Yes, Having Too Many Plugins Is Hurting Your WordPress Website’s Performance, SEO, & Opening It Up To Security Vulnerabilities

One of the wonderful things about building your company’s website with WordPress is the vast ecosystem of free themes and plugins. It often seems like no matter what you want to add to your website, there’s already a plugin out there to help you do that.

While this is a blessing for many small businesses, it can also be a curse.

When you add plugins to your WordPress website, you are adding more code that consumes resources, introducing potential incompatibilities, opening up new security vulnerabilities, and very likely hurting your website’s SEO in the process.

In some cases, such as websites that use WooCommerce for eCommerce it may be impossible to avoid using plugins needed the run your online storefront, but for other websites, there may be better ways to achieve your goal.

How Many WordPress Plugins Are Too Many

There is no exact number. The rule of thumb is any number of plugins over the least required to run your website is too many.

Oftentimes, people building their first WordPress website will install a plugin to try it, and then if things don’t work how they wanted, forget to deactivate and remove it. Over the course of time this can lead to your plugins page being full of tools that you once installed, and then when looking back at it later, forget why they were there to begin with.

How To Avoid Having Too Many Plugins On Your WordPress Site

These two rules can help prevent you from installing and having too many plugins on your WordPress website.

1. Only Install Plugins You Can’t Live Without
2. Immediately Remove A Plugin As Soon As You No Longer Need It

Only Install Plugins You Can’t Live Without

It is tempting to see the vast number of helpful, free plugins in the WordPress repository and think about the possibilities for creating a more persuasive website for your business. It’s an area where you need to exercise restraint.

Before installing a plugin, ask yourself if another plugin you are using already covers that functionality, or if you can achieve the same (or similar) goal without using a plugin at all.

By evaluating if you really need what that plugin promises to provide, or if you can meet that need in a more efficient way, you can save yourself a lot of headache down the road when you’ve long since forgotten why you installed it to begin with.

Immediately Remove A Plugin As Soon As You No Longer Need It

When you are looking for a solution to a problem you have on your website, it’s common to install a few plugins looking for the answer.

Unfortunately most people forget to deactivate and uninstall the plugins that didn’t work how they had hoped.

The best way to avoid that trap is to make it a standard process to install one plugin at a time, and immediately uninstall it if it doesn’t serve your needs. In combination with optimizing your company’s WordPress site, making sure unused plugins are deleted can ensure your website provides a customer-centric experience.

Why Too Many Plugins Are Bad For Your WordPress Website

There are three reasons having too many plugins on your WordPress website is a bad idea.

1. Hurting Your SEO: Each plugin adds more code that your site has to run and give users each time a page loads. That slows down your website’s speed, and slow website’s don’t perform as well in search engines.
2. Security Issues: Each plugin you install adds more code that hackers can try to exploit to gain access to your website and take it down.
3. Compatibility Issues: Each plugin you install adds more code that may conflict with other plugins or your theme, producing PHP errors that can slow down your website even more or cause it to crash all together.

Too Many Plugins Hurt Your WordPress Website’s SEO

With each plugin you install on your WordPress website, you are adding code that the website has to run each time a potential customer of yours loads a webpage.

In additional to running that code, those plugins may include additional CSS or JavaScript that your website will load with each page. That means:

• Each webpage on your website will be larger.
• Larger webpages load more slowly for search engines and users alike.
• A slower webpage reduces your page speed score, reducing your likelihood of ranking highly for keywords that are important to your business.

Managing the number of plugins on your website in combination with using a SEO-friendly WordPress theme is critical for improving your website’s SEO providing a positive user experience.

Too Many Plugins On Your WordPress Website Can Increase The Number Of Security Issues You May Have

Every WordPress plugin is built by an individual developer or team of developers. There are tens of thousands of WordPress plugins available, and very few developers for different plugins communicate with each other about their products.

On an individual level, each additional plugin adds more code to your WordPress site and some of that code may not be written as securely as it could be, which opens your website up to security risks.

In addition, in some cases, WordPress plugin vulnerabilities can be chained together across a group of co-installed plugins to create much larger vulnerabilities than either plugin had on its own.

Too Many WordPress Plugins Can Cause Unforeseen Compatibility Issues

Much like the security issues that can arise when too many plugins are installed on a single WordPress website, compatibility issues can arise as well.

When a plugin has a compatibility issue with another plugin or the theme on your website, it may produce a PHP error that you don’t notice immediately.

If there are just a few such PHP errors, it may only slow down your website, negatively impacting the website’s SEO. If there are a lot of errors, they may become “Fatal Errors” meaning that the entire website crashes and will require an experienced, professional WordPress developer to rescue it.

How Can You Avoid The WordPress Plugin Problem?

In some cases, if your business is operating with a small budget and you’re building your own website with a free theme, you may not have many options other than to rely on the publicly available plugins to help you achieve your goals.

If you do have a budget to work with, hiring a developer to build a custom WordPress solution for you that keeps performance and security in mind will help eliminate many of the problems associated with using too many plugins on your website.