Another Reason for Using Less WordPress Plugins
When I first started working with WordPress I tried all kinds of different plugins to gain an advantage and make blogging easier. Over time I discovered that some plugins have a short life span and using them can actually make more work for you or end up being a pain to get rid of.
Case in point is the once mighty Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. Man what a pain getting away from that thing! If you are not familiar with UTW it was a great plugin and it had a feature built into it that tagged terms within the content of the post. Using tag parameters like this: [tag] Your Tag Word [/tag]. The terms within the tag parameters would then link to your tags page and automatically tag the post. The tag parameters would not show on the content as long as you kept the UTW plugin active. The tagged term or terms would look like a link. But guess what? When UTW stopped working in WordPress and the plugin is deactivated the tagged terms on all posts looked just like the example. What a mess.
The lesson learned is never use a plugin that you will need to add anything special into the posts content. And never become so dependent on a plugin that your WordPress blog will look terrible or worse not function without it. Because chances are eventually that plugin will become obsolete!
So the solution to one obsolete plugin is… you guessed it, using another plugin! But in this case I choose to remove all those [tag] parameters from all my posts but not by manually editing several hundred posts. But using a plugin that searches and replaces text. It is real easy to use and unlike other plugins that always run this one only runs when you actually need or use it.
The plugin is called Search and Replace, and you can use it to repalce text in more than just the content of posts but just about any area of the WordPress blog that holds its data in the database. In my case I just replaced the tags with a blank and it took all of them away in seconds. This can be handy for a lot of other things too.
So as I continue to work with WordPress, the more it evolves and the more mess I see from obsolete plugins the more I believe that less WordPress plugins is better.
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I have learned this recently as well. I try to replace the plugins with code now so I dont have to fix stuff once a plugin gets old and out dated.
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Very good advice. There are many reasons to use few plugins but the danger of becoming dependant on tools that will not work later is important. Wordpress is constantly being revised. So unless the plugin is too there is a danger of future trouble. For that reason if there is a very popular plugin (even that is a bit less useful than another) choosing the popular one that is likely to be maintained may be wise. It is the likelihood of being maintained that is important, not popularity, but popular plugins seem to get maintained (often passing to others to maintain).
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I learnt this lesson the hard way as well – upgrading wordpress with a lot of plugins can sometimes be hell.
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best tips, and tutorials.
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Same here Anthony
Also, I found that loads of my wordpress plugins I don’t even need/use, since I have loads of all-in-one wordpress plugins
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Hi Jeff,
Good advice here because I also tried to use all plugins and I thought they would be good to my blog.
Thanks
Kha
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Thanks or the advice. I was thinking about trying Ultimate Tag Warrior. i didn’t know it could cause so many problems.
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I’m also wondering whether it’s wise to become too dependent on plugins such as Redirection – but then again what is the alternative?
Also, if you took the advice here literally, you’d have been waiting a long time for the WordPress core upgrade before being able to embed any video on your blog. So less plugins may well be easier to maintain, but it means hanging out quite a long way behind the innovations curve.
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Andy I am not saying to go without any plugins at all and I still use an old plugin to embed video. In fact I am not exactly practicing what I preach if you see my list of active plugins. But this site was or still is, used for testing and learning more about WordPress for me and sharing that with you.
The point of the post is to try to keep them to a minimum to avoid future obsolescence or compatibility issues.
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I never had such an experience. It might be I’m a new kid on the blog. But,for sure, I’ll take to educate myself from this how to using selective plugins and how to fix a problem. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
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I’ve heard this before but could not understand the reason why, but today got some ideas why too much of plugins can be a disaster. thanx man, great artcile.
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Less plugins are better.
But if your blog do not have many visitors , Such as never have more than 300 visitors online , the number of plugins is nothing,for 100ms or 500ms delay is nothing for people as well .
I think the key one is your host.
PS: All above are personal advise.
CAr
Accessory
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I have also noticed that less plugins is the best way to go…It gets all cluttered and seems disorganized if there are to many.
I use ultimate tag warrior in a few of my sites and it works wonders. Great info!
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i’m agree with your point of view, plugin is like handy tools in our life, once you get used to it, dependent you are to those tools. However since i am a beginner in using wordpress, plugin make possible many feature that original WP doesn’t include.
so i will stick with the plugin, and try to increase my WP power now.
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And is it possible not to use plugins at all? I think no, but it’s necessary to reduce the number of them
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I learnt this lesson the hard way as well – upgrading wordpress with a lot of plugins can sometimes be hell.
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Wordpress, with more plugins comes great responsibilities…
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I also learned this lesson the hard way, one of my blogs was severely affected however its good that i have everything backed up.
I hope the new plug-ins work for me
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I’ve noticed a lot of problems on my wordpress installations after hitting about the 10+ plugins mark, unfortunately, a lot of plugin authors don’t cross-check other popular plugins with their own, and it can cause a slew of compatibility issues.
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I use statpress, simple tag and all in one seo. I dont need more
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Remember that using many plug ins will consume memories on your server, too. It can also makes your site loads slower. If you care about performance, than use only plug ins that you really need.
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Thank you for the advice. We should only use plugins if there is a necessity. Using lots of plugins at once may result in errors. I’ve been doing a blog about cars for a long time now. I had similar problems too. It’s good that you shared the information with all of us. Thanks again.
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