Finding plugins is so easy. You can just click ‘Add plugins’  under ‘Plugins’ in the sidebar and there are easy instructions from there. Be sure to read the installation notes for the plugins as some do not work straight out of the box. You can also search Google as I sometimes do. The control panel plugin search feature has improved recently but I still find Googling helps me find what I am looking for. Some plugins are not in the wordpress.org repository so you will have to google to find them.

Some people think they can add whatever plugin they like and as many as they like and that might be OK but I am here to tell you that it might not be OK. Keep reading to find out more.

Things to remember:

1. Plugins can slow your site down.
2. Plugins can be a resource hog.
3. Plugins can stop working.
4. Some plugins are not compatible with other plugins.
5. Some plugins are not compatible with some themes.
6. You don’t need every plugin.
7. There are usually several plugins with similar features.

1. Plugins can slow your site down.
As I might have mentioned before, WordPress would be pretty boring without plugins so go ahead and grab some but keep in mind that in general the more plugins you have installed the slower your site will become. Some plugins will cause more damage to your website’s speed than others.

2. Plugins can be a resource hog.
This can be an issue on your server side and is similar to the first point. Some plugins make calls to the server and the more calls you make to the server the more CPU power you will need there. If you are on shared hosting which I guess most of the people reading this blog are, myself included, this could mean that your plugins will cause everybody’s web site on that shared server to slow down and web hosts don’t like that and might take your site down. This is not so common though and  I wouldn’t worry about it too much but remember the more plugins you have the more likely it is to cause a problem.

3. Plugins can stop working.
Just because your plugin is working fine today doesn’t mean it will tomorrow. There are several possible reasons. Sometimes upgrading a plugin can cause the problem. For example, recently I upgraded a plugin for a friend and it stopped working and after some investigation I found that the new version wasn’t compatible with PHP4 which is what her web site was run on. Luckily I was able to upgrade it to PHP5 without causing any trouble with the other websites in her hosting plan. There are enough reasons for your plugin to stop working to warrant a post dedicated to this issue so stay tuned.

4. Some plugins are not compatible with other plugins.
Simple fact. Sometimes plugins don’t work because of compatibility issues. If nobody else is having problems with the plugin this is likely to be the issue but see next point for another possible cause. Anyway, before you go complaining to the hardworking plugin author you should check the plugin page at wordpress.org or information on the authors own site for compatibility issues. If that fails try google. If you still can’t find the information try disabling all the other plugins and checking to see if the problem plugin is working. If it is working, that means it is a compatibility issue.  Reactivate the plugins one by one to discover which plugin is causing the problem. When you find the problem plugin you have some options:

• You can choose which plugin you want to keep.
• You can contact the plugin author and see if he can fix it.
• You can find alternative plugins

5. Some plugins are not compatible with some themes.
The more complex a theme is the more likely it is to have compatibility issues with a plugin. It is not as common as plugin vs. plugin incompatibility but it does happen and you follow pretty much the same steps as outlined above to solve this issue.

6. You don’t need every plugin.
As you should realize by now just installing a ton of plugins can cause problems. I suggest you carefully select your plugins and choose only what you think will make your site better. For example, in nearly all of my web sites I use an SEO plugin, a Google sitemap plugin and Akismet but I have one private web site that only friends and family can view or comment on posts so I don’t use any of those plugins on that site. The lesson: choose appropriate plugins.

7. There are usually several plugins with similar features.
This is not always the case but in general you can find more than one plugin with the same basic features. How do you choose which one to use? Of course you can compare the features and decide which features you prefer. You could also select a plugin on its ease of installation and use. Compatibility issues (see above) could help make the choice for you. Another thing to look out for is how active is the plugin author. Some plugins are abandoned by the author and even if it is working now I think it is fair to assume that without continued development it is sure to break at some point due to changes in the WordPress software.

WordPress.com Stats
The first one I’d like to mention is WordPress.com stats. Again, like Akismet, you need to have a WordPress.com API key (see previous post). This is a nifty plugin that provides a variety of stats and graphs about your website such as how many times posts and pages have been viewed and where your visitors are coming from and you can look at it directly from your control panel. In fact if you have several sites, as I do, using this plugin you can check all their statistics from one of those sites control panels. Also because all of the processing and collection runs on wordpress.com servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. That last sentence is pretty much copy and paste.

Official StatCounter Plugin
I use this on all my websites as well as my Cafepress shops. It is one of my favorite tools. You can get some of the same stats from the wordpress.com stats but the thing I love about this tool is that you can see what pages your visitors looked at, you can basically follow their path around your website and you can usually tell where each visitor came from and a host of other stats but the function that I just mentioned is what I look at the most. It can tell you a lot about the visitor but also about your site. If all your visitors are coming to one page and then disappearing from your website, you may have a problem. There are many reasons for this, it could be that you have only one page, an ugly website, a crap article, nothing that entices people to look at other parts of your website or a host of other things. It doesn’t tell you what the problem is unfortunately but it does tell you that there might be  a problem.
To use statcounter you need to have a statcounter account but they have great free service.

Well, I am off to install those two plugins so I will finally know if anyone is visiting this site.

Note: In the next post I will talk about installing plugins and give you some advice about how to find plugins, how to choose the correct ones for you and what to watch out for.