WordPress is the most popular CMS in the internet world today. The platform actually started as a mere blogging platform but has grown to become one of the best solutions for any website project you can think of, you are only limited by your ideas. One of the reasons WordPress has been very successful and popular among webmasters is the ease with which extensions are built in the form of plugins to extend the functionality of WordPress. This is why with WordPress you can build virtually any kind of website.

Being able to extend the functionality of WordPress doesn't mean you should overload your site with too many plugins. You should only use the most relevant and required plugins. Every plugin you see on the WordPress plugin directory has it's function and configurations. Some plugins are not properly coded, while some use outdated functions that might cause your WordPress site dysfunction when used with another plugin.

In most cases the problems you encounter on your WordPress site like memory issues, site crash, the white screen of death, error in database connection, slow loading time, frequent downtime and being locked out from your admin area are not far fetched from from the number and kinds of plugins you have running on your site. So in this post I will list some of the issues you might encounter with numerous plugin installed and also list the most necessary and relevant plugins you should install on your WordPress site.


Some negative impact of Installing too many plugins on your WordPress site


Server overload

Too many plugins will overload your server with multiple requests at same time which will lead to gateway timeout due to slow server response. Each time some one requests a page on your site, the server is called. So if you have too many plugins, each script will run at same time on the server, thus causing slow server response. This is a great deter your site visitors from coming back.


PHP memory limit drain

When you buy web hosting from a web hosting company, your server is configured with a specific PHP memory usage allocation. This can be 64mb or 128mb depending on the hosting package. Most web hosts cap PHP memory limit at 64MB for basic shared hosting packages and 128MB for other premium packages. Offcourse if you are on shared hosting, most web hosts won't give you access to the PHP.ini file which handles this factor. So if you have too many plugins installed on your WordPress site, will mean that you are likely to drain your PHP memory limit.This can be aggravated if you have a plugin that is wrongly coded.


c. Slow loading of site

Slow loading site is negative SEO and will affect your site rankings. Your site shouldn't take more than 5 seconds to load. Anything above 9 seconds means your site is taking to long to load. This is a put of to regular site visitors and most especially new visitors. Due to too many scripts running at same time on your server, your site will likely take eternity to load.


Frequent site crash

If your server is taking too long to respond, your site is bound to crash due to gateway timeout. Also if you have exhausted the allocated PHP memory limit, your site will crash due to inability of your server to allocate memory to process the various PHP scripts running on your site and sometimes this can take up to 20-30 mins for your site to come back online. This issue alone will kill any effort you are making on SEO not to mention the visitors you will loss and search engine bots it will prevent from crawling your site. It's important you know that when Google can't crawl your site, it will automatically start dropping previously indexed pages gradually.

You can see that too many plugins can destroy your site. The big question now is, how many plugins should I have installed on my site? I have only a maximum of 7 plugins installed on my site and I think you should do same , at most 9 plugins. When building your site, the most important plugins you should have are plugins to enable easy sharing of your contents when visitors visit your site, plugin that creates sitemap and pings search engines, a contact form, spam detection and preventing and newsletter plugins. Even if you have more than 9 plugins installed on your site, ensure that plugins that don't need to be active constantly are deactivated until its need arises.


Must Have Plugins On Your WordPress Site

#1 Jetpack

I think that the number one plugin you should install on your WordPress site is the Jetpack plugin by automatic. This plugin is very versatile and huge too, the good thing about it is that the team behind the project are regularly updating it in compliance with latest trends in WordPress newest versions. With Jetpack plugin you can automatically publish new contents to social networking sites, add sharing buttons to your contents, add related post widget to your posts to reduce bounce rate, view site traffic stats and so many other functions.

#2 Yoast SEO or All in One SEO

The second plugin you should install on your WordPress site is the Yoast SEO or The All in One SEO plugin to optimize your contents and site for search engine traffic. The livelihood of any site is dependent on traffic and about 52% of this traffic comes from search engines. So having a SEO plugin that optimizes your site for search engine related traffic is very vital. I have recommended this two plugins because they are the best in the WordPress SEO industry.

#3 Wp Super Cache or W3 Total Cache

Another plugin that you should have on your WordPress site is a caching plugin. WordPress is built on PHP one of the most popular programming languages, likewise the plugins you install on your site. PHP which is a server side language will make a call to your server each time a page is requested on your site. What this caching plugin basically does is to convert this enormous PHP scripts into plain HTML codes which the browser can quickly read and display its result upon request. So with installing either of the caching plugins mentioned above, your WordPress site will likely load faster. This will improve your SEO score as well as encourage visitors to your site to return next time.

#4 Akismet

We all know the fight against internet spam is a very tough one, which is why you need a plugin that will check comments on your blog for spam comments. Otherwise with the alarming rate of spamming this days , your site can be flooded with thousands of spam comments which will overload your database and mean you will need to be optimizing it more frequently.This is not good. So Akismet is here to the rescue to stop all forms of robots spamming your site from commenting junks on your site.

#5 Theme Check

One of the big advantages of using WordPress is the high number of both free and paid themes you can use to beautify your site, but then one thing is bound to happen, not all of the themes you see on WordPress theme directory meet the required standards. This is why you need Theme check to check any theme installed on your WordPress site for latest compliance with the newest version of WordPress. As a poorly coded theme can cause problem for your site.

#6 Contact Form

Finally on my list of must have plugins on your WordPress site is the popular contact form maker, contact form 7. Its very important for you to have a simple contact form on your site so that your visitors can easily contact you. Though the Jetpack plugin offers a simple contact form widget you can add to your site, but if you really want to create intuitive forms then you should install the contact form 7 plugin.

On a final note always remember to update all plugins and themes installed on your site. Any theme or plugin that is no longer maintained is not healthy for your site and as such should be uninstalled. Remember also to always optimise the performance of your database with Wp Optimize at least once every month. This will clear off caches of deleted plugins, spam comments from your database.

Note: the database is the engine of your site and you should always have a backup of your database before optimising it and for staying safe.

Source: http://herokeys.com/article/here-is-why-your-wordpress-site-is-crashing-and-going-offline-see-how-to-prevent-it/

Nice topic..