Templates & Plugins 2 — Tips for using Plugins

As discussed here, plugins can cause a heap of problems.  Following are some tips for using (or not) plugins and ensuring your CMS offers a clean content menu, not a multilingual hodge podge:

Get rid of plugins, present a clean content menu

• Audit your CMS and review which of the installed site-wide plugins you really need to keep and which can be replaced with simple transparent code snippets inside header.php.
• Audit your CMS template features and determine if you really need all those user features and special modules such as specialized logins and on-site tools.
• Deactivate plugins that perform special site maintenance functions used only intermittently, e.g. security checks, import/export, and activate them only when you actually use them.
• Set the access to plugins that perform admin tasks so that they do not execute for site users but instead work only on the backend.
• Configure your admin to run installs to see which remaining plugins trigger errors (on WP, in wp-config.php, set the debug mode to “true”).
• Remove all references of uninstalled plugins from the CSS, then optimize the remaining style sheets.
• Remove all references of leftover tables from the Mysql database, then optimize the remaining tables.
• Once you’ve uninstalled plugins, run a report to show all “Not Found” queries or 404 errors and remove them all.
• Deactivate — or better, uninstall — plugins you don’t use.