Avoid The Dark Side Of Plugins
Published on September 17, 2017
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
Okay, so we’ve all heard Kyle say time and time again not to put more plug-ins on our websites that are not absolutely required. This is because typically, the more plug-ins you have on your site, the longer it takes your site to load.
Recently, I found another reason to really watch what plug-ins do to your site. The social sharing plug-in that I was using had started to get a bit dated, and updates have not been frequent at all. So, I decided I needed to find a new social plug-in and installed Shareaholic.
Shareaholic has a pretty good reputation online, and has a lot of five-star reviews associated with it from other users. However, after I installed it, I noticed one setting that was set to on by default, being related posts. Normally, when you see a related post option, plug-ins will display multiple posts from your site that are related to the content that you’re talking about in your current post.
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Related posts are actually a great way to get users to engage with additional content all over your website on various topics. However, the related posts feature included with this specific plug-in doesn’t do what you would normally think.
As you can see below, when enabled, the related posts feature of this plug-in tries to send traffic to other websites all over the Internet. Worst of all, these links are affiliate links for the creators of the plug-in.
Personally, I think this is a dirty trick, and worst of all, new users may not even realize that these links are affiliate links. Just wanted to give everyone a heads up and a reminder to always check your site and see exactly what plug-ins are really doing in the background.
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