Jun 10

Written by:
2010/06/10 08:12 AM 

There are literally millions of blogs around today. But there are just as many plug-ins for blogs and websites as well. Are these plug-ins worthwhile or just a pain in the nether regions?

What is a plug-in?

If you use Firefox you might know what a plug-in is. A plug-in is a piece of software separate from your site or blog that adds extra functionality, a specific feature or service to the site.

Too Much is Too Much

When I first started blogging I would install every plug-in I found. With so many to play with and so little space on a web page it soon became apparent that I could not have any more.

The next thing I noticed was that my site started to load very slowly. It was then very clear that all these plug-in were causing the speed degradation. This is because 99% of them would make external calls to other sites and servers.

Are they really worth it?

Don’t be caught up with the plug-in hype. Too many plug-ins cause extreme clutter on a blog, and most of the time have absolutely no benefit to your readers.

Would a twitter plug-in work on your blog for example when the reader already has a twitter window open. Anyway he/she has come to your site to read your article and not your local tweets. That’s my thoughts anyway.

Recently a good friend of mine @kevincumbria from Web 2 and More had a terrible experience with a Wordpress plug-in, where it brought down his whole site. As a result he started losing readers.

My question is, are these plug-ins worthwhile? While there are certainly some that are, they are few and far between.

What are your thoughts?

I would really like your thoughts on this matter. Do you use any plug-ins, if so which ones.

Do you think plug-ins are worthwhile? If so, how have you made it work for your site.

Let’s have some great response with this so that we can help each other out.

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