Use a Google trick, applicable to any website search, to easily find great WordPress plugins

We thought we might offer a tip today about how to search for WordPress plug-ins. You can read about it or watch the video below.

The search function for WordPress websites is notoriously barely adequate. To be fair, WordPress software is not meant to be a search engine. Rather, it is meant to be used to build websites, and boy does it do a terrific job at that.

But when building a WordPress website, it is often the case that you desire a particular functionality. To accomplish that you likely need a WordPress plug-in. You could build one yourself. But there are tens of thousands of existing WordPress plug-ins, so there stands a very good chance that somebody has already figured out a solution for the type of functionality you need.

Enter the need to find that solution.

The WordPress.org website is home to the principal repository of WordPress plug-ins. It’s here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/. Unfortunately, searching for relevant plug-ins using the native WordPress search is often frustrating because the search function is so poor. Principally it works best if you know the name of the plug-in you are searching for. Yet it is often the case that you don’t know the name. Rather, you can describe the functionality you want, but do not know the name of a relevant plug-in. If you knew the name, you wouldn’t even need to search for it, would you?!

In the video below, we show you how to use a function of the Google search engine to better find WordPress plug-ins right on the WordPress.org site. In sum, you direct Google to search only the WordPress plug-in repository on the WordPress.org website. Advanced Google users will know this trick. If you don’t know it, however, watch the video. Not only can you use this method on the WordPress.org website, but you can use it on any website. In the video, we presume that you have made Google the default browser search engine, so you can search Google right from your URL (location) bar, as we do in the video.

Due Diligence for Finding a Good WordPress Plugin

And as always when it comes to WordPress plug-ins, do your due diligence. Make sure to review multiple plug-ins. Look for indicators of quality. How many people are using the plug-in? How many reviews does the plug-in have? Are the reviews good? How often is the plug-in updated? How recently was the plug-in updated? Does it work with the latest version of WordPress? These are all questions you need to answer to your satisfaction.

Happy searching!

Photo by Forest Simon on Unsplash

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