Cutting Down On Plugins - Which Ones Should I Remove Or Keep?
December 23rd, 2006 • Related • Filed Under
Untouchables (Well, I think so!):
- Landing Sites - I’m a big believer in this plugin and you’d need a good case to get me to uninstall this
- Math Comment Spam - Installing this made a massive dent in my daily spam count
- MyAvatars - I love seeing my readers
- Related Posts - Not over my dead body
- Share This - Although I hate social bookmarking icons, I don’t want to miss out on potential traffic. This plugin is my compromise
- Spam Karma 2 - Ajay walked me through installing this plugin earlier in the week as Akismet was blocking his comments (far too many mate!). SK2 gives much more control over my sites spam threshold, which after 2 days tuning is perfect now
- Subscribe To Comments - This plugin is sooooo good, I don’t think anyone’s even tried to make an alternative
- Text Link Ads v2 - Has to stay, unless anyone can help me add the code manually, or is willing to compensate me for the loss in revenue
- Wp-cache - Can’t live without this one. In tandem with APC this plugin is a lifesaver
So far I have removed the following plugins:
- Addicted To Live Search - although this was cool to watch, I don’t think it was that useful
- Digg This - I left this on as I wanted readers to know which of my posts had been popular in the post, but I think they probably had worked that out themselves based on which site or search engine they’d seen the link
- Search meter - Although this gave some very detailed search stats, my mint stats package gives me enough info so this plugin was just wasting resources
- WordPress Reports - Although this plugin did a good job of pulling together stats from Google Analytics and Feedburner, I decided it was a waste of resources as (i) I can still get these stats and (ii) Mint provides the same stats
- WordPress PDA - Ajay talked me (grudgingly) into removing this plugin. Although I love the clean layout I get on my Dell Axim, I’m probably one of the few readers using this plugin, so slowing the site down for everyone else was a bit silly. Plus, Ajay says he’s going to build a dedicated stylesheet for PDAs which will look much better. Keep tuned.
- WP-DBManager - I have access to my databases via phpMyAdmin, so installing this was dumb
- WP-UserOnline - Ajay had to take a tough line with me on this one. Again this plugin was installed for my own personal amusement, as it gave me a quick snapshot of how busy the site was. But, I now think the MyBlogLog images look a lot better (I’m even thinking of adding another row lol)
Let me know what you think I should do and also any plugins you’ve installed that you think I should add to one of the spots I’m hopefully going to free up.
Continue Reading This Post:12
Bookmark & Share
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.