I currently have a simple portfolio website that has a whopping 34 total plugins. And I am trying to trim things down a bit. Some of the plugins seem like they could be useful at some point in time but I’m not really sure if it’s worth keeping them around taking into account the cost-to-benefit ratio.
**Site Kit by Google** – Shows metrics from different Google products such as Search Console, Analytics, AdSense, PageSpeed Insights, Tag Manager and so on.
Looks like I’d just be sacrificing site performance for some convenience.
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**WP Activity Log** – Identify WordPress security issues before they become a problem. Keep track of everything happening on your WordPress, including users activity. Similar to Linux Syslog, WP Activity Log generates an activity log with a record of everything that happens on your WordPress websites.
The log already has nearly 6500 items in just a few weeks of activity. I assume it’d quickly eat up the database storage in no time.
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**Melapress File Monitor** – A hassle-free way to get alerted of file changes on your WordPress site & boost security.
Looks like it scans any newly uploaded files, so, that’s nice I guess?
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**Jetpack** – Security, performance, and marketing tools made by WordPress experts. Jetpack keeps your site protected so you can focus on more important things.
I have heard it is notorious for degrading the website’s performance.
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**Font Awesome** – The official way to use Font Awesome Free or Pro icons on your site, brought to you by the Font Awesome team.
Considering I am using a couple of SVG icons (which Elementor apparently sees as a potential security threat) from it, I should probably keep this one.
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**Image Optimizer by Elementor – Compress, Resize and Optimize Images** – Automatically compress and enhance your images, boosting your website speed, appearance, and SEO. Get Image Optimizer and optimize your images in seconds.
It seems to have quite a lot of negative reviews. And there are plenty of better alternatives.
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**WP Super Cache** – Very fast caching plugin for WordPress.
It might be better to use something like LSCache that does both caching and image optimizations instead of having two separate plugins.
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**WPCode Lite** – Easily add code snippets in WordPress. Insert scripts to the header and footer, add PHP code snippets with conditional logic, insert ads pixel, custom content, and more.
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**Simple Custom CSS and JS** – Easily add Custom CSS or JS to your website with an awesome editor.
Going to switch to the child version of the current theme just to be able to get rid of these two plugins.
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**WP Post Views** – WordPress post views counter counts the view of your Built in post type and Custom post type.
Not sure how useful that information is going to be really.
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**Page Views Count** – Show front end users all time views and views today on posts, pages, index pages and custom post types with the Page Views Count Plugin. Use the Page Views Count function to add page views to any content type or object created by your theme or plugins.
This looks similar to the previous one.
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**WP Social Ninja** – Display your social feeds, reviews and chat widgets automatically and easily on your website with the all-in-one social media plugin.
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**WPZOOM Instagram Widget & Block** – Instagram Widget is a customizable and responsive plugin, made to help you gain even more followers by showcasing your Instagram feed on your WordPress website.
An Instagram feed may be a necessary integration, and for that one of these two plugins should suffice.
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Lol 34 plugins.
Yeah, I would get rid of all of these. I’d also use LiteSpeed instead of WP Super Cache, but that’s only because I use Hostinger.
Of course, if you absolutely need to showcase you social media feed, and can’t program it yourself, I guess you could keep these plugins.
Always remember though, less is more.
Except from WPCode Light i’d get rid of all of them
Wp activity log is a mess if you don’t check it regularly or don’t have a dedicated person who knows how to handle it. Despite it can be very, very useful – you’re right, it takes too much space and it slows down the website.
I would suggest monitoring the website logs + maybe some custom logging if needed. In this case you won’t be able to see what a specific user did 2 days ago at 2:15pm, but you’ll still be able to see if someone tries to hack your site or something.
Usually, I keep only the Login history plugin, and I’m also providing security monitoring services for my clients.
But again, it depends on your niche: maybe you need to log all the user activity. If not – I’d suggest just copying the website logs once per month if you don’t have an ability to analyze them – in this case, if someone hacks your website, you’ll have pretty big chances to find out how they did it and fix the breach.
Disable all the plugins at first and then do the modifications.
I think keeping only the cache plugin is good enough. The rest can go. From my experience though, WP Fastest Cache works the best.
The number of plugins you use isn’t that important. As others mentioned on this thread, the quality of those plugins is way more important.
That said, it’s always good to audit your site and review the things you really use and need.
I would start by reviewing each plugin’s settings to see if you use them anywhere on your site today. If you don’t, deactivate them.
Once you’ve done that, look for ways to consolidate things. Let’s take a few examples:
– You have 3 different plugins for social feeds / icons: Jetpack, WP Social Ninja, WPZOOM Instagram block. Do you need all three? Maybe just keep one, or none and instead use the social icons that come with WordPress itself.
– You have 4 different plugins for stats: Site Kit, Jetpack, WP Post Views, Page Views count. Pick one, delete the rest.
– You have 2 different plugins for Activity Log: Jetpack and WP Activity Log. Pick one.
– You have 2 different plugins for file monitoring / security: Jetpack and Melapress. Pick one.
– You have 2 plugins to insert snippets: WPCode and WP Custom CSS and JS. Pick one (probably the one that allows you to insert PHP since it will allow you to add CSS and JS too).
– You have 2 image optimization plugins: Jetpack and Image Optimizer. Pick one.
– You use the Font Awesome plugin: could you replace it with the social icons provided by Core, or by inserting SVGs directly in your theme?
For each one of those cases, review your needs, review each solution and keep the one that best fits your needs.
Once you’ve done all that, you’ll already be in a much better place in your audit.
At that point, you can start thinking about actually removing features: sometimes things can seem useful, but you may not actually use them much or benefit much from it. If your site is a portfolio, do you need to collect stats at all, for example? Not doing that would not only allow you to get rid of one plugin, it would also improve your site’s performance and would make maintenance easier for you in the future. You’d lose a feature, but one that may not be that useful to you.
Same with something like an Instagram feed, for example. It’s a fancy feature, but having only an icon linking to your Instagram profile will be much better for performance.
imo this kind of audit is a much better way to think about managing your site, instead of just looking at your plugin count.
The thing about many of any plugins is you could easily replace them with a few lines of php code snippets online in a functions file, I used to run many paid plugins back in the day. Taught myself PHP and many times 4 lines of code did everything and more usually minus the bloat and slow update checks.