I love WordPress plugins. If you read most of my blogs here, you’ll see that I give WordPress plugin options for just about anything.
Does that mean my site has a million plugins? No.
Actually, I only use a few to power my site because too many plugins are not always a good thing. “Everything in moderation,” as they say.
When WordPress Plugins Become a Problem
Plugins are programs. Really awesome programs that can do powerful things. But since they are programs, they take up space on your server. The more plugins you have installed, the more space you’re taking up the server.
What this means is that when your site loads, it has to go through all of these plugins/programs to bring up the site for users. You know what that means, right? Speed issues are likely to happen.
We’ve covered the importance of having a speedy site many times in our blog. Check one of the articles here.
It’s important that your site loads quickly, and too many plugins can hamper that speed, especially if you have A LOT of them.
Speed isn’t the only problem, though. There’s something else that too many plugin do that can cause problems for your site.
Some plugins intersect each other. You may have a WordPress optimization plugin that reduces the size of your images, but then have a plugin that specifically reduces the size of your images. When the both of them are active, they can start to bombard one another, and the next thing you know – the images won’t load.
A bigger problem is when you have so many plugins and then your site stops functioning. With so many plugins, you won’t know which one is causing the issue. That means you have to deactivate each one, see if your site works, and then activate each one while checking if the site goes back down. This may not sound so bad, but it really is a tedious and frustrating thing to do when you have a lot of plugins.
How to Clean Up an Overwhelming Plugin Problem
If you have more than 10 plugins, you have a plugin problem. It’s time to wean yourself off of them just a bit.
You do not need all of them, even though you may think so.
The first step is to determine which ones are absolutely needed. The following are some of the most important ones:
- Spam controlling
- Yoast
- WP optimization
Besides those, you have to start asking yourself how much you really need them.
If you can do anything to your site to make the plugins go away, do it. This may mean hiring a developer to take care of some coding issues. It might mean resizing your images in Photoshop before uploading them. You can even post your blog posts to social media rather than using a plugin for it.
Delete the plugins you don’t absolutely need, and ONLY keep the ones that you absolutely need.
Once you clear out your library of plugins, you may notice that your site performs much better. You may even feel like overwhelmed when maintaining your WP.
Need help with your plugin dependence? Contact us. We can help you decide which plugins you don’t need, delete them for you, and make sure your site is functioning as it should.
