testing processes vary based on whether the development is small and unlikely to cause issues, or large with the potential to cause total failure to business-critical functions.
Best practices for installing plugins on your B2B website
Once you’ve found a plugin or extension that you’d like to install, take the following steps to ensure the integrity of your business website for your customers:
- Prepare use cases and determine the testing plan required for the new plugin. This can be automated or manual testing.
- Take a copy of your live website database back to your development or test environment to accurately emulate your live site.
- Install and configure the plugin as required.
- Undertake a smoke test to trial the most fragile and critical business features of your website with the new plugin integration. To find out more, take a look at our enterprise testing processes.
- Verify the function of the new plugin by running the test plan you designed in Step 1 for the new plugin functions.
- Extend your smoke test plan to include all of the new features that are critical to your business function.
Pro Tip: Limit the number of plugins that you use with your software
As a general rule, the more plugins you use, the more likely you are to experience issues, as each of the connections between your plugins and your software are sources of fragility.
It’s also important to remember that your core software is often updated automatically by the developers to keep you running on the latest version. This can cause multiple failures at upgrade points, however, as updates are often not backwards compatible with your plugins.
While many developers try to get around this issue by turning off automatic updates, this can compromise the security of your website or software platform. The best practice is to simply minimise the number of plugins you use altogether to help minimise failures.
If you’re struggling to manage your software plugins, consider Acora
With so many things to remember when it comes to choosing and maintaining your plugins, it’s easy to feel as if it all seems too hard. That’s where Acora can help.
Acora is an advanced and affordable digital experience CMS platform with a policy of no plugins – EVER!
Our digital platform comes jam-packed with comprehensive and robust features that allow you to create the perfect bespoke solution for your business – in its entirety.
Every week, we introduce more new features to Acora, with each one individually verified by our developers for your safety and benefit. For more information, check out the list of our latest features, as well as our roadmap for future development.
Contact us today for a free demonstration of Acora in action to see how we can enable your business to thrive without plugins.
Ask for a demo