A typical WordPress site we are asked to take over runs somewhere between twenty and forty plugins. A page builder, a slider, two form plugins, a security suite, an SEO suite, a caching plugin, a cookie banner and a long tail of small helpers that someone installed once and forgot. Each one is code written by a stranger, updated on its own schedule, with its own idea of what your site should look like.
We take the opposite approach. Our sites run on a handful of plugins, and most of those we wrote ourselves.
Why fewer is better
- Security. Most WordPress compromises come through plugins, not WordPress itself. Every plugin you remove is a door that no longer exists.
- Speed. Plugins load their own scripts and styles on every page, whether that page needs them or not. Lean sites load faster, which helps visitors and search rankings alike.
- Stability. When forty plugins update on forty schedules, something eventually conflicts. With a short list, updates are routine instead of risky.
- Clarity. When something behaves oddly, there are only a few places to look.
What we build instead
On this site, a custom theme replaces the page builder. Our own contact form handles validation, spam traps and rate limiting in a few hundred lines of plain PHP. A small SEO plugin adds only what WordPress does not already do: meta descriptions, social sharing tags and structured data. Sign in with Google and Microsoft, branded account emails and email delivery through Google Workspace are each one small, focused file.
When we recently removed a page builder plugin from this very site, two old demo pages broke because they depended on its blocks. We rebuilt them with standard WordPress blocks and a few lines of theme CSS, and the site now has one less thing to update forever.
When a plugin is the right call
We are not against plugins. Spam filtering backed by a large shared database, or a security tool provided by your host, are good examples of things worth adopting. The test we apply is simple: does this plugin do something we could not reasonably build and maintain ourselves, and is it maintained by people we trust? If the answer is no, we write the feature.
Ask us for a plugin audit and we will tell you which of yours you can safely retire.
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