Category: Plug-in Review

Visualizer: Tables and Charts for WordPress

What does it do?: A simple, easy to use and quite powerful tool to create, manage and embed interactive charts into your WordPress posts and pages. The plugin uses Google Visualization API to render charts, which supports cross-browser compatibility (adopting VML for older IE versions) and cross-platform portability to iOS and new Android releases.

 

Details: Visualizer: Tables and Charts for WordPress plugin is a powerful and easy to use plugin used to create, manage and embed interactive, responsive charts & tables into your WordPress posts and pages.

The plugin uses Google Visualization API, DataTables.net and ChartJS to add responsive & animated charts, graphs and tables, which support cross-browser compatibility and display perfectly on mobile devices. You can greatly customize all aspects of the charts and tables, and import the data from Excel, CSV, Google Sheets and more!

 

 

Positive Reviews: 

“Excellent Plug-in”

Easy to use. Good appearance

 

 

”The best one I found” 

After trying a couple of options, this was the one that worked the best.

 

Negative Reviews:

“Visualizer Table Won’t Show Up for Normal Users”

Visualizer table won’t show up for normal users. It only works for Admins

 

“Broken”

Tried to update a simple data set, and after clicking save chart, it dumped the value column. All my data is lost.

 

 

I like this plug in however, I am not sure how useful it will be for my portfolio. I think the graphs would be good for a business website. They were easy to use and put together.

Smush

What does it do? Reduce image file sizes, improve performance and boost your SEO using the free WPMU DEV WordPress Smush API.

 

Details: 

-Optimize images, turn on lazy load, resize, compress & improve your Google Page Speed 

• Lossless Compression – Strip unused data and compress images without affecting image quality.

• Lazy Load – Defer offscreen images with the flip of a switch.

• Bulk Smush – Optimize & compress up to 50 images with one click.

• Image Resizing – Set a max width and height and large images will scale down as they are being compressed.

• Incorrect Size Image Detection – Quickly locate images that are slowing down your site.

• Directory Smush – Optimize images even if they are not located in the media library.

• Automated Optimization – Asynchronously auto-smush your attachments for super fast compression on upload.

• Without Monthly Limits – Optimize all of your images up to 5MB in size, free forever (no daily, monthly, or annual caps).

• Gutenberg Block Integration – View all Smush stats directly in image blocks.

• Multisite Compatible – Offers both global and individual Multisite settings.

• Process All Your Files – Smush will process PNG, JPEG, and GIF files for optimum results.

• Super Servers – Smush images with no slowdown using WPMU DEV’s fast, reliable Smush API.

• Convert to WebP (Pro Only) – Upgrade and automatically serve images in Next-Gen WebP format.

• Configs – Set your preferred Smush settings, save them as config, and instantly upload to any other site.

 

 

 

Positive Reviews: 

“It just works”

 

It does a good job reducing the file sizes.

 

“Great plugin to handle images”

Easy and great. It does what it should. Great job!

 

Negative Reviews: 

“REMOVED ALL IMAGES; DO NOT INSTALL”

This plugin removed all of my images on my website, do NOT install this trash plugin.

The amount of people who complain about this VS people who hadn’t run into this problem *yet* is too small to be noticeable in the reviews section, but make no mistakes, this problem happens consistently for a small percent of people who install this plugin.

RUN A BACKUP ON YOUR WEBSITE BEFORE SMUSHING!

This plugin is trash and EVERYONE should be careful before activating – you either lose all your images or everything works decent and you save 13% on your image sizes.

Reached out to developers and still haven’t heard back in 13 days… what a shame.

 

“I’d give it less than a star if I could”

I downloaded “smush” to compress my images as recommended by a website training course I signed up for…. DISASTER! After almost a whole day of apparently compressing the images, my site wouldn’t load at all!! No access to half my pages! I reversed the process which involved staying up til 3am to keep the screen open as it will abort if the screen goes off apparently, and still it’s taken me the whole weekend to put everything back in order as it interfered with my top bar menu, footer, all sorts of things I didn’t really think it’d need to touch. This was the ONLY plugin that I had installed (I always activate one at a time, till I make sure they work, thankfully!) Gutted! I still need to compress my images but very very nervous to try now! By the nature of my business, I need to include a LOT of images on my site. I’m using the ASHE PRO theme and have the latest versions of WP and PHP. I have no idea what went wrong but I would NOT recommend this plugin to anyone!

 

 

I like the plug-in, I think i will be very useful and convenient. By using this plug-in, I won’t have to resize pictures in photoshop.

HubSport

What does it do? HubSpot’s official WordPress plugin allows you to add forms, popups, and live chat to your website and integrate with the best WordPress CRM.

Details:  HubSpot enables you to grow your business better. It helps turn visitors into leads, nurture them into customers, and measure your business growth.

With HubSpot’s free plugin you can easily:

• Engage visitors with live chat and chatbots, and convert leads with forms & popups.
• Build beautiful, responsive email newsletters inside WordPress, and nurture your leads with marketing automation campaigns.
• Manage your entire contact database with HubSpot’s free CRM, and group contacts together with the built-in list builder.
• Measure your business growth in real-time with easy-to-understand analytics dashboards.

 

 

 

Positive Reviws:

“Supportive” 

Prompt and tech savvy support! Always nice to know we’re speaking the same language instead of going through support tiers. Thanks again for the quick fix guys!

 

“Serves its purpose and great support” 

As a startup company we use HubSpot since very recently and we are delighted with its features. It is making our soon to launch new WordPress-Woocommerce website the HUB for communication and sales. And we appreciate very much their support! 

Negative Reviews: 

“No WP user identification” 

Doesn’t identify logged in WP users by default in chat or analytics. You need a bunch of additional code to get this to work. This is a basic function that zendesk & tawk.to do out of the box with their WP plugins.

“Too big, too slow, won’t deactivate”

I think the title says it all, not worth it.

Tried to deactivate on my site, got a popup asking “why?” and no matter what option I chose, the page refreshed and nothing happened. Tried to contact support and they told me to clear my cookies, which of course made me leave the live chat, then they refused to reconnect me, I got a message saying “no one is in the office now” like 2 minutes later at 2 in the afternoon.

I just want this plugin off my site already!

 

I like this plug-in it has many features that will be useful once I start to regularly use my site.

WP Optimize 

What does it do? WP-Optimize makes your site fast and efficient. It cleans the database, compresses images and caches pages. Fast sites attract more traffic and users.

Details: 

It does it in three clever ways:

• It allows you to clean and optimise your database.
• It gives you the option to compress your images.
• It allows you to cache your pages, for super fast load times (read more caching information below).

 

 

 

Positive Reviews: 

“Great cache plugin! (3 benefits in 1)”

Simply great for your website. Even the free version is more than enough!

 

“Great Plug-In”

Plugin made very well and very functional, we are using it for a long time and has never given problems. 

 

Negative Reviews

“Fix this” 

I’m a huge fan of wp-optimize. Used it for years … no problems.

However recently, often after creating a post, in two or three hours, all the styling is removed leaving a blue and white mass of mess.

So I turned off (new and improved?) minify on the plugin and guess what? The problem disappeared. Cost me enormous amount of time and money. Time I would rather spend on content rather than chasing sloppy development.

This after a couple of weeks trying to find the problem. As with most plugins (and their updates), coders are sloppy. I protect my site against hackers but the biggest threat to it is updates.

Here’s an idea. Before damaging people’s websites and costing them money, get the damn update correct.

I hate being used as a beta test.

 

“Crashed” 

First plugin ever to crash my site and database. Had to do a database repair to get my site working again. Couldn’t repair table wp options.