Be careful when choosing 3rd party plugin or library

Choosing third party library, plugin, extension, service provider or deciding who are you going to cooperate with, defines the route you’re going to follow on your way to success (or fall).

Fact: If you buy junk, it won’t work. You’ll bin it and spend more money on something else.

After more than 20 years of web building experience, we’ve grown a third eye on our foreheads that’s telling us which third party library or plugin is right for us and which is wrong. Today, I’d like to share our experience with you and hand over to you our internal procedure for choosing 3rd party plugin or library.

I’ll explain to you in detail how we decide if certain solution is worth our trust and money.

You’re making similar choices every day. It doesn’t matter if it’s a big project at work, whether you’re about to refurbish your bathroom, fix your broken car, create a website for your business or build your personal blog. Chances are, you’re not able to do everything by yourself, so you must choose third party provider.

Let’s face it:

If 5 different handy men come to fix your bathroom — one after another, there’s 90% chance it will fall apart.

Likewise — if you glue up your website from 10 third party pieces, it will fall apart.

Even big companies are standing in front of a decision “who are we going to trust” when they’re choosing suppliers for their production.

Online world is no different. In fact, it is much more complicated to choose third party piece of your online jigsaw as the choice you have is endless.

While developing Pixenio (a brand new web-building solution for broad use by laic users, web agencies and professionals), we too, were standing in front of a difficult choice of third party elements we were going to use.

Check out our internal Best Practices infographics we follow when choosing the best third party component.