Why Too Many Plugins Are Bad For Your Site
WordPress has transformed how people develop websites. There are hundreds of WordPress sites being started daily, and that number keeps increasing. WordPress is an open source CMS that gives you the capability to customize and refine your website to meet your particular needs and wants. WordPress provides the everyday person with the ability to launch a website in a fraction of the time it would have taken even a few years ago.
One of the most significant factors that sets WordPress apart from every other CMS is their comprehensive library of Plugins. Plugins enable you to expand WordPress’s platform, making it possible to do almost anything you can think of with your website. From sliders to appointment calendars to simple contact forms, plugins make it possible to do in minutes what used to take hours. For all their possibilities, however, plugins come with their own set of flaws and these need to be considered before overloading your site with them for the sake of saving some time.
User Experience
Adding too many Plugins to your site to manage all of the dirty work of coding out things might look like the obvious and quickest route to take, the problem is that it is not efficient. Having your website depend on plugins to handle many of the features of the site will open the door for more complications and obstacles involving your website later on down the road, such as page speed and site maintenance.
Being a developer, one of the most critical points to keep in mind when building a website is user experience. User experience, when it comes to web development, is how the overall experience is for the user when visiting the site and ensuring that the website is simple to use and pleasing to the user. One of the greatest deciding factors of whether or not a user is going to remain on your website is page speed, or how quickly the web page loads for the user.
Because Plugins are an expansion of what comes with WordPress, its necessary to install heavy files to have these plugins work on your website. These files will slow down your website speed because it now has to load twice (sometimes even triple!) the number of files your website originally had to load if you had just coded out that simple contact form instead of uploading a contact form plugin that could do it for you.
Vulnerabilities
Plugins, on top of bringing down your load times, also open the door to vulnerabilities within your website, such as backdoors, malicious redirects, and pharma hacks. What these hacks do are ongoing and very damaging to your website. A simple malware hack because of an outdated plugin can cause your whole website to go down or potentially get you blacklisted on search engines for having malicious files within your website. There are services out there, such as SiteLock, that will help you scan your files for Malware and malicious redirects, having the plugins means opening the door to these vulnerabilities.
Regular Updates
Plugins are continually being modified by the author, so they will need to be updated routinely when a new version is released. Always having to update your websites plugins is not only time consuming, but very critical because a majority of hacks come from outdated plugins and themes. At first, using Plugins might look like the quickest and easiest road to take, but in the long run, it’s only going to cause you more work down the line.
Final Thoughts
This is not to say that you should never have a plugin on your WordPress site or never use more than one. Plugins can be very beneficial and have their place when creating a website. However, it is always necessary to think about whether or not you actually need a Plugin to handle a particular function or is it advantageous to just take the time out now and hard code it so that you don’t have to concern yourself about the very real vulnerabilities later. In general, you can build a website with many different user functionalities using only 3 – 5 plugins. More than that and it could be more trouble than its worth.