The Myth Of Too Many WordPress Plugins

As a seasoned developer, I can’t tell you how many times a new client has come to me and said, “My site is really slow—I think I have too many WordPress plugins,” or “I had a developer look at my site, and they said I have too many plugins. Can you delete some and see if that helps?”

To put it plainly, the idea that too many plugins slow down your site is a myth. Let’s talk about what’s really happening.

Reality

The truth is, a single poorly written plugin can slow down your site, or two well-written plugins might clash and cause performance issues. A great example is running multiple caching plugins that try to do the same thing. Plugins designed to make your site faster can actually make it slower if they’re fighting with each other.

If your plugins are well-written and don’t have conflicts, you could have hundreds—or even thousands—without experiencing a speed issue.

What to do?

While the number of plugins isn’t the issue, it still might be a plugin (or several) that’s slowing down your site. Or maybe it’s your theme. Or giant images. What’s really needed is a performance audit by a professional.

It may be tempting to install a performance testing plugin—and you might find something—but often the issue is subtle: a long-running query that runs on every page, or something similar. It takes an experienced developer to dig deep and uncover the tough issues.

If you really want to test for yourself, you could start by disabling all plugins and adding them back in one by one until you spot a significant issue. This isn’t as painful as it might sound, because WordPress has a “safe mode” that lets you test your site without certain plugins while still keeping them running for visitors. The WP Safe Mode plugin makes this easy.

Actual issues with too many WordPress plugins

While speed isn’t an inherent issue with many plugins, there are some things you do need to watch out for.

Plugins, themes, and WordPress itself should be kept up to date as much as possible. When you have just a few plugins, you might not see updates for weeks or even months. However, the higher the number of plugins, the more frequently you’ll need to perform updates. With 50–100 plugins, you might see updates every 1–2 days.

Automatic updates can help mitigate this, as can a monitoring tool. Many security plugins will email you when they detect a plugin that needs updating.

Practical Steps

Watch for low install numbers

Plugins that genuinely slow down your site often aren’t very popular—word gets out. A low install number on WordPress.org can indicate a problematic plugin, but it’s not a guarantee. It might simply be new or built for a niche use case.

If you install a plugin with a low install count, test your site immediately afterward. If it feels noticeably slower, it might not be the right plugin for you.

(Note: “Gutenberg Blocks – ACF Blocks Suite” has no known performance issues, I simply used it to show install counts)

Go Commercial

Commercial plugins often come with support—and if there’s a speed issue, the developers are going to hear about it and fix it. It’s in their best interest to ensure performance for everyone. Also, if a solid commercial plugin has known issues with other plugins, they’ll often list those conflicts and provide mitigation options.

Most commercial plugins also offer a way to ask pre-sale questions. You can describe your site—what theme it uses, which plugins are installed—and they’ll let you know ahead of time if they expect any problems.

Be Careful with Custom Code

Commercial plugins usually have entire teams dedicated to testing and quality control. But if you hire a freelance developer to build something custom, even if their code is excellent and does exactly what you want, they may not take the time to test it alongside every other plugin on your site. Be sure to ask them to do this—even if it costs a little extra.

Be More Careful with “Forum Code”

There are over 20 years of WordPress forum threads online, filled with code snippets that say things like “Just drop this into your functions.php file.” That code might be great. It might have been great 15 years ago. Or it might be absolutely terrible.

If you’re not a developer, have one review the code before you use it. It might only take a few minutes and could save you hours, days, or even months of frustration.

Ask Around

If you’re part of a WordPress community, don’t hesitate to ask if anyone is aware of known conflicts with the plugins you use. Meetup groups are easy to find on Meetup.com, and many have Slack groups—so you don’t even need to be local to get help.

Summary

As I’ve shown, the idea that having “too many plugins” slows down your site is a myth. That doesn’t mean there aren’t issues—it just means your site is a more complex machine than one running with just a few plugins. And complexity requires more attention and a savvier hand to maintain it properly.

If your site does complex things, it might need many plugins that work well together. But if it’s a simple travel blog to share photos, you probably don’t need a whole suite of them.

Bonus

This banner image—with 56 active plugins—is from my own site, HeroPress.com. And here’s my PageSpeed score.

Performance is a 92 because I have giant images, and I’m ok with that.

About half of my plugins are things I wrote myself, and many of them have only a few lines of code. This makes them easy to turn off and on for testing. 

Remember the forum code that suggested you put it in functions.php? You probably never want to do that. If you use that code you can put it into custom plugins like I did or use a snippets plugin like Code Snippets.

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