Cutting Down On Plugins - Which Ones Should I Remove Or Keep?
I’ve been working with my new WordPress guru, Ajay, on reducing the bloat on my blog from plugin overload. One of the dangers of WordPress is it’s so easy to customise, and no real technical knowledge is required. This can get quite addictive and before you know it, your pages take an eternity to load from too many plugins whirring away.
I intend to do a lot of work on my theme this Christmas as I’m off work for a week or so. Before I make my pages any heavier, I thought it would be best to remove the unnecessary plugins that weren’t benefiting me or you, my readers. I’ve done pretty well so far and my pages seem to be faster already, but I want more speed.
So, I want to ask your views on which of the remaining 35 Plugins I should chop either because they are resource hogs, or because they are pointless, or the same effect could be achieved in a more efficient way. I’d also like to know which plugins or mods you think I should consider adding to my site.
Plugins At Risk:
- Blank Target Comments - Is this really necessary? Could I achieve the same effect through tweaking my theme?
- Extended Live Archives - I use this to create my archives page. It’s very slow and heavy. I think this one is skating on thin ice. Alternatives?
- Image Manager - Is there a better way for managing images with WordPress?
- No Ping Wait - To be honest, I don’t really know what this does
- Quote comment - Doesn’t seem to format quotes very well, and there’s got to be a better plugin/method for WordPress
- Search Everything - Could I achieve the same through fixing my WordPress installation?
- Show Top Commentators - I want to encourage more comments, but the bar is getting quite high now, so I might ditch it
- WP-PageNavi - I want to see if I can incorporate a more interesting navigation
- WP-PostViews - This list never changes, I think my top 10 articles has had 2 changes in the last 6 months. Given that I only use it to display my top 10 articles, I could create this manually and update whenever I wanted from my mint stats
- Wp View Subscriber Info - I think I’m going to turn this one off, and just turn it on temporarily when I want to run a report
- WSR Contact Form - Produces a very dull contact form. I want to see if I can find an alternative, or just tell people to PM me in the new forums
Plugins That Are Probably Safe:
- Brian’s Latest Comments - Is there a better comments plugin out there?
- Comment Quicktags - Need the functionality, but again, is there a better way of achieving the same effect?
- Fold Category List - I don’t like clutter, so I think this plugin is here to stay
- Global Translator - After my difficulties with Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro I think this one is a keeper
- Google Sitemaps/UTW Addon (2) - I think these are safe, unless there anyone has a better way to keep a sitemap up to date
- Lightbox - I love the effects. Period. But, is there a better way to achieve this?
- Live Comment Preview - Essential, but there must be a way of coding this manually…..??
- Paged Comments - I hate long lists of comments,but maybe there’s a better plugin that could do the job better
- Redirect old slugs - I’m constantly changing post and category names, so I can’t see this one being dropped
- Themed Login and Register - This plugin might be going, as one of the things I want to play with is adding bonus additional features for registered users like Ryan over at Cybernet as I think the WordPress default registration process is a bit pointless
- WPvideo - although there are better video plugins, I don’t want the hassle of updating all my old embedded videos
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Comment by Everton on 13 February 2007:
Apparently I’ve had too many translated page requests so I have to wait for Google’s next reset
Comment by tatman on 13 February 2007:
When I click on your Arabic translator, I get this message from Google:
“We’re sorry…
… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.
We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.
We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google”
Comment by Viper007Bond on 27 December 2006:
[Comment ID #47676 Will Be Quoted Here]
May I suggest my Clean Archives Reloaded? It’s based on the SRG one, but uses waaaay fewer queries and has some fancy Javascript collapses.
Comment by Everton Blair on 27 December 2006:
Thanks for the ‘indirect’ tip Viper007Bond - I’ll check quoter out.
Comment by Viper007Bond on 27 December 2006:
For the record and as stated on the plugin’s homepage, I know my Quote Comment plugin has many shortcomings.
A complete recode was planned and had actually sorta been started when I discovered a plugin that was nearly identical to my planned result (just a JS function in the source, AJAX content pull, editable quote content, etc.) which made me abandon my plugin in favor of the other one.
Comment by Ajay on 24 December 2006:
@Sujan, Related posts does add a few mysql queries, but as EB said, it comes highly recommended as of now.
@Ashish, SRG Clean Archives looks decent, but I still think it better to have your archives handcoded.