One of the great things about WordPress is its plugin ecosystem. Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty good bit of kit, but if something is lacking there is a universe of plugins out there, at least one of which is likely to help you achieve your goal.
Plugins, however, sometimes need a bit of judicious oversight.
Our goal at Weblicious is to offer the best web environment for you, your customers and other websites on our servers. Over the years, we’ve idenfitied a handful of plugins that, in our experience, can cause various security or performance issues on your site as well as on our servers as a whole. For this reason we’ve made certain plugins disallowed.
A partial list of disallowed plugins follows later in this article (“partial”, as it is frequently updated). Should you try to install a disallowed plugin you will see a message dialog that the plugin cannot be installed. Should you circumvent our disallow process, we may disable the plugin remotely without notice and review your account. We take security and performance of our web hosting very seriously.
Generally speaking, our Managed WordPress plans are more strictly controlled than our cPanel hosting. This is because our WordPress plans are carefully curated and fine-tuned to give you the best web hosting experience. That said, cPanel hosting plans that run WordPress are still subject to our Disallowed plugins rules and architecture.
Not all the plugins here are disallowed, but we recommend against using them.
About disallowed plugins #
We’re not suggesting any of the plugins listed here are “bad” plugins. Some of them, like related posts plugins, can be great for content discoverability.
But our overriding concern is to provide the best and most secure web hosting experience we can. Some of the plugins here duplicate functionality that we implement server-wide.
More significantly, some of the plugins listed here have proven that they will negatively impact performance or security and, accordingly, we’ve made the decision to prevent their use. In almost all instances there are alternatives available without the performance hit or security concerns.
Needless to say, we disallow any plugin whose authors appear to have abandoned it, despite it still being available on the WordPress repository. As a very general guide, a plugin that hasn’t been updated during three previous WordPress releases is assumed to be abandoned.
And lastly, though these are harder to define and detect, Nulled plugins. Nulled plugins are, typically, premium plugins that have been hacked or otherwise modified to get around licensing subscriptions and often purchased at a third-party site at a fraction of the cost of the plugin from the original author. These plugins can also carry malicious code. Nulled plugins are banned from our servers and will be deactivated and deleted without notice.
If you have any questions about these disallowed plugins, or feel a recent update to a plugin has rectified the issue we’ve banned it for, please get in touch and we will review the plugin’s status.
Please note that this is not an exhaustive list.
Caching plugins #
Your web hosting runs on Litespeed servers; Litespeed has its own specific caching architecture which makes most caching plugins redundant. In fact, installing certain caching plugins will do the opposite of what they’re designed to do, which is to make your site run faster; installing an inappropriate caching plugin on top of Litespeed may in fact slow your site down. Our recommendation here is to install Litespeed Cache (if it isn’t already installed), and leave it at that.
Other caching plugins can have a negative impact on your site and our servers and are consequently disallowed:
- WP Super Cache
- WP File Cache
- W3 Total Cache
- Nginx Helper
- Cache Enabler
- Siteground Optimizer
There are many more in this category. Please take our advice and stick to Litespeed Cache. It has been specifically developed for Litespeed servers and really is the best solution to your caching requirements.
Image optimisation plugins #
Server-based image optimisation plugins are, for the most part, ill-advised if not actively disallowed.
The exceptions are those that process and optimise images on their own third party servers, not ours. These include Imagify and EWWW Image Optimizer.
That said, Litespeed Cache is again your best friend. It connects to its own QUIC server and CDN which compresses and optimises images off-site and then updates your own image library and resources, automatically utilising the new compressed image. If you are on a Managed WordPress service, we will have configured this function for you.
We don’t actively monitor image optimisation plugins. Many of them have recently swapped to a third-party server model, or limit the number of images that can be optimised in one go or in one day and so don’t present the performance drain that they used to.
That said, if we see a drain on performance that can be traced to an image optimisation plugin, we need to discuss alternatives.
Our solution? You guessed it: use Litespeed Cache’s image optimisation functionality.
Backup plugins #
We love a backup! We think it’s one of the most important things you can implement as part of your WordPress maintenance routine.
The best WordPress backup plugins backup your site incrementally, and store those backups on a third party server. Backup plugins that do not function in this manner put a strain on your server resource allocation and can quickly fill up your storage allowance.
We offer our own WordPress backup service (an incremental backup, with off-site storage 😉 ). But if you do want to implement your own backup strategy, here are some plugins we’d prefer you avoid:
- WP DB Backup
- WP DB Manager
- BackupWordPress
- VersionPress
- All-in-One WP Migration
- BackupBuddy
- BackWPup
- Duplicator Pro
- Snapshot
- WP DB Backup Made
Related posts plugins #
Almost all related posts plugins suffer from the the same problem: intense indexing and search issues that thrash the database. A handcrafted module where you curate your own suggestions for related posts is a much better idea — it’s kinder on the server and, more importantly, it gives your website users a much better experience.
Nix the following:
- Dynamic Related Posts
- SEO Auto Links & Related Posts
- Similar Posts
- Contextual Related Posts
- Fuzzy SEO Booster
- SEO ALRP
- WordPress Popular Posts
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
- Yet Another Featured Posts Plugin
Performance and minification plugins #
Performance and minification can mostly be tailored via the Litespeed Cache plugin (see above). Additional plugins are generally not needed, and other performance or optimisation issues should be addressed via cPanel, not your WordPress installation.
- Better WordPress Minify
- P3 Profiler
- Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
- WordPress GZIP Compression: GZIP should be enabled on the server, not via WordPress. Our Managed WordPress plans enable this by default; cPanel customers can enable this via your cPanel dashboard > Software > Optimize Website > and then select the compression option you want.
- JCH Optimize
Statistics #
Many stats plugins generate almost constant calls to the database which is a site performance killer. Third party services do a much better job without hammering your site. These include Chartbeat (paid), Google Analytics (free), Jetpack (free) and Segment.io (free).
But it’s a No to:
- JR Referrer
- Referrer WP
- Statpress
- WP Postviews
- WP Power Stats
- WP Slimstat
Miscellaneous plugins #
- Hello Dolly!
- WP phpMyAdmin: We offer phpMyAdmin access without a plugin from cPanel > Databases > phpMyAdmin
- Sweet Captcha: Security specialists Sucuri revealed that the Sweet Captcha service was used to distribute adware; as a result we have decided to ban the plugin outright.
- Allow PHP Execute
- Dynamic Widgets
- Exec-PHP
- Inactive User Deleter
- Pipdig Power Pack (P3)
- WP RSS Multi Importer
- WordPress Popular Posts
Email plugins #
Just because you can send emails from WordPress doesn’t mean that you should. Specialist third party tools like MailChimp, AW Weber, Constant Contact and many, many others will do a better job and will not tie up the server. For that reason, we disallow direct sending of bulk emails from your WordPress installation.
You can, however, use a mail service’s SMTP server to route your emails, but you should consider their own spam and bulk email policies first.
