For many real estate agents and offices, unveiling a new real estate website can be a positively thrilling moment. With so many prospective buyers looking online first to shop for listings, here’s your chance to solidly establish your brand identity, corner the local market in the properties you specialize in, and attract more leads than you’ll know what to do with. But why stop there? Your new WordPress site is a versatile platform that can accommodate a wide range of flashy and useful plugins, that can add even more flair and interactivity for your site’s visitors, as well as make managing your site’s content easier.
At first, you add and install Akismet to help filter out comment spam. Then a fellow realtor recommends Jetpack, a plugin that includes a wide range of site performance and content tools, and you promptly set it up on your site. And one day, while you’re browsing the web, you stumble across a real estate plugin, which includes all kinds of bells and whistles for your site. You access your site’s dashboard, navigate to Plugins, locate the plugin, and activate it.
Suddenly, your site has ceased to function properly. Maybe you can’t access your site’s dashboard, your site is taking forever to load, you’re getting 404 errors on many of your site’s pages, or your site has crashed entirely. What went wrong?
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, a WordPress plugin is a program that extends the core functionality of your Content Management System, or CMS for short. There are tens of thousands of plugins available through WordPress.org, most of which are free to download and install. While plugins can be fantastic tools to manage content and enhance the appearance and performance of your site, they’re not all created equal. Many are riddled with bugs, prohibitively increase load times, compromise your site’s security… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. And these potential pitfalls aren’t limited to free or poorly-developed plugins; reputable & premium plugins still may not play well with your current version of WordPress and/or the plugins you already have installed on your site.
Picking the Best Plugins
This isn’t meant to scare you away from adding plugins – we just recommend that you exercise caution when shopping for new ones. To this end, here are a few suggestions to help you discern helpful from harmful plugins:
- WordPress.org allows users to rate plugins. If a plugin has an average rating of four stars or higher, this may be a good sign (but not the whole story, so keep reading); if it has two stars or less, you probably want to steer clear of adding it to your site.
- Check how many times a plugin has been downloaded , which is indicated by the number in parentheses next to the aforementioned stars. For example, if a plugin has been downloaded by over 150 users and maintains a four-star rating, that’s a point in its favor.
- Check how recently a plugin has been updated (click on the “Changelog” tab to view this). While a plugin may have worked great for everyone back in 2013, it may not work optimally with newer, responsive sites. Also, you may want to check out how well-supported a plugin is. Click on the “Support” tab, to see how quickly previous issues with the plugin have been resolved by its developers.
- On that note, if you have a responsive real estate website, you should ensure that any plugin that affects the appearance of your site is designed to work responsively.
- Take a moment to read the reviews. A plugin that works well for 95% of users may still conflict with a plugin that you currently have installed, and may seriously disrupt your site’s functionality.
It’s also a very good idea to get into the habit of backing up your site before installing or updating any plugins.
WordPress Maintenance Packages
On a related note, it’s important to keep in mind that the latest version of a plugin may conflict with existing plugins on your site, or your current version of WordPress; by the same token, updating WordPress itself may have the same undesirable results. For your peace of mind, we offer our WordPress Maintenance Add-on (Basic and Complete), a service which covers regularly-scheduled WordPress and plugin updates, backups, and cleaning up comment spam. As always, feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns.