WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world, and one of the most important reasons for this popularity is its plugins. With nearly 60,000 official WordPress plugins to date, you can provide your site with a lot of additional features and functionality. It reaches the point where just one add-on is capable of turning your site into an online store (Woocommerce) simply!
The benefits that can be gained from installing plugins on a WordPress website cannot be counted, but everything has its pros and cons. Installing a lot of add-ons in an unorganized manner on your site may have negative results and may cause many problems.
Of course, additives cannot be dispensed with, but at the same time they must be treated with caution. Therefore, in this article, we will discuss the impact of the frequent use of plugins on WordPress sites, and what problems you may encounter due to excessive and unorganized use of plugins. We will also explain how to install many add-ons without causing any problems on your site, and how to manage installed add-ons.
How plugins work in WordPress
The easiest way to understand how add-ons work is to compare them to applications that are downloaded on a smartphone. Most of us install applications on a smartphone to obtain new features and characteristics that are not available on it. These applications are designed, developed and programmed by independent parties (companies or individuals).
The exact same applies to WordPress plugins that work with the same mechanism. Just as a smartphone without additional applications can only make and receive calls, a WordPress website without plugins is a very simple blog in which you need to control and program everything manually.
Therefore, to add any additional features or functionality to your site, the easiest way to do this is to download the add-on that provides you with this functionality. There are plugins for almost everything you want, and that’s what makes WordPress special.
After installing the add-on, its programming files (CSS, JavaScript, PHP files) are uploaded to your site. These files contain code written by the add-on developers, and with every new add-on you install on your site, you can imagine the number of code files and codes that will be uploaded to your site, which will increase the possibility of a conflict with the core WordPress site files, or with other add-ons.
Also, add-ons that contain bad code and do not respect high quality standards will be disastrous and full of errors and loopholes, and their presence on your site may lead to its failure. Conversely, high-quality plugins will increase the features and characteristics of your site.
This leads us to the following question:
Quality or quantity…which is more important?
Installing plugins on your site is inevitable as long as you want your site to be distinctive. But the question remains: What is the maximum number of plugins that can be installed on a WordPress website without causing any problems?
If you are waiting for an answer that contains a specific number, then let me tell you that there is no specific answer to this question. The number of add-ons that you can install on your site depends entirely on their quality, and their compatibility with other installed add-ons and with the site as a whole.
To explain more, your site can contain, for example, 50 plugins and still work efficiently. This is because these 50 add-ons are of high quality and work together smoothly. Your site may contain only 10 plugins, and be full of problems, due to the low quality of those plugins.
So it’s not about a specific number, but about quality. When you make sure to install high-quality plugins, you will reduce the possibility of any errors occurring on your WordPress site.
How can low-quality plugins affect your site’s performance?
Installing just one low-quality plugin can significantly degrade your site’s performance. There are several areas in which low-quality additives can lead to problems:
1- Your site speed
The speed of your site is one of the important things that you should focus on. According to statistics, 40% of visitors will leave your site immediately if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Not to mention, a slow site will affect its ranking in search engine results (SEO).
As we explained previously, plugins are programming codes that aim to do specific things that you need on your site. But installing poorly programmed add-ons may slow down your site’s loading time, which is something you never want to happen.
When a user requests to open a page on your site through his browser, the browser will send requests known as HTTP Requests. These requests are commands through which all elements on the requested page, including add-ons, media, and resources, are loaded.
In theory, the fewer HTTP Requests your site has, the faster it will load. Since extensions can increase the number of HTTP requests, this means that they may affect the speed of your site.
But it’s hard to give up add-ons and what they offer just for the sake of speed. In fact, a large number of HTTP Requests may not necessarily cause slow download speed. If the installed add-ons are programmed with high efficiency, allowing requests to be executed smoothly and quickly, and the server resources are appropriate and able to handle all these additional requests without delay, then everything on the site should be fine.
However, if the add-ons are of low quality and not professionally programmed, or you do not have appropriate server resources, this will of course cause a delay in HTTP Requests and their accumulation, leading to a delay in loading the site when requested by the client.
2- Requests to connect to the database
All WordPress sites have their own databases. When you install any add-on, it will communicate directly with the database to write and read data. Plugins constantly communicate with the database so that the data appears directly to the client.
As with HTTP Requests, too many database connection requests will slow down your site’s loading speed.
3- Security problems
WordPress itself is a secure system and does not contain security vulnerabilities as long as its core files are up to date. But this does not necessarily apply to WordPress plugins that you install on your website.
This is one of the most dangerous aspects through which low-quality plugins affect the site. Therefore, protecting your WordPress site from hacks that lead to the loss of your data is closely related to the quality of the code in it.
Bad plugins are one of the biggest doors that hackers go through to attack your site. Hacking via add-ons can happen for two main reasons:
- Poor quality code that does not contain high security standards.
- The add-on is old and modern versions are no longer available to keep pace with the latest security challenges.
