WordPress Widget/Plugins | Quantity vs. Quality or Both?
Working with several other real estate agents, together to solve the world's problems with WordPress, I've learned how little I truly knew about WP! During the learning process, one puzzling piece of the pie has always been widget plugins. How many do I need and how many are too many?
I have interviewed several site designers who repeatedly tell me that you need no more than 5-10 widgets on your site. Should you have more than that, "your site will be bogged down and you will lose potential consumers because of your site's slower load time."
Well, if any of you real estate agents have a WP site, you KNOW that 5-10 is impossible--heck, you can have that many just with your IDX and generic search widgets! We have repeatedly tried to minimize the number of widgets that we use but, in order to promote your site and optimize SEO, you truly do need more than 10 to accomplish that. If you have the 'perfect' 5-10 widget plugins, are you offering the maximum experience for the consumer visiting your site? You could very well be but, at a recent real estate conference, many who had over 10K visitors per month to their sites said that they have over 15-20 widget plugins and their sites are optimized to perfection.
I have someone monitoring my WP sites on a daily basis to determine load time, randomly checking for typos, topics, etc. I've definitely learned to grow thicker skin as there always seems to be something up with my sites that someone doesn't like! Plugin widgets tend to be the culprits when a site is loading poorly and if you've recently added a new widget, it's generally that new one that is causing the issue and becomes an easy fix (time-wise). It's when you've done a major overhaul one day, adding and deleting multiple widgets, etc. that pose the real problems.
So, while doing a little research with regards to the widget plugins, I found this great tool to help if your WP site seems to be a bit bogged down. PluginHog Detector (a plugin that reveals CPU stats via table format), can help you diagnose your own problem--and it's free.
My suggestion: Those of you with slow-loading sites, install this plugin and see for yourself. As the author suggested in the link above, turning off the plug-in or deleting the widget, one by one, in order to detect the CPU hogging culprit, is difficult and time-consuming. The 'zillions' of plugin widgets that we're using are all listed on the PlugIn Hog Detector table, demonstrating which of them are the real CPU hogs.
More and more developers are working diligently to make the new widget plugins CPU-efficient because to many of us, it's about having as many good quality widget plugins as our consumer deands. There are also sites available with lists of widget plugins that are both CPU-friendly and CPU draining. If you're curious about the potential CPU drainage from a particular plugin, Google it and carefully read the reviews before installing it.
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