Not recommended anymore

I’m used to actually recommend this solution, but I do honestly not remember anymore why exactly. Probably because I was new to the “Elementor” world at some stage and thought that this Essential Addons perhaps is a good fit. However, I’m really not happy anymore and here are the reasons:

Quality Assurance
Obviously this plugin gets used 400k+ times. The Pro version probably also gets used at least 20k+ times (if not even more). However, it seems that this is not serious enough, otherwise I really cant understand why you always release something which is not even ready to be released.

Broken Live Sites
Yeah yeah, I know – don’t worry. But reality works a little bit different. Clients do not always want to spend extra money to have a webdeveloper/webdesigner/whatever cloning/staging the live site just to test out the most newest minor version of a plugin. Imagine an average site has 20+ plugins most likely and you have to test every site, every scenario and just everything as soon as a minor version of any of those plugins gets released. You quickly end up with only testing plugins instead of properly doing your job.

I’d expect that the developers of a plugin are doing their best to build confidence and trust, so the users can just update their plugin with peace of mind. But well, obviously you love to surprise us.

Weird blue line
IWhat are you trying to do now? Admin-wide notifications to advertise your other products? Seriously? I’m not even sure what this is but it seems just WRONG! We do not need more notifications. Especially as a Pro User I’d expect to not get bombarded with additional ads about your other plugins!

Manual Updates?
Welcome in 2020! Ok, this was still in 2019 but still – why the heck should someone update the plugins manually? The only reason I find is because it has been poorly developed in the first place, everything other than that is no valid reason honestly. So, thanks to this I was in the bad position to wait weeks until I was able to receive the “new” (broken) version of Essential Addons Pro from one of my clients. Initially they prefered to buy it themselves because I told them that this would be the better solution and won’t cause any troubles because updates will be straight shipped to the site. I told them that they do not have to worry about to always download the latest version and send it to me by e-mail. Now you probably can imagine how confused they were as I asked them to download the latest version and send it to me.

Well, after so many issues over the past year. Ordered to manually update the plugin. Had always issues with one or the other “feature” and spend many hours debugging weird issues on the website without ever thinking about that suddenly another plugin is at fault. (first time there was an issue some months ago where the CSS has been oviously writtin into an external CSS (?) for performance reasons. However, this CSS got deleted again causing a few display issues, and now its the instagram widget which obviously causes a layout issue resulting in debugging with many questionsmarks in my head, asking myself where the fu** is this issue coming from. Ahhh….there it is…the Essential Addons Instagram widget.

I’m sorry, maybe I’ve got a bad day today, but I’ve had enough of this solution. I say it as it is: I’m not happy with this and will most likely not further recommend this solution. To many too bad things happened in the meantime and I really do not want to seem unprofessional by recommending this “solution”.