Of course, hacking can occur even through high-quality add-ons when they also contain security vulnerabilities, but the risk increases when using low-quality add-ons. One of the most important steps that you must follow to protect your site from hacking in all cases is: always updating your site to the latest version , and frequent backups of your site data before installing any new addition to it.
How to choose a high-quality add-on?
It has become clear what you will suffer if you install an add-on with poor code and low quality. But how can you distinguish a high-quality add-on from a poor-quality add-on, especially when there are many similar add-ons?
Don’t worry, there are simple steps you can follow to ensure the quality of the add-on before installing it on your site:
1- High ratings
Although this step is obvious; However, many people ignore it and you see them installing the first add-on they get from the search results without ever checking its rating. In fact, choosing the highest-rated add-on alone is not enough. Rather, it is also preferable to read some people’s reviews of the add-on to see if they encountered specific problems with the add-on.
It should be noted here that some negative ratings and reviews are due to the person’s lack of understanding of the add-on and its working mechanism. This does not indicate a lack of quality of the add-on and should not affect your personal evaluation of the add-on. Look at the negative and positive reviews to get a clearer picture of the quality of the plugin, and focus on the reviews that explain a problem during installation or use to know the actual quality of the plugin. You can view all the ratings and reviews for the plugin by going to the “ Reviews ” section on the official plugin page on the WordPress website.
2- High reliability
When you search for an add-on to achieve a specific goal, and you find many results for many add-ons that accomplish what you want, the first thing to do is what we explained in the previous step, which is to exclude add-ons with negative ratings from the list of available options.
However, you may have several options for similar add-ons, all of which have high positive reviews; Then how do you choose the best one?
In fact, there is another factor that you should consider when choosing the most suitable plugin, which is the number of reviews for this plugin. An add-on with 3,000 ratings, for example, is better than an add-on with 100 ratings. Now, more ratings mean that there are more users who have tried it, and that the percentage of errors in it is lower. Greater positive reviews also mean that this add-on has higher reliability and security.
You can also know the exact number of downloads the plugin has received through the official plugin page on the WordPress website by looking at the “ Active Installations ” section.
The same applies to knowing the company developing the add-on.
3- Regular updating
One of the important factors that you must take into consideration when choosing a high-quality add-on is that it receives regular updates. Frequent updates indicate that there is a strong team behind this addition that seeks to always provide the best and latest, and is keen to fill gaps and follow up on security problems.
You can check that the plugin is receiving regular updates by going to the “ Development ” section on the official plugin page on the WordPress website. There you will find a change history section containing details of previous versions, which indicates that updates are released periodically. You will also notice the “ last update ” date , which should be soon and not go back a year, for example, or a long period.
You can also find out information about the plugin’s compatibility with the latest update to WordPress, the latest update to the PHP programming language, the minimum version of WordPress required to make the plugin, and the supported languages.
How to manage plugins on your site
Although you have followed the previous steps in selecting the best and highest quality add-ons, you still need to manage the add-ons installed on your site in order to avoid any problems or conflicts that may occur, especially when there are many of them.
You can manage installed plugins by going to the “ Installed Plugins ” section in the “ Add-ons ” section of your WordPress site’s control panel.
To manage installed add-ons efficiently, do the following:
Keep what you need
Having tens of thousands of add-ons on the store does not mean that you have to install them all on your site. Yes, having what you need directly with one click is a great thing, but keeping many add-ons, even if they are of high quality, are more than you need, will undoubtedly slow down your site.
The best thing you can do to keep your site loading fast and secure is to delete plugins that you never use. Even those that you use only a little (for example, once every few months), it is better to delete them as well, install them when you need them, and then re-delete them when they are finished.
Also, the add-ons in the “ Inactivated ” section are often add-ons that you never use and therefore have not activated. Therefore, it is preferable to delete it as well.
We also recommend that you check for installed add-ons that are no longer receiving any updates and delete them. If you need the same features that the old add-on offers, you should look for better alternatives with regular updates.
Don’t forget to update
In addition to being important for updates to provide new features, improve them, and fix bugs, the most important aspect of updates is filling security holes through which hackers can access your site, hack it, and steal its data. Therefore, updating add-ons is very important, and you should do it whenever they are available.
You can update the plugins installed on your site from the “ Installed plugins ” list on your site. You will notice a warning message below the add-on that needs to be updated, and next to it is a button to start the “ Update Now ” process, click on it.
If you want, you can click on the “ Activate automatic updates ” option next to each add-on installed on your site so that it is updated automatically whenever a new update is released without the need to do so manually, thus ensuring that you obtain the latest version of the add-ons installed automatically and without effort.
In the end, as we mentioned previously, no one can determine the number of plugins that can be installed on WordPress sites. The number does not matter. The important thing is that you only install the add-ons you need, and make sure that these add-ons are highly reliable, well programmed, and of excellent quality. The article can be summarized in the following sentence: “Quantity does not matter, quality is what really matters.
