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How Many Wordpress Plugins are Too Many?



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How Many Wordpress Plugins are Too Many?

I have heard that having too many plugins can be bad for your website SEO and that it can slow down your website.

Can anyone explain to me why having too many plugins can be bad for SEO? Is it because it slows your website down or are there other reasons that come into it?

And even though I've been told that "too many" plguins can be bad for SEO nobody has been able to tell me how many is fine and how many is too much. I don't just add plugins all over the place but I do have a good few on my websites.

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anwebservices
I am working with WordPress for long time as user but also as developer of themes and plugins. To be honest nobody can tell how many plugins is too many, because it depends on which plugins are you using.
This is little complicated to explain but i will try to be as simple as i can. For example many plugins in it's codes using some "third party" website's for additional purposes like javascripts etc... So if they not include javascript in the code, but perhaps requesting javascript hosted on third party website, it's mostly OK, as most of these websites are very fast in providing it, BUT if you have few different plugins requesting same javascript to display some files or features of your website, then it's slowing down your website, just because of multiple calls to third party files, and speed is measured in milliseconds, so if your page is loading for 1 single second it's far too slow for Google crawlers and can be downside for SERP.
That's main problem why it's hard to tell how many plugins to use. In some cases 3 could be too much, while in other case 10 would be nothing to worry about. So only solution is to test them by switching on and off and test your website, plus when you getting new plugin for your WordPress, always read other member's reviews to get better plugins!



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Lynne
Thank you for your explanation. It makes it a lot clearer for me to understand, so it is not necessarily about the amount of plugins but the type of plugin and whether it slows my website down or not. I'll check that out with the plugins I have published on my websites.

With my mommy blog (that was an online store) I have loads of plugins that I was using previously but I am not any more. This is something my sister and I are busy with now. We are going to redo that whole website and do a good clean up of all the unnecessary things.



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anwebservices
Here is something what can help you out to test your website speed and see what slowing it down https://www.seoclerk.com/faq/17894...speed-of-website



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Lynne
Thank you, I will check out that discussion to learn about my website speed.



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idealmike
Well it's true that plugins can slow down your WP site but without them your site is basically featureless. So you have to have them installed and activated if you want your site to have those features that those plugin provide. If you have a lot of plugins installed and they're all being used, then that can slow down your page loading times which is how it can be bad for your on-page SEO. For this reason, you should only use those plugins that your WP site absolutely needs. Also, you should look into ways of optimizing those plugins that you are and do need to use. Although the developers sometimes do a good job at this, there are WP plugin developers that don't spend a lot of time optimizing those plugins to run fast. This could be from simply removing any white space or erroneous code that isn't used like code comments etc. All of which has to be loaded into memory and is mostly useless stuff so is fairly safe to remove to speed up the plugin loading times. I wouldn't suggest you doing that yourself if you have no experience in doing stuff like that but you can employ a WP expert to do that for you. They'll look at which plugins you're currently using, look at ways to optimize those plugins and possibly even migrate some into just one plugin. So yeah, that's basically it and should help you to understand this side of WP better. How Many Wordpress Plugins are Too Many?



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Lynne
LOL Mike, no I have no intention of playing around with any code anywhere like that. Coding makes me scared!

I agree with what you said that sometimes plugins really are necessary. So perhaps at times it is about looking at what is the best for me and my website at that time: Slightly slower loading speed vs website not having vital features.

Thanks for the tip about getting a WP expert to check all my plugins and make changes to them if necessary, that is really helpful. I didn't know that was something that could be done and I think that is something I should do at some stage.



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anwebservices
OK, few more things i forgot to mention.
  • Do not use plugins which are not updated for 6 or more months, specially over 1 year.
  • Always update your plugins to latest version

It also depend who is coding plugin and which coding techniques are used. Even if plugin is regularly updated, but coded in old coding techniques it can slow your website few milliseconds, so few here few there can be a problem. Again, try to switch them on and off to test. If you find which one is slowing your website most, try to find another one which can provide you with same functionality.



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Lynne
Thank you for those tips.

When I am searching for a plugin I usually look at when it was last updated, whether it is compatible with my version of Wordpress, how many downloads it has, how many people have rated it and what the rating is and of course then I look at the functionality of the plugin.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to check in here and ask everyone's opinion of a plugin I am thinking of using, and also ask for alternative suggestions. I wouldn't know anything about coding techniques and know what is old or not!



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idealmike
Oh yeah that's another thing about optimizing your plugins. Some of them will call 3rd party sources such as javascript files etc from other sites. And those sites might not always be available or the scripts and files can go missing. So another part of optimizing your plugins is to ensure that they don't call and request 3rd party scripts and files and make sure that they're all referenced locally. How Many Wordpress Plugins are Too Many?



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Lynne
So you are saying that not only can 3rd party scripts slow down my websites but it can also cause the plugin to just not work if those sites are not available or something goes wrong with the javascript files?

Ok so that is not good at all.



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anwebservices
Yet another thing to mention. (sorry for multiple posting but they keep coming to my mind) I suggest you also to test your theme! Theme can cause same problem as plugins, because it's not just design in themes, there is also coded functions and can be troublesome, depending on coding quality. So you can switch your website to default theme for short time and test it's speed to make sure theme is OK



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Lynne
Nope, post away. These are the types of things I know nothing about, themes are also something that confuses me. I just look for something that looks good to me. I know, I can almost see all the experts here sighing and rolling their eyes, mumbling "oh stupid woman"... But I don't know what to look for with themes other than just nice looking.



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webexpert1313
Hello, Its not matter How many plugins are good or bad for WordPress.
You need to consider in all plugins about bugs, if everything is good then no matter how many plugins work in your website. Thanks



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Lynne
Yes I've heard sometimes plugins conflict with each other or your theme... geez too many things for me to keep thinking about!



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idealmike
Try not to over think it too much Lynne. Just use the plugins you absolutely need to use only and make sure your site and the plugins are updated regularly and keep on blogging! Plugin conflictions don't happen as much these days with the top used plugins because the plugin devs make sure they are conflict free and compatible with them all so you shouldn't really run into that problem if you're using the top most used plugins. It's only really when you install some plugin that isn't often used or hasn't been updated in a long time or was poorly coded that can cause conflicts but even if it does this is never to tricky to deal with anyway. Just remove the little blighter in worst case scenario. You'll be fine! How Many Wordpress Plugins are Too Many?



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Lynne
Thanks Mike. I think you are right, I get sucked into every little detail and start worrying about it. The only plugin conflicts I had before was with Yoast and that is a very popular plugin! I got feedback from a few people here at SEO Clerk that it is quite common to have conflicts when using Yoast? I changed to All In One SEO because of that and everything is now working fine on all my websites.

I think I will check out the discussion thread on website speed that Anwebservices recommended, it can't hurt to know more about that.



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