The plugin quality spectrum is enormous. I’d rather pay for something maintained than use something free and abandoned.
I keep a staging environment for anything I’m not certain about. It’s saved me more than once.
What I actually do
Performance is the thing most clients don’t care about until it’s a problem, and then they care a lot.
The temptation to over-engineer a small site is real. I try to resist it.
Still figuring some of this out.
