WordPress Plugins and Optimization
As I have set up this blog I spend countless amount of time researching on the Internet about available WordPress plugins and here are some of my opinions and questions from my research. The goal was to carefully select and only implement the most important plugins in order not to slow the website down. The problem is deciding what is important and what is better or worse. Is my music play list really important? Probably not but it adds personality to the blog and it might even raise search engine ranking. This is really the only plugin that I used that displays personal information, everything else serves a purpose. Maybe I should have said relative purpose, most of the plugins do not really help in providing better content but enhance the look of the blog.
The math question on comments is my current spam protection tool, which is not necessary since I just started the blog, but I think it is better then the regular captcha plugins which I do not like because I often cannot read the image letters. Plus, captcha doesn’t work as effectively as it should so if I ever run into spam problems I will just install Bad Behavior 2 and Spam Karma 2.
Another plugin that is rather useless is the graph that shows post times called sparkstats. In my opinion, however, it looks pretty cool and its definitly better then BlogTimes which is quite similar. I also had to add a clean archives plugin to enhance the look of the archives and wpPaginate to get rid of the next/previous look I did not like. I don’t think these plugins slow down the website too much so why not add them.
The important plugins that I have are Popularity Contest, Most Commented, and Jerome’s Keywords. Recent posts and recent comments were already implemented into the theme but they are also most important in my opinion. These plugins provide internal linking and engage the viewer in the content on your blog so if they slow down the website, it’s worth it. Plus, I don’t think they cause any real delay.
I have a bunch of plugins that run in the admin, they are essential, and I am pretty damn sure that they do not effect how fast the website loads. I am referring to things like post spell checker called Corrector, Maintenance Mode, and Flickr Photo Album. The Flickr Photo Album is quite large and I only use it to quickly insert my flickr pictures into posts, but when I check the source of the blog I don’t see anything that has to do with this plugin so it should not effect the load speed. Is this correct?
Translation is definitly important and I use WP-Translate which I think is the best plug-in out there. My definition of best is simple and effective. Every blog should have a translation feature, I hate reading blogs written in a language I don’t know and manually trying to translate them via Google. It’s so much easier to just click on a flag. While I am on this subject I would like to plug my new, not quite finished, project: TRANSLATEN. The idea is that computer translation sucks and many people want human translation. The website is going to be a simple yet effective forum powered by vanilla where anyone can post something they want translated and others can translate it by replying to the thread. Things like paypal donations to translators and voting on quality of translation is being implemented. If you are interested in something like this, please go and join.
To finish with the WordPress plugins, I also added Users Online, Ajax Contact Form, Subscribe to Comments, Vipers Video Quicktags, Subscribe 2, and Xfish meta. I consider these pretty important. I also installed the BDP Referral Tracker which I think is quite large and thus, I wonder if this could be slowing down my blog. If you have any opinions on this please leave me some comments.
Overall, I am trying to find a balance between speed of the website, functionality, and content. I have about 30 plugins installed and I think that the website is still loading fine so far. The slow down is mostly generated by the javascript from AdSense but there is nothing I can do about that. Finally for tracking stats I use Google Analytics and SiteMeter. I have two of them because I want to test how they compare. Users online and BDP Referral Tracker also provide some statistics. Is it a good idea to keep Google Analytics and SiteMeter or should I settle for just one? Does Users Online or BDP Referral Tracker slow down the load time of the website? I appreciate all your opinions.
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Comments
I like the idea of a math question to help combat spam in comments. I’m going to try and add the plugin you reference to a contact-form I am using (ContactFormII) because I have been getting some contact-form spam. Thanks for a great article.
Thanks for very interesting article. btw. I really enjoyed reading all of your posts. It’s interesting to read ideas, and observations from someone else’s point of view… makes you think more.
Someone else below asked this already.
I am getting nailed with Spam in my website for our blog website. Is there anyway to stop this? If not, there really isn’t any point in leaving it up and active. Any help will be greatly appreciated. http://www.profesjonalna-reklama.pl
Thanks Keep up the good work. Greetings from Poland