5 Reasons Why You Should Or Should Not Use WordPress Plugins

Depending on your needs, WordPress plugins are the best and worst aspect of WordPress. The whole purpose of plugins should be to provide a certain function or solve a very specific problem. They should never be used unnecessarily to satiate a desire to indulge in brand new technology. WordPress plugins can be a real time-saver but they can also allow you to be lazy when creating your website. The real key is knowing when you should use them and when it is best to avoid the use of plugins. Below, we discuss five reasons to use plugins and five reasons not to.

When You Need Plugins

1- For Speed

You can greatly speed up your WordPress posts and pages by using a plugin such as WP Super Cache. This allows you to make static HTML versions of your posts and updating them as and when you choose. If you receive a lot of traffic, this is useful as it reduces the need for server-side processes to generate a post when a visitor looks for it. Super Cache is capable of almost tripling page loading speed in some cases.

2 – Anti-Spam

If your blog is popular and receives a huge amount of comments, it can be a pain weeding out the spam comments left by trolls with nothing better to do with their day. Thanks to Akismet, you can filter out spammers that are registered on the Akismet database. This plugin is known to remove over 99% of spam comments.

3 – When Search Engines Bypass You

Google XML Sitemaps Generator enables search engine spiders to index the content of your website. It alerts search engines every time there is new content on your site which is ready to be indexed. Regular index is one of the keys to a high search engine ranking.

4 – When Your Site Needs More Traffic

The All in One SEO pack plugin is known to improve the search engine ranking of websites. If you want visitors to locate your shiny new website, you need help with SEO. If you can’t rank in the top 30 results for keywords related to your industry, very few people will ever find your site.

5 – To Improve User Experience

PageNavi is a terrific plugin as it provides your website with a pagination feature. Essentially, this means your visitors can quickly and easily find your old posts. You can customise it to meet your specific needs and increase the possibility of visitors returning to your website.

When You Don’t Need Plugins

1 – If You Are Indecisive

WordPress plugins are supposed to save time but if you are guilty of frequent procrastination, you might be better off ignoring them. Picture the scene: You find one plugin and install it only to find one that is superior soon after. You remove one to install the other and continue to add plugins. The extra lines of code added to your template weigh your site down. Each plugin could potentially add additional time to the loading process. Impatient visitors will not wait 10 seconds or more for a page to load.

2 – You Understand That Basic Functions Are All You Need

Knowledge of the WordPress content management system is all you need when you decide to publish your content. You should have immediate functionality and if there are new features worth installing, they will be added in upcoming releases. Simply upgrade these features as and when they come available rather than searching for something new.

3 – When You Value Content Over Excess Style

It is important to remember that you are creating the site for your target audience and don’t need the approval of other website owners. Your customers want a clean structure and useful material. When trying to make a sale, the most important thing to remember is that you want to show them why they need the product/service rather than trying to impress them with a fancy website. Concentrate on improving user experience through videos, images or text. If you have time for added plugins, perhaps you can go ahead. Otherwise, focus on the basics first and don’t complicate matters needlessly.

4 – You Want Reliability & Speed

But didn’t we just say that plugins can speed up your website? Yes we did but there is also the possibility that plugins will slow down your website as they force search engine spiders to read more lines when crawling your website. With more lines comes a greater possibility of bugs in your code. Negative reports by search engine spiders can be very damaging so bear this in mind when considering plugins.

5 – You Don’t Like Shortcuts

When used correctly, plugins can greatly improve your website in terms of improving page loading speed, removing spam comments and enhancing customer experience. Yet when it goes wrong, it can go badly wrong, especially when you are unfamiliar with plugins. If you are of the belief that shortcuts usually lead to inferior
results, perhaps you should steer clear of WordPress plugins.

There are good, bad and ugly sides to WordPress plugins. They often encourage sloth as creators of websites think plugins are some sort of magic pill. In addition, the ease of use of the existing WordPress system is a thing of beauty and is something that should not be trifled with for no reason. On the other hand, if you have WordPress plugin expertise, there is little you can’t do to improve your site using these tools. In the end, it is a matter of necessity, time and skill level.

An article is written by Sara Carter.  I like social networks, Google android, http://www.mac-reviews.net/ and psychology. I’m interested in IT services, computer upgrades, computer repair, different computer apps. Love travelling and skiing.