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The desire to have more and more can never be extinguished. At least I cant do anything about my desire to keep my sites growing. This requires the best collection of tools. Plugins are the tools I use most.
The question when is having too many plugins bad. The answer to this question lies not in the definition of the phrase ‘too many’. In fact there you could only have a only a handful of plugins and it might be affecting your blog. Here are a few things you should know about plugins.
Type of Plugin
One way to categorize the plugins is whether the affect your blog from front end or does it only efffect your blog’s admin area.
Most Plugins affect the feel of your pages. They do present something for the blog reader to see. In my dictionary these are front-end plugins. They do sometimes provide an admin area to manage that look and feel.
The other type of plugins are only to make the life of the admin [or the blogger] easier. They do not show anything inside posts. But they provide features that helps admin in managing and publishing the post. In my lingo these are back-end plugins.
The back-end plugins are not very likely to have severe performance drawback. The obvious reason is that they come in play only from the admin area. One such example is my Flickrize Image Search. The plugin does absolutely nothing when a user is browsing through your blog. It is the front end plugins that you need to be absolutely cautious. They may hamper the performance of your blog seriously if you are not careful. Front end plugins will query the database for each posts. If they are not written smartly you will see the effect in load time of your page, and if your site has a lot of traffic, it will slow down considerably when ‘not so smart plugins’ are used.
Credibility
See how stable the plugin is before installing it on your blog. I always recommend trying and testing a plugin in your test site. Before installing a front end plugin, have a look at the plug in page and see the comments of the people who used it.
License
A commercially licensed plugin will have support behind it. Chances are that it will be more stable and tested. In case you find issues you can contact the provider and have your issues resolved. But most of the plugins we use in WordPress are free. They may not provide an excellent support. However contacting the author in most case does help.
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