When you have a website that you recently made and are thinking of improving it by adding new features. So you move to plugins for that. When you come across the plugin repository of WordPress, you might have seen thousands of plugins waiting for you to download.
At first, as a beginner, these plugins might be a lot for you and your plate, and you might have been carried away with the downloading and installing process of plugins that you suddenly lost count of how many WordPress Plugins have you installed on your WordPress dashboard.
And when you look back at your WordPress Dashboard, you feel like it’s a lot already and you still have a lot to download for your website. Suddenly you start wondering what is the right number of plugins which your website can handle and is recommended.
With enticing and attractive plugins on the plugin repository of WordPress, you will be allured to download them because of their convincing claims, their immaculate ratings, their high download numbers and features.
Plugins are a way to make your website studded with features and options to choose from.
But over-installing them would cause serious issues to your website. With more than the required plugins, the websites start to act up and start lagging at some point.
WordPress is an ecosystem just like your Android or IOS environment, you don’t have numerous applications downloaded on your device just because they are reliable and pretty great, you keep the useful ones which actually work and are being used most of the time.
Most people start with the top and the best plugins listed in the blogs and articles recommended by industry people, they start looking for that certain list of all the top plugins available in the WordPress plugin repository and thereby downloading them all more than its actually needed.
Here’s what you shouldn’t do
Don’t Download Plugins Just Because Of Their Appeal
Plugins can seem very promising and you might think, the more the plugins, the better would be the website as it has been the most common misconception in the WordPress community.
Don’t Download Plugins Because of Their Good Rating & Active Installs
Also, many plugins have high ratings and very high active installations which can coax you into downloading them. And you will again get carried away with it and start downloading them all.
Don’t Download Numerous Plugins To Serve The Same Purpose
If something can be done with a single plugin, it would be a waste to make numerous plugins do the same task and expect it to do better. As it can lead to a lot of problems and you might not be able to complete that task that you wanted to as a result of flooding your website with plugins.
With more than one same type of plugin installed in the website and all functioning at the same time doing the same assigned task would more likely to crash and create problems thereby making a mess of the website.
Don’t Download Plugins Looking At Their Features List
Almost all the plugins attract users by offering you with a long list of features and options. Let’s be honest, most of the users won’t be using all the features of the plugins which they are offering. And on top of that, if you download more than one plugin for a simple task, it might lead up to a cluster of plugins in your dashboard with you having difficulty in managing them and your website’s proper functioning.
So, What Is The Right Number Of Plugins?
There isn’t one unfortunately. In the end, it all comes down to one point, it depends on your website be it a blogging website, an eCommerce website, a portfolio website, a static website or a learning website, the work you want your website to do, only look for the plugins appropriate for that, nothing more than that, there has never been a fixed number of plugins for your website, your website can handle a certain number of plugins before it starts acting up. Just don’t go beyond it.