Blog Tipz

There are now more than 6,700 plugins for WordPress, and although many of them aren’t current, there are still plenty that are compatible with the most recent version (WordPress 2.8+). It can be difficult to choose a plugin that suits your needs, and after this process, it can become tiresome updating and managing your plugins.

This post isn’t meant to be a solve-all for managing plugins, but it will certainly help when it comes to updating and adding new plugins. After all, having too many plugins installed at any time can certainly slow down your blog’s back-end, and potentially the front-end, too (what your visitors see).

Due to the nature of the WordPress plugins market – open and allowing anyone to create their own plugins, you have to be cautious installing new plugins, especially if they are new and from unknown developers. However, nearly all plugins found on the WordPress Codex page are from reliable developers who have released multiple plugins in the past.

Installing New Plugins

Finding new plugins should begin with a search engine, rather than the WordPress Codex. It’ll be a better indicator of the “best” plugin for your needs – you’ll find reviews and comments from others who have used the plugin. After you find a plugin that you like, enter a specific term into the WordPress.org search box to determine all the details.

I highly recommend the Easy Installer Plugin, as you don’t have to download the plugin files to your desktop, like the included installer for plugins. All you have to do is copy the link found on the plugin’s download page, and copy it into the appropriate field – it’ll extract and be placed in the appropriate place.

Managing Unwanted or Not Working Plugins

In order to manage plugins that may no longer work, keep notes on the reasons they might not work. Doing this will help you address the developers, whether they may be known issues or ones that pop-up due to your particular case. Some developers create plugins in their spare time, so this might not work in all cases, so you might need to just find a new plugin that suits your needs.

While WordPress doesn’t have any way to separate or group plugins, you could delete the plugin and keep a copy on your computer, in the case you need that particular version again, otherwise they should be removed from your server.

Inactive plugins, or those that you no longer have a need for, can be more difficult to manage. Sometimes, I have quite a number of inactive plugins I haven’t gotten around to deleting or using again. On a monthly (or quarterly) basis, it is a good idea to go through and update plugins, removing those that either don’t work or aren’t used any more.

Updating Plugins – A Good Schedule

It is extremely important to keep your plugins updated. New version releases include more features, security enhancements, and are more stable than previous versions. Some question this if they are using custom plugins, but in this case, you might only have to upload and replace one or two of the core files in order to properly update the plugin.

Behind the main WordPress version (2.7 or 2.8, for example), you want to keep plugins updated, or it creates holes for hackers to enter your blog. Keeping plugins updated for WordPress 2.8 is extremely easy – they are highlighted in the sidebar area with the number of plugins that need to be updated. Clicking on this will bring you to a list of plugins requiring updating, and through the one-click update process, it rarely takes more than a few minutes to complete the entire process.

Conclusion

While this guide was quite simple, you need to remember that the more flexibility you want to have with WordPress, the more plugins you need to have installed. More complex installs have built-in plugins (not found within the Plugins Panel of WordPress), and solve many of the problems that come with installing plugins.

The average WordPress user has between ten and a few dozen plugins installed. As themes become more inclusive of the more advanced features, there will be even less of a need for this high number of plugins.

How many plugins are you using, and how do you update and install new ones?