Annual Wordpress Widget And Plugin Smackdown!
How many of you have read posts like…
Top 10 Wordpress Widgets You Simply Must Have, Top 50 Widgets You Can Not Live Without or Top 100 Widgets Every Wordpress Install Needs.
OK, we’re guilty of publishing a few posts like this. But even more so, we’re guilty of installing every friggin widget and plugin that seems to exist out there!
This is a problem. You see, we end up installing them.
It will slow down Wordpress. It will slow down your site loading AND it could cause your browser to crash or fail to load Wordpress. I’ve actually been able to crash my browser a couple of time — might have been dumb luck though.
So it’s time for the Annual (or weekly) Widget and Plugin Smackdown (I used to LOVE WWF — now WWE — when I was younger - it was the greatest guy oriented soap opera ever!).
So how did we decide if a widget or plugin stays or goes? You could use these three questions:
- Does the widget or plugin slow down the blog page load? If the answer is YES, then it MUST GO!
- Does the widget or plugin add any real value to the readers of the blog? If the answer is NO, then it MUST GO! But there are some exceptions. I’ve had to kill most chiclets that promote other services because of load times and some contained javascript.
- Does the widget or plugin add any value to you? If NO, then it needs to go.
I remember a rather nasty company meeting years and years ago, our CEO was talking about company growth and the fact that attrition was high, blah, blah, blah… and he made a comment that “it is always good to see the deadwood go…”. Maybe there was some truth to it, but nevertheless it was a nasty thing to say.
There are some plugins out there that are like deadwood.
Clean up your blog, get rid of the crap that’s preventing it from loading quickly.
Your visitors will love you.
The image is Copyright WWE as is the term “Smackdown”. I found the picture from Yahoo Canada TV and it is WWE Smackdown Superstar Boogeyman.
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[...] followed it through. As I said previously, I’m a widget junkie — but recently went through and got rid of some [...]