{"id":1373,"date":"2026-04-22T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pletzenauer.com\/2026\/04\/22\/plugin-wildwuchs\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T20:15:51","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T18:15:51","slug":"plugin-wildwuchs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pletzenauer.com\/en\/2026\/04\/22\/plugin-wildwuchs\/","title":{"rendered":"When a WordPress plugin becomes a liability"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago I took over a website running 74 active plugins. The site loaded in 8 seconds, the backend was sluggish, and the admin had stopped installing updates \u2014 afraid that something would break.<\/p>\n<p>This is not a rare case. WordPress has built a plugin ecosystem that makes getting started easy \u2014 and that is exactly how many sites turn, over the years, into a patchwork of dependencies that nobody can account for anymore.<\/p>\n<p>My approach: three questions before every installation. First, is the feature truly necessary or just nice to have? Second, is the plugin actively maintained? Third, is there a clean way to do it without a plugin?<\/p>\n<p>The result for the site above after 6 weeks: 22 plugins, load time under 1.5 seconds, updates running automatically.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jedes installierte Plugin ist eine Wette darauf, dass jemand anderer Ihre Probleme l\u00e4nger ernst nimmt als Sie selbst.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1453,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wordpress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pletzenauer.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pletzenauer.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pletzenauer.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pletzenauer.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1373"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pletzenauer.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1392,"href":"https:\/\/pletzenauer.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions\/1392"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pletzenauer.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pletzenauer.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pletzenauer.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pletzenauer.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}