Plugins - Yay or Nay?

[adew]

Hi Joe,

Your question sounds like you see plugins as a necessary evil.

Plugins are fine and, frankly, a must if you want a WP site to be anything more than the most basic of blogs.

A lot of people have this strange idea that plugins are somehow bad, and should be avoided. This is nonsense. Use plugins that you need to give you the functionality that you or your clients want. Well-written plugins, ie those that use the proper API's, are no less secure than WP itself. For additional reassurance, yes, go for popular, well-supported plugins (though, look less at the download count and more at the star rating and type of support questions/comments that crop up in the WP forums to help you work out which are good and which are not so good).

As for performance, it depends on what the plugin does. Plugins which add db queries, such as all the popular related posts plugins, will add a performance hit of some sort. Others, such as contact forms, add very little performance hit if any (IMO). Only experimentation on a real site with real content can give a proper answer to the question of how many plugins is too much.

Hope this helps.