Do You Really Need All Those Plugins?
Posted by: Adriana Post date: January 26th, 2010If your blog seems slower lately, you may have too many plugins. These days, you can get a plugin for just about anything, and many people do so before even thinking of how it will affect their blog’s performance.
I am as guilty of it as anyone else: I hear about a new pluguin, or an old one I didn’t know did something “cool”, and download it to my blog. And soon enough I have so many plugins I don’t even know what each of them do.
It’s still the beginning of they year and it’s time to go through your blogs and check to make sure you don’t have any unnecessary plugins added.
So, your first step is to go and check how many plugins you have, and how many you really use. If you don’t use it, remove it!
Plugins are notorious for slowing down your blog, and many can be eliminated with just a little bit of a tweak here and there. See if you have any of the following on your own blog, and how you can replace what they do easily.
Google Analytics Plugins – there is no need for a plugin to include your Google Analytics. You simply open your footer.php, and add the code right before the closing body tag. A 1 minute job, actually faster than finding, uploading and activating a plugin.
The only time you need to be careful is if you decide to change your theme: you’ll need to go into your new theme’s footer.php and do it again.
AdSense Plugins – there are lots of options for presenting AdSense on your site, but unless you want o place your units in the middle of an article, or in some other odd place, you can actually code your AdSense into your template quite easily, removing the need for just another plugin.
After removing all those unneeded plugins you’ll be happily surprised with a faster blog.
January 28th, 2010 at 5:17 PM
[...] we talked about trimming down the number of plugins on your blogs. Today, let’s talk about what plugins are essential to running your blog [...]
January 29th, 2010 at 2:00 AM
Great point about slow loading pages and too many plug ins. I am guilty. I wll take a look tonight asn see what I can do to eliminate a few. Have you found that Disqus slows down you site at all?
January 29th, 2010 at 2:05 AM
Clay, funny you mentioned Discus slowing down my site. Yes, I noticed slower loading time, and wondered if others noticed it too. Did it load slow for you?