WordPress Plug-in Fever

One of the great features of WordPress is it’s ability to utilize plug-ins. For those new to WordPress… plug-ins allow to add features to WordPress that did not originally come with the core WordPress install. Atomattic, the company that created WordPress tries to keep the software as simple as possible. They do this by only including features that the majority of it’s customers would likely find useful. Thus avoiding software bloat and unnecessary complexity, both for users and developers.

The good news is that there area a ton of plug-ins available in the WordPress Plug-in Directory. Over 7000 at last count! With the myriad of features available to extend WordPress it certainly is easy to catch plug-in fever! But before you go hog wild with the plug-ins it really is best to have a strategy. This is especially true if your site is being used for business – where reliability and ease of maintenance are key.

The strategy that I recommend is to only use active, trusted quality plug-ins and to use them sparingly. In short here is why limiting the number of plug-ins is a good strategy…

Plug-ins are typically the work of independent developers. Some plug-in’s have a huge user base and are actively tested against and updated soon after every release of WordPress. Other’s, not so much! Plug-in development and support may have stopped when the developer graduated and got a paying job or the developer simply lost interest and stopped making changes to it. In any case it is a good idea to look for plug-ins that have a lot of users and are currently being updated if the plug-in is going play a critical part in you website or blog.

Another risk of adding to many plug-in’s to a site is that it may slow your site down. Depending on how the plug-in’s are built, they may be adding additional code to your web pages. For example, a plug-in may cause a JavaScript file to be added to the web page. While some JavaScript files are small, some are not. If the Plug-in was not constructed correctly, or not configured correctly when added to WordPress, this could really slow things down for a site visitor with a slow Internet connection. When installing plug-in’s it really is a good idea to spend some time and make sure they are configured correctly and using a tool like Yahoo’s YSlow which can help point out and identify resource hogs.

As I alluded to in the previous point, careful plug-in configuration is key. Unfortunately, some plug-ins require you to make settings on every page on the website. Even if the the plug-in is not actually being executed on every page, you may need to click a check box to disable or risk adding unnecessary (and un-executed) JavaScript to every page on your website. While it is not difficult to make the required settings it can be time consuming on larger websites.

Even if a plug-in is regularly updated with every release of WordPress it still means it needs it needs to to updated, tested and possibly reconfigured with every release. If a site has a log of plug-ins this can be time consuming at worst and slightly annoying at least. Having less plug-ins means less time spent on regular updates and testing.

In Conclusion

When building a WordPress site I really recommend looking at each plug-in and making sure it’s of good quality, that it is regularly updated, and that it is the best way to get the needed functionality. Sometimes, even though plug-ins are available it is simpler to just build the functionality into the WordPress theme if you know how to do the programming yourself. An example of this is creating forms. I find the existing form plug-ins to be very limiting an I find that it is much cleaner to just create the forms myself using php, jQuery, XHTML, and CSS. If you have the ability to do some of the coding yourself, it will allow you to create exactly what is required without the bloat a do everything plug-in would require.

Finally, if you find that you are needing a lot of plug-ins to do what you require. You may want to look at a more robust solution for your CMS. While WordPress is a great solution for simple websites, it’s not the perfect tool for all projects. For more involved projects a more advanced CMS such as Drupal, Joomla, or ExpressionEngine may be in order. While these CMS’s may not be as easy to master as WordPress, both at the development level and as a content editor, they do have features built into the core product that make them better suited for more complex projects.
This could eliminate the need for some plug-in’s and keep things as simple as possible. Which is always good thing and the way we like it!