The number of plugins you can install on your WordPress site exceeds 50,000. Although you wouldn’t by any means want to install all of them.
The question is: Is it possible to install too many plugins? And if so, how many is too many? What kind of harm, if any, can an excessive plugin addiction cause to your website? How should you go about choosing the right types of plugins for your site?
Do we really need it?
WordPress works just fine on its own, but you need plugins if you want to add extra features and functionality. Choosing the right plugins can play a large role in its success.
WordPress plugins have a few other traits: they live in wp-content/plugins/ in your WordPress installation. They’re visible in your WordPress Dashboard if you click on “Plugins”. And they can be activated and deactivated — allowed to perform their task or do absolutely nothing — on that page.
Most plug-ins are pretty simple, but some will perform complex actions that are “expensive” in terms of backend processing and will slow a website down. In other words, you could have a quick loading website with 80 plugins, and add a single, complicated plugin and lose half a second (or more) of loading time!
Plugins and potential issues
Depending on which plugins you have installed, how many are active, how they are coded, and what their purpose is, a number of potential issues can arise.
To avoid issues, it is also important that you uninstall any WordPress plug-ins that you don’t want to use, as they can become a potential liability. Keeping unnecessary files on your site also increases your WordPress backup size. This means that it will take more time for you to download or restore the backup.
It’s also vital that you keep your chosen plug-ins up-to-date. Using the most recently released versions will reduce script conflicts (which will affect your website’s performance) and decrease the chances of your website becoming vulnerable to spammers and hackers. In addition to updating to the latest versions, consider only using plugins that are compatible with your version of WordPress.
The security of your WordPress website should always be a major concern. No one wants to have all of their hard work destroyed by a hacker. Whenever this happens, hard-earned reputations can be lost overnight and businesses can be severely impacted, not to mention the effort and time involved in recovering from such an attack.
If you host your website at WP Engine, you just made your life easier because WPengine is taking care of security and caching, and daily backups for you. That means you don’t need to install complicated plugins that handle caching, security, and even backups. Here is a list of WPengine disallowed plugins: https://wpengine.com/support/disallowed-plugins/
Extend your WordPress experience with 51,758 plugins: https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/
