Mediaboss Marketing

How can you identify trustworthy themes and plugins? There are a few telltale signs. Here are some ways you can identify trustworthy themes and plugins so you can be rest assured the code is of good quality and, more importantly, safe.

WordPress plugin directory contains a rich and abundant collection of free themes and plugins. The great thing about the directory is that it is maintained and policed by a great team of contributors, including people like Ipstenu who is contributes directly to the WordPress core.

This maintenance is invaluable as they are very quick to act on reports for untrustworthy content. Abusive themes and plugins are promptly removed, and the majority are reviewed before the first iteration is published.

In the directory, look at download counts. Yes, there may be a new plugin which will obviously have a low download count but, generally, a plugin with more than 100,000 downloads is something you can trust more.

Additionally, any registered user can review a theme or plugin and rate it out of 5. Reviews are a great indication of how the plugin performs on people's sites. Reviews may also be useful to double check on specific features, or possible conflicts with other themes and/or plugins running on your site.

Read reviews that are rated 1/5. Reviewers generally rate something 1 out of 5 if a plugin is genuinely of low quality or doesn't work, but sometimes a user can give something a low rating because it doesn't work for themonly, not knowing that some other conflict may be happening. In addition, WordPress mods do check on reviews to overlook their substance.

Each theme and plugin hosted at the directory has its own support area. Take a quick look inside to see if there are a lot of issues and, if so, how much they could affect your own installation.

Also look at the proportion of threads labeled [resolved]as this shows the author's own activity within the area and if evidence that support is offered and potential bug fixes are being seen to.

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How to Choose Trustworthy WordPress Themes & Plugins