How Many WordPress Plugins Are Too Many?
CEO of WPRiders. World-class programming put to work for small to mid-sized businesses, startups and nonprofits. getty  Working in a field for a long period of time will not only make you more knowledgeable but will also make you more experienced, and with the right amount of experience, you'll start noticing certain patterns whenever you have to deal with clients. When it comes to websites, there are many things that can and will go wrong if youre not careful enough. Some of the most common WordPress issues that I've seen clients struggle with are:   Having an unstable website due to a large number of plugins.  Paying a lot of money for a website that keeps on crashing.  Hiring professional developers to fix a website, only for the fixes to cause new bugs. The truth is that a lot of businesses depend on websites to succeed. If a product or service can be purchased, many people will look to purchase it online, so theres no way around it. But websites can bring forth issues that aren't fun to deal with at all. Some of those issues are caused by having too many plugins. Lets see why having too many plugins is considered a big "no" and what can you do about it. To better understand why having too many plugins is a bad idea, lets take an example. Lets say you want to organize a party, so you ask your friends to help you cook the food. To speed up the process, you get into pairs and start cooking with other people. You put some salt in your dish, and when your back is turned, your partner puts more salt, thinking that you forgot to add it. These small mistakes keep on happening, and by the end of the cooking process, you have a dish that doesn't taste good at all. The same can happen with plugins as well. The root problem is that your websites plugins have been written by different developers who dont know much about each other. This means that nobody tested to see if plugin A, written by one developer, actually works well with plugins B, C and D, written by several other developers. If the plugins aren't compatible, they might cause the website to crash. The problem can get even more complex than that  assuming the plugins get updated by their developers and, even if plugin A works with B today, the next version of plugin A might not work perfectly with the next version of plugin B. The answer is you, the website owner. Another good way of understanding plugins is by comparing them to apples. Having plugins on your website is like having a bag of apples. When you buy it, you can have a bag full of red, delicious apples. But if theres one bad apple in the bunch, then that apple will soon spoil the whole bag. One bad plugin on your website and your website can become unstable, slow and insecure. This in turn will give you very poor Google Page speed scores, which will mess with your SEO. As the CEO of a programming company, I can confidently say that having 20 plugins is a pretty good number. The upper limit would be 30 plugins. Anything above 30 is too much. Well, first of all, plugins are like the moving parts of a machine. The more you have, the harder it is to manage them and to keep your machine (the website, in this case) stable and functional. Secondly, every time you update a plugin on your website, you'll have to verify that the main features of your website are still working. Our team found that at 20-30 plugins, you can have a test plan in place that you can run on a monthly basis after you update the plugins. When the numbers go beyond 30, the total number of feature combinations that come from those plugins becomes unmanageable. The best way to go about it is to have a plugin cleansing process. This procedure generally involves two steps:  1. Creating an inventory of all the plugins that are being used. This usually takes about one day of work and involves documenting the purpose of each plugin. 2. The plugin cleansing and replacement. This can take a number of days, ranging from two to 10. During the final step I suggest:   Removing unused plugins.  Removing duplicates.  Replacing the bad performing plugins with better and newer alternatives.  Writing a custom plugin that would replace the other three to four plugins but without the added overhead. A Solid Foundation For Your Website  Of course, the best course of action is to prevent all these issues from happening in the first place, which is entirely possible and might not be as complex as you think. Build your website on a solid foundation. One way you can do that is by hiring a professional team of web developers, or you can start the process with a plugin cleansing. After that, you can grow your business and your website with a strategic roadmap in mind. This will allow you to expand your business in a scalable way and avoid most website-related issues. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives.