WWMD: Uninstall Unnecessary Plugins
- Filed under: WWMD
No, WWMD doesn’t stand for Wimpy Weapons of Mass Destruction. It stands for Wpdesigner Weekend Must Do. WWMD is a new series of posts that I’m starting on this blog to help you improve your own blog, one weekend at a time.
Your first Wpdesigner-Weekend-Must-Do task is to review your installed plugins and uninstall the unnecessary ones to improve your blog’s performance.
For this blog, I’ve uninstalled the WP Download Monitor plugin, which I used to track how many times my themes and other files have been downloaded. Why did I uninstalled such a useful plugin? I didn’t need it and it was putting stress on my server, simple as that.
If you want a more complicated explanation, here it is; the WP Download Monitor plugin was making too many queries to the database. The more queries your blog makes, the more stress your server (web host) has to endure. In extreme cases like surviving a Digg-effect or a huge sudden increase in traffic, your host could shut down your blog for putting too much stress on the server, even if you haven’t used up the storage and bandwidth resources.
With the WP Download Monitor plugin, the front page of my blog had to operate with 136 queries on every page load. After uninstalling that plugin, the front page needed only 10 queries to work. 136 versus 10 and all I have to do is give up tracking the downloads, hmmm.. oh what, oh what should I do? I deactivated / uninstalled it, of course.
To find out how many queries your blog is making on each page load:
- Add
<!– <?php echo get_num_queries(); ?> queries –>
to your theme’s footer.php file.
- Upload the new footer.php file to your theme’s folder.
- Go back to your blog’s front page.
- On your browser, go to View > Page Source.
- Scroll to the bottom to find the number of queries.
The image below is an example of what you’ll see:
Before you start uninstalling or deactivating each plugin to find out how many queries each one makes and to find out which plugin to uninstall for sure, back up your blog’s database and files, just in case you mess up.
Now that you know what you must do for the first WWMD, once you’re finished, come back to this post to write a comment. Let me know how it turned out for you and how I can help you with the next WWMD.
Very nice SP. This could definitely help me.
I’ll be looking forward to the new series!
Great post. Looking forward to the rest of the series.
And if you would like to know, I uninstalled the following plugins from DP:
Buy Me a Beer/Coffee plugin
bbPress-integration &
Get Recent comments
Basically, I just didn’t need them anymore.
[…] WWMD: Uninstall Unnecessary Plugins […]
Okay, this is a really helpful tip. And thanks for the reminder.
Great tip. I will need to head over and remove some. I know theres got to be something I don’t need anymore!
nice tip
thanks for the query tip SP
Great sp. Me too using WP Download Monitor, fuh! 143 queries. Alternative? use Imp-download (23 queries.) Anybody tried lester chan download manager?
I am currently using Simple Download Manager. My pages are only to be making 15-19 queries.
That’s nifty. I think I’ll do that. I need to clean up my website anyway.
Huh I didn’t know about that bit of code. Gonna put in my footer now. Thanks SP!
Hah, really nice tip! Thank you!
I will unstall it.
I usually add: seconds. to also display the time it took to generate the page.
Furthermore yo ucan use firebug, a firefox extension to see how long your page takes to load and see the size of each of its elements.
and there is headspace2 a nice plugin I am just trying out, which can enable plugins only for certain pages, so they load only on those pages you want them to run
Thanks SP! Great tips.
How do you get the seconds into the queries like you did on your page?
Example
I’ve always been an advocate of light-weight, plugin minimal sites. I think there are currently 11 plugins I have activated, and I’m wondering which I can strip further.
How many plugins do you have running SP?
Actually mate, this post came at just the right time for me. I’m giving away over $4,000 worth in free blog prizes to celebrate my blog birthday, and thanks to your prompt I’ve just halved the number of queries on the prize draw page:
From 212 queries to about 100.
The biggest culprit was the MyAvatars plugin, as I have quite a few comments on the post already, and each one pulls a query to collect the avatar.
I’ll keep it de-activated for now, and have also de-activated the WP Ajax Edit Comments plugin, which is another I don’t really need right now.
Mageous - I use timer_stop(1)
David - I have 13 activated, but most of them are small plugins like No Self Ping, Optimal Title, Comment License, etc.
I also use MyAvatars. However, this page that you’re reading uses only 14 queries and there are 18 comments.
Hmmmmm, you’re doing such a better job than I am! That’s not surprising really.
I found the real culprit - the LinkLove plugin for DoFollow comments.
By de-activating it I’ve dropped the queries from 117 to 24 on my blog post with 46 comments.
I wasn’t sure why, but you weren’t in my feed reader. You are now though.
I was thinking about installing one of those dofollow plugins. Thanks for the tip
Hey Potato, this post is taking off - I think it’s actually a good idea to share experiences/thoughts on what plugins people DON’T need - there are so many must-have wordpress plugins out there, but how about some lists about what we don’t need?
I’ve been going back and forth with the maker of the all in one seo pack plugin and he is VERY close to making the popular seo title tag obsolete as well as optimal title and probably some other seo plugins
I’ve never re-enabled wp-cache because of the gate it doesn’t work properly in that when I have it running and write a new article it doesn’t show up on the site until I flush the cache - I imagine that there must be a way to set it up to work properly since it is so popular, but I haven’t had the time to investigate it sufficiently
I’m sure there are some others I tried, used for a while, and got rid of when I realized they were slowing down the site or other plugins do a better job, but because I DID get rid of them they’re no longer listed and I forget which ones they were - ah well, if I remember some more I’ll report back
Hey guys. Thank you for this awesome tip. I like it! I currently have 14 querries. I think that is okay. I will think about what I could get rid off!
cu
Lovely and useful, thanks.
Good and really useful post for all readers and specially for me, thanks!
[…] an individual must make before they achieve DoFollow status. UPDATE: 04 February 2008 Please read this comment I left on WPDesigner.com, which highlights how the LinkLove plugin uses a lot of resources to run. […]
[…] WWMD: Uninstall Unnecessary Plugins […]