Overcrowding Your Website
I see a lot of people often searching for all of the new plug-in's and there is a host of plug-in's that are absolutely necessary to have installed in your site to run it properly and to give you the advantage each one provides.
Regardless of what type of niche you are focusing on I'm sure there are dozens upon dozens of plug-in's, but where do you draw the line? I have talked to people that have over 10 plug-in's. The question is, Do you really need all of them? You need to know that everything you add to your site slows the website bit by bit. You should probably make a point to keep only the ones you need period.
Of course there are other plug-in's to optimize your website and make it "fast" and improve the response, but how much does the plug in actually improve your site as opposed to removing all of the unnecessary junk and actually getting more out of the optimizing plug-in? Online businesses often lose quite a bit of money due to people's inability to wait for pages to load.
How does this potentially affect your site? Well, it probably does more than you think. People don't want to sit tight and wait for your page to load, so if you jam pack your website with all sorts of useless plug-in's you can probably bet that your site is not as responsive as it should be. According to Suraj from mythemeshop.com " Amazon says they lose 1% of customers if their website takes 1/10th of a second more to load."
In addition, Many studies have shown that each additional second in page load time can decrease your page views by 11% and conversions can go down as much as 7%. If this does not mean anything to you then I don't know what else would.
If you want to test this all you have to do is go to your Analytics page and webmaster tools and find out how long your pages take to load. The idea is to minimize the load time on every page of your website and the only way to do that is by getting rid of all of the things that can possibly slow you down.
I guarantee you that if you look through your plug-in page you can find at least a couple of them that you only use for 1 single feature. Is that 1 single feature worth possibly losing potential customers? I don't think so, but only you can make the call. Just think of Amazon and how they lose 1% of customers if pages take 1/10th of a second, that is still pretty fast and they still lose 1% which to them probably translates to thousands of dollars worth of sales.
Take some time to go through your own page and decide whether or not the plug in's are actually helping you or slowing you down.
Good Luck to you guys and thanks for the support!
Regards,
Manny
Recent Comments
9
I have stuck with what Kyle has said and like to keep things simple.. very interesting facts on amazon gives us an idea of just how important loading time is
Thank you, Manny. I just deleted 2 plugins that were just sitting there collecting dust. God Bless! ~Cathy
I have 15 installed and I need them. The 15th was Quick Cache and my load speed is 561/ms on home page (blog roll)
On posts: average 1.4s
John
Every major problem I've had on my sites, Manny, was due to plug-ins. I had to strip them out and re-add them one by one to figure out what was doing what. I keep only the ones that are truly necessary now and if something goes wonky, I check to make sure I haven't added something unnecessary. Don't get me wrong. I love plug-ins, but they can be a big problem, too. Good advice!
Yeah, I know. Some even do more harm than good while some add no true value at all, so yes I agree with you. I love plug-in's too but some are not designed as well as we hope or want them to and that can be a problem later on.
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Good advice. I'm with you....don't use a lot of plugins.