Not enough WordPress plugins

It’s been said and somewhat validated that too many WordPress plugins can slow down your website- especially if you’re on some cheap and nasty shared hosting service. What if I told you that it’s not always the case?

Today I’ll be looking at what’s needed to run a popular Woocommerce WordPress store and why a lot of plugins are necessary to not only the success, but the day to day running of the store.

The basic summary is that by having a large number of plugins enabled on your WordPress install you require additional processing power to run them all concurrently. No real big deal here, even average shared hosting can handle this without too much trouble. Now, having a large amount of outdated and or poorly coded plugins will most likely have the biggest negative impact. So the real question is should be how to tell if your plugin is good or just another an angry resource hog that smashes your database.

The good news is that we have the WordPress plugin directory. This is the safest place to get your plugin fix as every plugin is reviewed by developers from WordPress, and they must meet strict guidelines to be placed in the repository. It’s not to say some bad and outdated plugins slip through the cracks- it’s generally a very safe place.

Below you’ll find a solid Woocommerce eCommerce store’s installed plugins that we use, that hardly seem to affect page load times and general site speed. We’ll also provide a brief rundown of why the plugin is necessary and required.

Note: We don’t use affiliate links or receive any remuneration from the links found in this article. All links simply point directly to their creator.

1. Akismet Anti-Spam By Automattic
   Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from spam.
2. Autoptimize By Frank Goossens (futtta)
   Optimises your website, concatenating the CSS and JavaScript code, and compressing it.
3. Facebook for WooCommerce By Facebook
   Use this official plugin to help sell more of your products using Facebook. After completing the setup, you’ll be ready to create ads that promote your products and you can also create a shop section on your Page where customers can browse your products on Facebook.
4.  Genesis Connect for WooCommerce By StudioPress
   Allows you to seamlessly integrate WooCommerce with the Genesis Framework and Genesis child themes.
5. Genesis eNews Extended By StudioPress
   Replaces the Genesis eNews Widget to allow easier use of additional mailing services.
6. Select Genesis Latest Tweets By StudioPress
   A tweet ticker that works. We connect facebook to Twitter so our visitors will always see our latest social content.
7.  MailPoet 2 By MailPoet
   Create and send newsletters or automated emails. Capture subscribers with a widget. Import and manage your lists. MailPoet is a sweet plugin maintained and supported with love.
8.  WooCommerce By Automattic
   An e-commerce toolkit that helps you sell anything. Beautifully.
9.  Simple Basic Contact Form By Jeff Starr
   A secure contact form that’s fast, flexible and works nicely with Google’s anti-spam captcha’s by loading it in after field entry.
10.  WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro By WooThemes / SkyVerge
    Supercharge your Google Analytics tracking with enhanced eCommerce tracking and custom event tracking
11.  WooCommerce PayPal Express Checkout Gateway By WooCommerce
    A payment gateway for PayPal Express Checkout
12.  WooCommerce Tab Manager By WooCommerce
    This lets you edit product tabs and have them list comments, reviews, instruction manuals and anything else you need.
13.  WooCommerce Product Filter By WooCommerce
    This gives you better control of WooCommerce’s product and category filters.
14.  Wordfence Security By Wordfence
    This is a heavy plugin that hardens your WordPress installation. There is still no substitute for a solid backup regimen but helps and gives some piece of mind.
15. WP Smush By WPMU DEV
    This will optimise and compress your uploaded images into smaller file sizes. I normally disable this once all images have been run through
16.  WP Super Cache By Automattic
    This is a must for almost any WordPress site. Other great cache solutions W3 Total Cache and WP Rocket
17.  Yoast SEO Premium By Team Yoast
    The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more.

Any decent webhost- even shared, that offers WordPress optimised shared hosting should do the trick. Obviously a VPS or high tier package will yield best results but not everyone has 20 concurrent users checking out at the same time.

Have a go and test, test, test.