Are you suffering from WordPress Plugin overload?

I love it when I run across a certain kind of person.  You know who you are.  The type that has every possible FireFox plugin installed, some days just opening FireFox it takes 45 minutes to run through all the plugin updates.

One of the things I like best about WordPress is how lightweight it is.  It’s simple, it does it’s job, highly customizable.  Plus, even though it is simple it can be made to be much more complicated through the use of plugins.  You can add just the features and abilities that you need for your site.

Something I dislike about other systems is maybe they are awesome because of the huge list of features, but those features can be a resource hog.

Quite awhile back I read an article that I can’t find right now to link.  It talked about some load tests on a few of the “frameworks” that are out there for programming.  One of them that they considered a programming framework was Drupal.  They included this because even though it is a CMS type script, it’s so robust and feature rich and can really be used as a programming framework.  The problem? Just to display nothing more than “Hello World” to a browser, it performed with a response time significantly slower than a lot of other systems to do the same.

I mean this makes sense in all reality.  It has so much capability that it has to dynamically load tons of classes, functions, etc.  even though all it’s doing is displaying “Hello World”.  It’s fine if you need all the features and your site is going to use them, otherwise it’s just a disability.

WordPress is Lightweight, can you keep it that way?

That’s one thing that is really nice about using WordPress.  It is so light.  And the way that plugins integrate is really nice.  You can add complete features with an upload and a click of the button.

Then I run into someone who asks me to help them figure out why their installation is so slow.  I take a look at their plugins screen, they have 70+ plugins uploaded, 30+ plugins activated, but only about 15 give or take actually in use.  The rest are just there because.

You know a spoiler might improve the performance of a race car, but not if you attach 15 of them.

There are always all kinds of reasons.

Well the reason I have 4 ad rotators installed is because I wasn’t sure which one I liked, and I tried them all out until I decided I liked this one

Here’s the thing, just by having them activated the functions that make up the plugin have to get loaded every single time a page loads. So maybe you are using one ad rotator, but enjoy the drop in performance of 4 just for fun!

Another point to be made, installing plugins always creates variables in your database.  Some plugins don’t properly remove these variables when disabled.  The larger your database becomes the slower it takes to pull content out of it.

How long will your visitors wait to see your blog content?

Keep your installations as clean as possible.  Normally, I keep extra installations of WordPress around separate from my main.  Any good host should have the ability to create subdomains.  Install a plain installation there, or even make a copy of your installation, install the plugin there first.  ESPECIALLY, if you don’t even know if you’ll want it long term.

If you decide you don’t want it there is no reason to ever install it on your main WordPress site.

Cause and Effect, chain of events.  Doesn’t matter if your content is good, if visitors get tired of waiting for your pages to load.

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Tagged as: blog publishing, blogging, Capability, Cms, Disability, Firefox, Frameworks, Hello World, Huge List, Job, Load Tests, Love, Plugin Updates, Plugins, Programming Framework, Resource Hog, Response Time, Type Script, wordpress, wordpress plugin, wordpress tips