Update: Progress On Cutting Down On Plugins

Yesterday, I made significant progress on my goal to cut down the number of plugins I use. I’ve even removed one of my previously ‘untouchable’ plugins, the Landing Sites plugin, after doing a Head-2-Head of its results against the Related Posts Plugin, and finding that the Related Posts Plugin actually produced more relevant results.

If you’re a regular reader you probably have already noticed the difference in how fast the pages are loading, through me removing ‘unnecessary’ plugins. In fact, my server usage has fallen so much it’s made a mockery of the upgrade I was forced into last month when my site was getting a lot of traffic. In fact, the majority of the times when I check it says 0.0% (Load average 0.18, 0.22, 0.29).  Previously, it was always hovering around the 70-80% mark.

It’s a shame I’ve pre-paid for the rest of my contract, as I can probably now come down 1 package, maybe even 2, which would save me a lot of money. I guess sometimes it’s nice to pay more for total piece of mind. I’m totally confident now that if I get ’slashdotted’ again my site won’t fail me, whereas before with the plugin bloat, I wasn’t – even on the top server package.

I’ve been very aggressive in trying to remove plugins, even removing one of my ‘untouchables’, Landing Sites, despite always encouraging people to install this plugin because of it’s ability to show related posts to search engine visitors. What the landing sites plugin does is show related posts based on the keywords that users were searching for, as opposed to the Related Posts plugin which shows posts related to all of words appearing in the post.

I decided to do a quick Head-2-Head test to see which plugin produced the most relevant results. What I did was take the top 10 search referrals I get from search engines, which account for around 20% of my traffic, and compared how many of the results (maximum of 5 per post) produced by both the Landing sites plugin and the Related Searches plugin matched the keywords from the search.

For my top 10 search referrals, 42% of the results produced by the Landing Sites plugin matched the search keywords. However, the Related Posts plugin matched 54%. At first I was surprised by this, but after some thought I came up with a theory that might explain why.   I think the Related Posts plugin does better because it has more data available to try and find a match, because it uses all of the words appearing in a post to find related posts, rather than just the few keywords that were supplied by the user. This allows it to include additional ‘related’ keywords in its matching process, to improve its relevancy.
Based on this, I’ve now said goodbye to my first untouchable plugin. I’ve also removed:

• Blank Target Comments (was placed at risk): Given that absolutely no spam is getting through to my site now thanks to Spam Karma 2 and the Math Comment plugin, there’s no need to add rel=”nofollow” to comments to stop commenters getting credit from Google.  In fact, all I was doing was penalising my readers.  So, it’s gone. Hopefully, more of you will leave comments now ;-)
• No Ping Wait (was placed at risk): Still not too sure what this plugin did, but I have a suspiciion it was the reason I was struggling to leave trackbacks. Gone

• Search Everything (was placed at risk): Understanding how user’s use the search facilities within blogs has really got me confused.  My boss who generally lurks in my blog (and of course knows my real name!) will fall out of his chair if he reads this, as one of my day jobs is optimising search revenues on our portal. While I ponder on the best way to get users using my search engine, I have at least decided to switch out the Wordpress search engine for Google’s engine, so this plugin was made redundant

• WP-PostViews (was placed at risk): I really wish I’d removed this plugin sooner, as once I’d removed it and manually re-created the list of my top 10 posts based upon my recent mint stats, not my all-time stats, more recent and more interesting posts have appeared in the list for the first time like Watch More Free TV Online, Broadband Speed Test, Watch Free TV With Your PC, Why Can’t iTunes Add Artwork Properly? and Watch Free Football Online – The Easy Way i.e. half the top 10.  These posts are much more interesting, and are clearly what the wider online world is interested in, so hopefully these links will be more enticing to visitors

Removing more plugins is going to be harder. Please help me by going over the original full list.

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• Which Related Post Plugin Is Best?
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