How to Know It’s Time to Stop Installing New WordPress Plugins

WordPress is huge. Out of every ten websites you visit, statistics say that three use WordPress. It has a firm grasp on 60% of the content management systems market. Beyonce’s website uses WordPress, as does The New Yorker’s website, and the official website of Sweden.

There are some pretty good reasons why everyone is using WordPress. Flexibility is one of them — you can create any kind of website using it. WordPress is easy to use and customize, it’s SEO friendly, it supports multimedia, and it’s regularly updated. It has pretty much everything you need to create and manage a website. Whatever it lacks, you can easily add by using plugins.

Plugins can be very useful for increasing the capabilities of a WordPress website. You can use different plugins to achieve specific goals, like increasing conversion rates. You can use them for analytics, automation, or making the maintenance of your website even more easier. But if plugins sound to you too good to be true, you’re onto something. If you’re not careful, plugins can cause more harm than good. This is why it’s important to know when it’s time to say “no” to plugins.

Duplicate Features

Today, we have an abundance of tools that help us manage and grow our businesses. Even more so if some parts of the businesses take place online. It can be a WordPress website, an email marketing campaign, or social media presence. Whatever business activity happens online, or whatever online asset a business builds, there’s a tool to make it run better or easier.

It’s important to understand that many of these tools have ways of connecting with different assets. A real estate company, for example, can invest in a high-quality WordPress website. Instead of looking for a new CRM plugin for a website, the business can try to connect the real estate CRM they already have. Seeking separate solutions just for a WordPress website can be costly and time-consuming. If there’s a way to connect existing solutions with a website — and often, there is — that’s a point where you should say “no more.”

Too Many Needless, Outdated, or Inactive Plugins

The number of plugins you have installed on your WordPress website will grow with time. You can find new plugins that perform better. Some plugins might be well past their prime. And there are always those plugins you deactivated but didn’t bother uninstalling.

Once in a while, you need to perform a check of all the plugins you have installed on your website. You need to know which ones are working well, which can be replaced by a multi-functional plugin, and which are not supported anymore. You should also see which ones you’ve disabled and uninstall them if you don’t plan to use them anymore. But if you notice there are lots of plugins you don’t need any more, you should stop installing new plugins until you clean up your website of the old ones. It’s never a good idea to hoard plugins, and you should stop adding to the pile until you sort it out.

Performance Issues

The big sign that you should stop installing new WordPress plugins is when your website starts showing performance issues. Good loading speed is not just one of the marks of a great website, it’s a necessity. Your website visitors will not wait happily until your website loads. You might also notice that your website crashes too often, or that it’s starting to have an abnormal amount of security issues. You might also notice high bounce rates and that visitors leave your website quickly. All of these are problems plugins can cause.

It’s important that you understand that simply uninstalling a bunch of random plugins might not fix the problem. There’s also a good chance that the number of plugins you have is not the cause of the problem. You can have dozens of plugins installed, and your website can be working without a hitch. But you can have just two, and your website can be rendered useless. The performance issues your website experiences are caused by plugins that use too many resources, or plugins that are incompatible, or plugins that are simply bad. Until you pinpoint the problematic plugin, you should refrain from adding any new ones. Better yet, don’t get any new plugins until you learn more about how to check new plugins for issues before installing them.

No matter how useful they can be, plugins can be a source of problems for a WordPress website. If you want your website to avoid performance issues, you should practice responsible plugin installation. Install only the plugins you need. Choose plugins from respectable developers. And uninstall the plugins you won’t be needing anymore.