WordPress Plugins are a great way to extend your blog. With literally hundreds, even thousands of plugins available for WordPress, you can make WordPress do pretty much anything you want it to do. There are plugins to get blog stats, Twitter apps, show popular posts, even to help you make your blog SEO friendly. And these are all great to have and use. I use quite a few of them myself.
However, there are a few things you need to be careful of when using WordPress plugins. One of these is your blog’s load and response times. If you are running a lot of plugins, especially ones that load information to your blog when someone visits, this can severely put a damper on your blog’s load and response times. This can deter visitors to your blog from coming back, as a lot of us are impatient with load times on a broadband connection. Those on dial up connections (yes there are still a few of them out there) may never bother with your blog again.
Another thing to be wary of is how much bandwidth a plugin uses. A friend of mine on Twitter recently had an issue where her host took down her blog stating that she had used too much bandwidth. As she told me she does not have a monthly bandwidth limit, I was surprised until she said that her host claimed that she used so much bandwidth that she took the entire server down. She knew it had to be one of the plugins she was using, and when the host finally put her blog back up, she narrowed it down to StatsPress. She disabled the plugin and has not said anything about having any issues with bandwidth usage since.
However, it just goes to show that you do need to be careful. While I would not say StatsPress is a bad plugin (I do not use it myself, I use WordPress.com Stats and my WordPress.com API key), I would caution anyone who does decide to use it to watch their bandwidth consumption closely to see if there are any changes or any spikes in consumption once the plugin is activated.
I admit, it is possible that my friend was running an older version of WordPress or even an older version of the plugin which could have been exploited by a hacker, thus causing the sudden bandwidth usage spike. I am not discounting that possibility. However, I have seen plugins cause excessive bandwidth usage, slow load/response times, and in some cases, even break WordPress. So use caution when adding plugins.
Check the comments left about the plugins, check the rating the plugin has been given. Make sure when installing a new plugin that you are installing the latest version. Be aware that if the plugin states it has not been tested with your current version of WordPress or says it is compatible up to a version of WordPress lower than what you are using, that it is a possibility that it could break the blog until it is removed.
By all means, use plugins to make WordPress do what you want it to do. Just make sure you keep an eye on your blog to make sure they are not causing issues.
