How Many Plugins Your WordPress Blog Should Have?

WordPress plugins help in the developement, usability and design of your blog. It is due to the availability of plugins only that the WordPress is considered the best out of hundreds of Content Management Systems(CMS) available. There is a plugin available for every feature you want in your blog. But the main questions are :

Is it good to use plugin for everything? What is the limit on the number of  plugins I should use on my blog? Do excess of plugins have a side effect on my blog?

Now I will try to answer these questions one by one.

First of all, You should use only those plugins on your blog which find some use and without which adding an important feature to your blog will not be possible.  Here is a list of WordPress plugins which you must use on your blog. In this case a lot depends on the theme you are using. I will explain it why in a little time.

Before I answer the second question, I would like to throw a bit of limelight on the third one. Every plugin requires space and time to load and work for your blog. Hence every plugin you add, there is an increase in the loading time of your blog and load on your server. This is harmful for SEO and your search engine rankings as load-time has a crucial role to play. Therefore it is highly advised to not to use any excess plugin on your wordpress blog. Here is where theme has a role to play. If your theme already has inbuilt features, then there is no need to add plugins for them. Hence it keeps your blog clean and make it load really fast.

Generally the free wordpress themes lack this facility. Hence if you really want to avoid this plugin problem, then you can switch to Standard Theme which is an excellent theme for bloggers. It is fully loaded with features and its design makes it the fastest loading theme ever. Many top bloggers are using this theme to make money online on a large scale from their blogs.

So now the final answer to how many plugins you shopuld use is that it depends!

That is right. List your requirements on your blog and then look out for plugins. As I said before, choose your theme wisely. In any case, it is not advised to use more than 20 plugins if you do not have dedicated servers for your blog. For shared hosting, it would be best if you keep the count till 15 only.

I would like to know how many plugins you use on your blog.