WordPress
29. maj 2020
How plugins kill your website
Before you rush into downloading various plugins for your website, it is worth knowing that there is a downside.
Indhold
What is plugins Too many use cases Different developers Bad developers Creates more maintenanceWhat are plugins
A plugin can do many different things and, in many cases, can be both useful and smart.
If you have a website on WordPress, you can download plugins for almost anything. Some of the most popular, for example, are for creating a contact form, duplicating a page in WordPress, or improving your SEO by choosing the text that appears on Google when someone searches for the website.
When you install a plugin, you are installing a machine that someone has built. The person who built the machine has designed the plugin as a Swiss Army knife that can handle several different things within a specific area.
However, when you download the plugin, you likely do not intend to use all of its features—only one or two. You see the Swiss Army knife as a corkscrew.
This can cause the following problems.
1. You have 48 features in the plugin, all of which are loaded
– but you only use one of them. If you need 10 features, you install 10 different plugins, each covering one of your issues—but in reality, 1,000 issues are being solved in total. You just do not need the remaining 990 features.
This will make your website slow and difficult to navigate when you need to make changes to the site.
Instead, you can get to know your plugins, delete all the features you do not use, and thereby keep only the necessary plugins installed. Almost all websites should, after being live for a while, undergo a thorough clean-up of which plugins are being used.
Of course, it is risky to delete things indiscriminately without knowing what the different plugins do. Therefore, this task should be handled by the person who built the site or the person who works with the website on a daily basis.
2. Plugins are made by different people
Therefore, there is nothing to prevent plugins from conflicting with each other.
On the contrary, different plugins compete to get you to download and use them. If you download a plugin with a feature that an existing plugin already covers, the two plugins can end up at war with each other.
Therefore, it is important to download only the necessary plugins—and within them, only the necessary features.
3. Plugins are not necessarily made by skilled developers
They are therefore typically much heavier and more inefficient than they need to be.
In principle, you do not know what code is included in the plugin, and it can be all sorts of things you do not need at all—and which is actually quite poorly coded. Therefore, it is of course best to choose the more popular plugins that have good reviews.
The very best option, but of course also the most expensive, is to code things from scratch yourself, because then exactly what is needed is built—no more and no less.
4. More plugins mean more maintenance
At Morningtrain, we typically see that if a website has many plugins, it simply has a shorter lifespan than if it has very few plugins.
With these four important issues that plugins can cause, you are hopefully better equipped to download the plugins you may need for your website.
The best approach is to know what you are looking for and then download the plugin. You should never download plugins you do not need or perhaps do not even know what they do.
