In this article I’m going to cover why having an excessive amount of plugins or modules on your application can lead to resource usage on your account.
What is a plugin or module?
A plugin or module is a small bit of code that extends the base funtionality of an application. An example plugin could display a calendar on every one of your pages showing upcoming events.
How many plugins are excessive?
There isn’t a hard limit or good number of plugins to have on your website, but it’s generally recommended to keep it to the bare minimum that supports your sites main functions. The number of plugins you can run within your account’s resource usage limit, is also going to depend on the level of traffic that you receive.
As an example if you have a very intensive related posts plugin, that for each visitor it’s going to look through the entire database for other posts related to the current one the visitor is reading. This plugin might be fine to have on your account while you’re getting less than 500 visits a day. However if you’re getting thousands of unique visitors a day, the extra server overhead from having this plugin enabled might be too much.
If you have too many active plugins or modules running on your website, in extreme cases this could lead to a temporary account suspension, so realizing the impact that plugins or modules can have on your account’s resource usage is good to know.
Known high resource plugins
The current list of plugins have been known to be resource intensive at one time or another, simply having them enabled on your site alone might not be problematic. However with the level of traffic that your site receives they could be problematic.
If you happen to have been contacted by our system administration department regarding another possibly high usage plugin, please use the Your Opinion Matters! form on the top-right of this page to let us know about it, and we’ll update this list!
- Constant Contact WordPress Widget
- Digi Auto Links
- Disqus Comment System
- FireStats
- Google Talk Widget
- Quotes Collection
- Reveal IDs
- Simple Post Thumbnails
- VaultPress
- WassUp Real Time Analytics
- Wordgento
- WP Cloaker
- WP Facebox
- WP Facebox Gallery
- WP-Lifestream2
- WP Online Backup
- WP Autoresponder And Newsletter Plugin
- WP Symposium
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
WordPress plugins
