Photo by macinate

With the popularity of WordPress, plugins (and themes) are big money. However, let’s not beat around the bush. Big money also tends to attract some not so great sellers.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing I despise more than painting with a wide brush. In any industry there are always commendable leaders and smaller yet honestly good sellers whom we should all do business with again and again. On the flip side there will always be the bad apples. So, when laying down our hard earned money for WordPress plugins, how do we figure out who exactly we are buying from and who deserves our business again and again?

Watch Their History

There’s nothing more telling than that. Just because a seller is consistently pushing out plugins does not always make them a good plugin vendor. What you should be looking out for is

How often do they go back to update, fix and improve upon their older plugins?

There are many vendors who sell one new must-have-it-or-fail plugin after another. If you take a good look at the old plugins they used to put out, they are hardly heard of after the initial launch. Sometimes, you can’t even buy them anymore. So where do these plugins go? Chances are, in a dark corner never to be seen again because the sellers have already milked it for the money.

Imagine… how frustrating it would be if Apple or Microsoft kept coming up with a type of operating system every other month. I’m talking about completely new and fresh. I’d bet we’d not enjoy the level of computing we do today.

Good products are rarely built overnight. They don’t come out the gate to hit it out of the park. That is not the norm. Great products are almost always cultivated. Nurtured and built up over time. Yes, there will be some products that aren’t meant to be long term solutions and that’s fine if a seller has a couple of those in their inventory. But if their inventory is like a revolving door of new plugins after another. Just be careful.

There’s nothing more frustrating than landing a plugin you think will do what you need but shortly after, you find the seller can no longer support it they are out of the initial launch profits and there is no long term marketing plan in place to promote it. Either that or they are too busy with new plugins.

Ultimately, you’re left holding the bag and footing the cost too because now, you’ve wasted the money invested in the plugin, the time or outsourcing costs getting it to work and now having to back track to look for another solution.

In short, go with a good record of support with staying power. Not a good record of producing plugins. That just tells you they are good marketing new stuff. Not making good software you can count on.