WPMU DEV sucks – don’t use their plugins

This is the legacy left in their long history of sucky-ness.

1. Known in the developer community for being a ripoff company.
2. Poor code quality.
3. Poor support quality.
4. Poor business practices.

I hate wasting time on inferior products when I could be covering much more incredible solutions used everyday by professionals. But here I am…re-explaining myself for the 30 millionth time about why nobody should ever use any WPMU DEV products or ever take them seriously.

WPMU DEV is a ripoff company with fancy marketing.

When I was first aware of WPMU many over 5 years ago, WPMU DEV was a pretty much an abuser of the GPL license. If you don’t know what that means…it basically means anybody can create derivatives of your code work (basically “steal”) and relabel it as their own, even resell it for profit if they want. All WordPress extensions are bound by that license by default.

Whatever popular plugins were around at that time, WPMU DEV had their own generic store-brand version of it.

• Forms
• Membership
• Seo
• Image compression
• Caching
• Email
• Comments
• Ads
• Pop-ups
• Marketing
• Security
• Social
• Oh yeah, they had a pagebuilder, too!
• See their list of 100+ legacy WPMUDEV plugins.
• All their list of current premium WPMUDEV plugins.

You name it, they had it. Whatever plugin was successful, they did a copycat version of it.

WPMU DEV plugins are mostly crap.

This is probably why most of you are reading this page. It’s because you’re wondering about their plugins. If you don’t already know. Most of their plugins are junk and made fun of by developers all the time. Anytime we see a site with WPMU DEV plugins, we immediately assume the previous developer didn’t know what they were doing or not really even a “developer” at all.

Why are they crap? Who knows…

Maybe outsourced or built by low-grade developers. Maybe they have so many plugins that they don’t have time to properly maintain each one throughout the many updates of WordPress, PHP, or overall compatibility with other plugins.

• Hummingbird (cache) – crap.
• Smush (image compression) – crap. (Although some people like it.)
• Defender (security) – crap.

What makes them crap?

Poor coding, doesn’t work right, conflicts with other plugins, bloated, high memory use, etc. I can’t remember all the plugins I’ve seen and why I hated them. You’re welcome to research for yourself.

WPMU DEV has a long history of poor support.

I can’t even imagine how bad it would be. I know companies with only 1 or 2 plugins that are buried by support requests. I can’t imagine what WPMU DEV’s support staff would have to do supporting dozens of copycat plugins. You’ll see scathing reviews all over their internet.

WPMU DEV has a long history of unethical business practices.

Generally, they were overselling their plugins to be magical and then being difficult to refund or giving bad attitude in support requests when their customers weren’t happy.

Should you give WPMU DEV a chance?

I have the same answer all developers have….NO.

WPMU is probably the laughing stock of the WordPress extension eco-system, just like the AVADA theme. Will they improve? Are they getting better?

Actually, I think they’ve improved for sure. It used to be that they were called a FRAUD or SCAM…and now only associated with bad coding. I think it was a great move that they dropped so many plugins to focus on only a few. I do feel their support got better over the years (naturally due to having fewer things to support).

But I don’t see them ever becoming a quality development company in the future. They still don’t specialize in any particular niche. Still doing copycat plugins…check them out. The other thing too…is that if you’re going to do a copycat plugin, you plugin needs to have a unique feature or something to make it better than what it’s copying. But all their copycats never ascend to that. They’re just copycats (if even that) and completely inferior. At best, they price their plugins cheaper and that’s it.

Hey, if you like the cute superhero branding and low pricing, give WPMU DEV a try. But if you want serious plugins developed by people who actually care and passionate about providing solutions…try out a real development company.