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#1 Reason you should Choose your Plugins Wisely

What is the #1 reason you should choose your plugins wisely?  What does that mean?  Does it even matter?  Shouldn’t I just add new plugins every time I find one that will fulfill a function that further optimizes my site?

The answer might surprise you.

Have you ever bought one of those extension cords that has all the outlets to plug into?  Made sense, didn’t it?  You could plug a lot of things into the same wall outlet and your life just got a lot easier…

But wait.  Did you find it frustrating after a while when nothing seemed to stay plugged in any more? Did the breaker for the wall outlet ever “kick?”  Did you ever notice the cord getting hot?
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That’s what happens when you try to plug too many things into the same wire.  It tries to carry all that “juice,” but believe it or not, all those electrons, small as they are, still occupy a certain amount of space, and when you get too many trying to travel through the same “tunnel,” the wire, they get to fighting with each other.

We call that friction, and friction creates heat.  It happens when you try to put too much through something that’s too small.

The same thing applies on the Internet.  We call it “bandwidth.”

If you have a fast server and a lot of bandwidth, you can probably get away with adding all the “bells and whistles” to your website.  But should you?

Here’s the thing:  Your website loaded on your high powered computer on your expensive, fast ISP might look and work great, but what about the average user – you know – the one you are trying to reach with your message?

The more you add to your website, the slower it gets.  This is really important, especially now that so many sites are accessed using mobile service – aka, smartphones and tablets.  These traditionally (and habitually) have a lot less memory (RAM) than desktops and laptops, and their chips are often not nearly as fast as what’s in your new computer.

“But… but…” you might protest.  “I’m using plugins to optimize all my text, photos, and video!”  That should make it okay, right?
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The pesky reality of bandwidth

But the truth is that the plugins, themselves, use bandwidth and memory.  In other words, the more plugins you use to optimize your site, the more you might actually be slowing your site or making it difficult for visitors to use.

Remember the electrons fighting to get through the tunnel?  Well, plugins use the same “tunnel” as your browser – the cable that connects users to the Internet.  The more plugins you add, the more crowded it gets.

This not to say you shouldn’t use plugins when optimizing your website.  The right plugins can do an amazing job of streamlining your site and reducing the size of files.  They also can provide required security, keep track of and track visitors, and much more.

We’re now getting to the #1 reason you should choose your plugins wisely.  Plugins are a good thing, but like the saying goes, you can have too much of a good thing.

Again, imagine going to a great nightclub.  The music is good, the people are terrific, and everyone is having a fabulous time.  You’re having lots of fun, dancing the night away, but then you start to notice something:  It’s getting hot in there, and it’s getting really hard to move.  Dancing is becoming more work and much less fun.  In fact, getting up to dance might mean not having a place to sit when you finally get through the crush back to your table.

What happened?  The guys at the door, the “breaker” in our wall outlet scenario, let too many people in and now things are getting overloaded.  It’s getting really hot and nothing’s working the way it should any more.  Wait times for anything seem to be forever, and everybody is getting irritated.  It’s time to just leave.  On the Internet, this is when someone clicks away from your site.

If you use too many plugins, what was a great idea at the beginning starts to overload the system.  Your website load time goes up, instead of down.  People who try to visit your site start losing patience and click away.

You can test this using sites like Pingdom, Google, and others to test your website load speed.  How does this apply to why you should choose your plugins wisely?

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Choosing SEO Plugins

When doing SEO (search engine optimization) on your website, plugins can be a big help.  There are plugins to reduce load time for images, text, and video.  Others will optimize your code, which while invisible, still takes time when your website is loading.

There are lots of plugins, many that are very good at doing their job.  But the problem is that pesky bandwidth.  Everything takes bandwidth, including plugins.  That might drop considerably after your site is loaded, but it can really affect load time.

This is where Pingdom and the others comes in.  Test your site each time you add or remove a plugin.  If your load time goes down, great!  But if it increases, you need to make some choices.

Do you keep the plugin you just added and drop another that does less?  You can only make that decision by making the other one inactive and checking load speed again.  It is a process, but it is worth it.

In the end, this will give you your “voltage drop.”  In wiring, that is can be calculated using a formula based on the cross-section of the wire size being considered.  It calculates the minimum size of wire that can be used for a particular amperage requirement (current – aka, traffic when applied to your website), with a specified voltage supply (the push – aka, whatever is driving your traffic).

The higher the current, the larger the wire needs to be for the same voltage.  In other words, if you are trying to push a lot of traffic through your website, you’re going to need to be able to handle it.  If you’ve already overloaded your system with too many plugins, it’s going to stall.  Load times will become so high just when you need it to be able to load in an instant that all your precious traffic is going to click away.  Worse, your site could simply crash if it gets too many visitors.
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Short-Circuit!

Another unforeseen event that can occur when adding a new plugin is a conflict with one or more existing plugins that shuts your site right down.  Have you ever been working on you site and suddenly it doesn’t load?

You finally contact tech support and magically, a few minutes later, your site is running again.  What did they do?  They disabled one or more plugins.

That’s like a short-circuit in your household wiring.  This is where something connects the two wires going into your wall outlet before the load.  A bad motor in a hair dryer, running over your extension cord with your lawnmower, etc., are just a few things that can do that.  The breaker trips and you have to go back in and turn it back on, after you remove the problem.

This is what the tech person does, flipping the “breaker” back on after removing the problem, the plugin you just installed, or maybe a few plugins (often, they are trained to indiscriminately deactivate the “most likely culprits”).  Then you have to figure out which ones you can safely turn back on.

Therefore, you need to choose your plugins wisely, taking these things into account.  Your website should load faster and better when you add a plugin.  Any time it loads slower or something worse happens, you need to discover why and decide how to proceed.
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Main reason to choose your plugins wisely

You want your website to look great and to load FAST!  Plugins can really help, but like just about everything in life, a little can be great, but too much of a good thing often turns into a bad thing.  Make sure you choose your plugins wisely, so that your website really does look good and at the same time, loads with lightning speed.

When you discover the right combination, you will quickly discover it was worth all your hard work to get there
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A final note

Like everything else, taking the time to choose your plugins wisely is not the end.  Everything, and I mean everything, is constantly changing.  Plugins need to be kept up to date.  You and automate that to a certain extent, but never make the mistake of “set it and forget it,” as far too many are doing.

A plugin that was great can suddenly run into conflicts that stall your site when it or another are updated.  Some great plugins become obsolete when, for some inexplicable reason, their creators stop updating them.

Never take your eyes off your site.  Schedule regular and frequent checkups to make sure everything is working properly.

And keep on creating great content!  What are your favorite plugins?  Please tell us in the comment section below. Be sure to leave us your link!
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