Choosing the right combo of plugins for our blogs is not an easy task. There is a lot to consider. From which the best WordPress plugins are, which ones offer similar or equal features for a lower price, to how many is a good number and how many will affect our blog’s health.
How Many WordPress Plugins Are Too Many?
Personally, I don’t like having more than ten (10) plugins installed on my WordPress blog, for one very simple reason. Plugins are like different teams of people working on our online magazine. They take care of themselves (with updates), but they are still there and sometimes we need to step up and see what they’ve done.
One has the option to enable auto-updates, so that we don’t have to. But on several occasions, an update from one plugin collided with another plugin, and I had to deactivate one by one to see where the problem was coming from.
That is something you’ll see in forums very often: “Have you tried deactivating all your plugins?”. It is frustrating and a big waste of time.
Hence, I keep my number of plugins below ten, and I have disabled the auto-updates for all of them. A good amount, according to the CEO of WPRiders, is twenty (20) and no more than thirty (30), as he stated in an interview for Forbes.
WordPress Plugins for Performance
Coming Soon Page, Under Construction & Maintenance Mode, by SeedProd
This plugin allow us to close our site under “maintenance mode”, telling search engines that is not actually closed and that we’ll be right back ? There’s no much to explain because it’s extremely easy to configure.
Jetpack, By Automattic
“Security, performance, and marketing tools made by WordPress experts. Jetpack keeps your site protected so you can focus on more important things.”
WP-Optimize – Clean, Compress, Cache
“WP-Optimize makes your site fast and efficient. It cleans the database, compresses images and caches pages. Fast sites attract more traffic and users.”
Akismet Anti-Spam, By Automattic
Protect your blog from spam!
Yoast SEO, By Team Yoast
Gotta make your blog rank good on search engines! This is the greatest solution. “The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more.”
WordPress Plugins for Monetization
Site Kit, By Google
Google Console, Analytics and Ad Sense, will be in one place… in your WordPress dashboard! Hoe cool is that?
“Site Kit is a one-stop solution for WordPress users to use everything Google has to offer to make them successful on the web.”
Ad Inserter
It allows you to choose where to show which ad. Game changing!
WordPress Plugins to Have More Features
Breadcrumb NavXT
Leave breadcrumbs to your readers.
Custom Post Type UI
Admin UI panel for registering custom post types and taxonomies in WordPress. I use it to:
- create my own “classroom mode” for my guides
- create hidden taxonomies to make the most of the Query Block
Jetpack
Besides helping with the performance of a blog, Jetpack comes with plenty additional blocks for the Gutenberg editor, the possibility to link a form to MailChimp and “oh, so much more.”
