TweetDon’t use Google to find free themes and plugins.
One great thing about WordPress is the availability of free tools to go with it. At the time of this posting there are 1,457 themes and 17,297 plugins in the WordPress repository. However, anyone can build a theme or plugin and there are plenty out there you won’t find in the repository. There are many guidelines for plugins and themes that people must follow in order to add their code to the repository. These guidelines are meant to protect you from malicious code that can turn your site into a spam machine or disable it completely. Unless you are very comfortable reviewing plugins yourself it’s best to stick to the official repositories.
Don’t get completely scared of from non repository plugins. There are some reputable companies out there that offer “free” versions of plugins in order to coerce you into a pro version. As a rule of thumb if someone is trying to up-sell you they probably don’t want to upset you. There are also many premium themes from places like StudioPress and Woothemes, as well as premium plugins like Gravity Forms and Scribe SEO. Most of these companies have been around a few years now and are highly reputable. Once again, if someone is trying to sell to the masses they probably don’t want to create a reputation for selling virus and spam machines.
For more information on the dangers of Google and free themes check out this article from WPMU.org.
Don’t ignore updates.
This applies to WordPress itself as well as themes and plugins. Updates are done for three reasons: add new functionality, fix bugs, fix security flaws. The first two reasons might not make or break your site. However, if you have a security flaw it can be a death nail. Recently an image editing code called “timthumb” had a massive security flaw. This code is used in hundreds of themes and left many people vulnerable. I can attest to the destructive nature of this security problem as it took down an old site I have a tendency to ignore. If you have multiple sites on the same server or run many sites on a multiuser install it can be especially devastating. Fixing one site is bad enough, 10 at once is even worse.
Don’t turn your site into a yard sale.
Ever go to a website or blog and think “this site has stuff all over the place, it’s a mess!” Do you really need to have 3 different sharing plugins scattered about the site, a bunch of of widgets streaming random information, or plugins that replicate core functions with a small tweak? You want people to come to your site for one reason: to hear what you have to say or buy what you have to sell. Turning your site into a Christmas tree can be very distracting and cause readers to lose focus.
Another problem with this is it can make your site extremely slow. Every plugin adds more code that has to load which increases loading times. Some are also poorly written causing it to load even slower than it should. And finally, it’s easier to get conflicting code with a ton of plugins. Javascript can be very finicky if done incorrectly and cause a whole site to act goofy. You might think you’ve trashed your site when really it’s a bad plugin that is just getting in the way of everything else. There are other ways codes can conflict but I personally find javascript to be the most common problem when someone has tons of plugins.
What is an acceptable number of plugins? It depends of course. Some people will tell you 10 and others say 20. There are also people that say zero and prefer to hand code everything into their theme. There are light plugins and there are heavy plugins. Typically plugins that create a fancy display, some cool trickery, or bring in information from outside sources are your biggest slow downs. If you have 15 plugins for sliders and live tweet feeds you will run much slower than if you had 5 and 10 plugins for things like affiliate link management or back end SEO.
What else can be drastic for a WordPress site?
