How many plugins do I need?

Sunday, February 8th, 2009 at 11:52 am

How many plugins [ 2:34 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Todays question:

Is there a practical number of plugins that should be on a blog? There are many that appear to be useful. But can you go overboard with plugins?

I’ll answer the second part first and yes you can go overboard. This can make your blog load very slowly and will cost you visitors.

There is always a fine line between adding features and slowing down performance. You can use a plugin like WP Cache to save load times but…

Sometimes that causes more problems than it solves. Yesterday I discussed plugin conflicts and the cache plugin has more than it’s share of those so for me to this point is has not been worth the effort.

The key is to make sure that the plugins you do use add value to your blog either for your reader or for the serps.

For example a plugin like All In One SEO is mandatory for me to have better custom title tags. It increases the ranking posts get and adds more serp traffic.

Something like the Riffly plugin has not caught on with my readers so far and if that showed a decrease in load times would go immediately. So far it hasn’t but because few are leaving audio or video comments it would be a net loss if the load time caused me to lose readers.

So there is no magical number for anyone. Just check your blogs load performance. If it slows then decide what helps you increase readership and what doesn’t and slim down from there.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold