With the current state of the world locking us all in our homes, we are increasingly turning to the internet (as if we weren’t spending too much time on it already!), and if Jeff Bezos can increase his wealth by more than $185bn in 2020 by selling us stuff, why shouldn’t we tiny little people try and get some slice of the pie – even a few crumbs would be more than enough for most of us.

With that in mind, we’ve had a look at five of the best WordPress plugins to help you set up and manage your growing online sales empire…

With the current state of the world locking us all in our homes, we are increasingly turning to the internet (as if we weren’t spending too much time on it already!), and if Jeff Bezos can increase his wealth by more than $185bn in 2020 by selling us stuff, why shouldn’t we tiny little people try and get some slice of the pie – even a few crumbs would be more than enough for most of us.

With that in mind, we’ve had a look at five of the best WordPress plugins to help you set up and manage your growing online sales empire…

Ten years ago, a potential WordPress theme buyer might stumble upon a site like ThemeForest. The themes on the site would primarily tout the hundreds of shortcodes they included. These shortcodes would allow the user to build anything they wanted with simple BBCode-like brackets around some tag or another.

The practice was not limited to ThemeForest. Nearly every theme development company at the time — and they were sprouting up by the dozens a decade ago — needed to compete in the same arena. Despite all their faults (never mind that no user could reasonably remember hundreds…

According to user reports, All in One SEO plugin for WordPress unilaterally turned on automatic updates. The auto updates coincided with a major upgrade which in turn caused multiple sites to suffer outages and other unintended behavior.

Automatic Updates Without Consent

Automatic update is a feature that allows plugins to update automatically without any action from the publisher. The common expectation is that this is something that a publisher opts into it.

Some publishers backup their WordPress installations before updating. That way if something goes wrong they can easily roll it back to…

@johnrisbyJohn Risby

Proud father, husband and author of incredibly long articles. MD of The Alcohol-Free Shop (www.alcoholfree.co.uk)

When you post something on the Facebook WordPress group on Christmas Eve about the poor quality of plug-ins and it gets 131 reactions and 118 comments within a few hours, basically all in agreement, you know you are not alone in how you feel.

The post in question was about the poor quality of far too many WordPress plug-ins, including paid for premium plug-ins, not just free ones.

To be clear from the outset, I’ll continue to refer to plug-ins throughout this…