I’m not saying I’m perfect, but over the years I’ve learned to COMPLETELY dump wordpress themes for 2 major reasons.
Both 1 and 2 share a problem and that is you rely on a third party company to make security and functional updates. The more plugins you have, the more companies you rely on and often times, you get weird plugins in there with so few installs that you know they are going to be abandoned in a year.
Back when wordpress was solely dominated by template and had no all in one systems, my rule of thumb was a plugin needed 10,000+ active installs or I wouldn’t use it.
Now I prefer even more, often only going for 100,000 – 1,000,000 or more and I’ve ditched as many plugins as I can.
Supposedly the norm is having 20-30 plugins, which is absurd. Imagine the security problem you’ll have and the lag loading in 20-30 different js functions and stylesheets (even if you merge them all).
Recently there was a big hack, for lack of a better word, affecting over 400,000 sites. In the past, I’ve used some of those plugins, but fortunately got out of that mode by attending plugins anonymous to cure me of WordPress plugin addiction. Just kidding, I’ve always hated overloading sites with plugins.
By adopting plugin minimalist, with the exception of experimenting with my own site, I’ve managed to avoid all the hacking scandals, for now. I will say though, recently a contractors computer got hacked. Fortunately I have security measures in place that alerted me and I was able to avoid a bigger issue, then implement very strict security measures.
If you’d like a fast site that has minimal security holes and doesn’t rely on plugins published from around the world, let me know. I’m happy to help!
From the Essential Plugin attack:
