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